While we were waiting for the shotcrete crew, we continued on some side jobs. One of which was insulating the skylight curbs and protecting them with stucco. Detail on our mix recipe, etc. later, but first, the video.
The Video
The Mix
Here, we used the scratch stucco recipe of
5 buckets (25 gallons) of sand
94 lbs (1 bag) of portland cement
17 lbs (1/3rd bag) of hydrated lime
We mixed this all dry and then used buckets of the mix, mixed with water (about 20 cups) using a drill mixer. After applying the stucco (it naturally forms a layer about 3/8ths of an inch thick), we used a “scratch” tool to give it texture so the second layer would grip it well. Then we left it for a few weeks to cure and watered it often to increase the strength during the cure period.
The recipe for the brown coat was very similar, except with 10% more sand and lime to weaken it a little bit. You want the brown coat weaker so that if it tries to shrink as it cures, it will crack instead of cracking the scratch coat off the wall.
Before applying the brown coat, it is a good idea to wet down the wall. Otherwise the moisture from the fresh stucco is sucked into the scratch coat and it is difficult to work with.
After applying the brown coat, we continued to water it for another couple weeks, again to improve the cure and the strength.
Improved mix
As I mention in the video, along with our improving stucco skills, we also experimented with the mix and found that adding a quart of thinset after mixing in the water really improved the workability of the stucco. It also improved the stickiness (important for ceilings) and gave it some waterproof characteristics also.
The Gallery
Again, sometimes the easiest way to tell a story is as captions on pictures.
The skylight concrete would have leaked a lot of heat. So we needed to wrap them in insulation. But first we needed some wood to screw the insulation too… Necessity is the mother of invention.
This side of the skylight needed more insulation because it included some vertical ducts. I decided I would need to extend the electrical box a little. This was not enough.
In one of the first attempts, it became clear that the electrical would be too recessed.
So, I ended up using a bunch of outdoor box extenders… If it looks stupid, but it works, its not stupid?
Another view of my stacked electrical.
The outlet after we got the stucco around it
Eventually, we covered the wood tops of these with copper…
When you are burying a house, one of the tricky bits is to keep the dirt from spilling where you don’t want it… Like into the doorways. I have a number of retaining walls planned for this build, and, just to keep things interesting, I have designed each one a different way. This section is about the “Heavy Stone” wall by the back door/patio. More details below, but first… the Video
The Video
Cost
I had assumed that those concrete blocks were the cheap way to build a retaining wall and the fancy quarried sandstone was the expensive way. Of course, I probably still would have used some real stone… However, when I looked into it, At least for the cost of the stone, the real stone was cheaper. Of course, that doesn’t factor in things like the cost of the mortar, which was about 5$ per level on my wall, so still not too bad. The real cost of building a wall like this is time… Those precast concrete block walls probably wouldn’t have taken me nearly so much time, but no regrets on choosing to do this one the hard way.
Engineering
Retaining walls often fail. Keys to keeping this one from going down included…
Wide heavy stones (heavy stone is actually what they called this size at the quarry) that are substantial and want to stay where you put them.
Leaning the wall back against the earth load. Before the earth can tip your wall over, it would first need to straighten it out. Gravity helps you keep things as they are.
Curving the wall against the earth makes it a lot harder for the earth to tip it over, just as it is harder for a mug to tip over than for a domino. Making the wall concave helps even further because the loads against it are in compression, something that the stone handles with ease.
Behind the wall, I had plenty of drainage. Drain gravel, landscaping fabric and HDPE corrugated/perforated drain tube were working to make sure that water pressure never gets a chance to build up behind the wall.
Layers of carpet were also used in the dirt behind the wall. This “geo-textile” idea is used by highway engineers to keep dirt from shifting under ramps. I would have liked to have used more layers, but some is better than none.
I watched lots of videos online about how to build a retaining wall that lasts. I recommend anyone who is planning to build there own do the same, and don’t be tempted to take shortcuts.
The Gallery
Here is a gallery of pics with detailed captions.
Here is the delivery. I paid 80$ per pallet, plus something (like 120$?) for the truck to deliver all the pallets.
Here are some more standard concrete retaining wall blocks. If you check the top right, you can see how many linear ft you get per block and calculate how many square ft of wall you would get per dollar. When I compared this with the cost of my quarried sand stone, my sand stone was about half the price.
Before I could bury the garage, I needed a retaining wall, but before the retaining wall, I needed some stucco over these fox blocks… This is just the scratch coat.
Partway thru the stucco job, I checked to see if the camera was still on. This is apparently how I look after a couple hours of night stucco work. (after finishing my regular work day and driving out to the site).
To get a gentle curve, I put down a 20ft long piece of 1/2 inch PVC going thru the marks I had made earlier. Then I put down mortar and started laying blocks.
After a few rows, the wall was already looking interesting and I was already learning.
After the wall was a few blocks high, I back filled for drainage. I also covered this all in landscapers fabric to keep the sand out. Actually, I came back later and filled the whole area with drain gravel, it is easy to use too much when you have a skid steer bucket and order by the dump truck.
After dark it starts to get harder to find the right stones. This evening I probably only got 3 layers in.
The 3rd evening, I got another 3 layers in before it was too dark to find rocks…
The rocks were all aligned against the front of the wall, but the back looked considerably messier. To sort that out, I used my mortar sprayer to shoot mortar over the back of the wall and fill all those cracks. I did it at several stages, this was the first. No pics of the actual shooting because I was busy at the time.
More progress… By this point, I had most of the basics down and things were moving along nicely.
Another pic…
Once the wall reached a certain height, I put these “benches” up against it. We had first made these for the ICF blocks.
Sometimes the kids seek out the camera to get a self pic or just wave at me.
Kids love climbing on walls. However, it can be a problem if the mortar isn’t set yet. This day it was before we started on the wall though.
You can see we have extended the platform. I also added wooden blocks to make it easier to scramble up, but I usually used the ladder.
Random pic
We named our dog Sandy to fit in to the site better. She loves getting up high and looking around.
Sandy chilling on the wall while I worked…
This is how it looks from the ground. I plan to add moss, creepers, etc.
I have always been a big fan of Copper roofs, especially when they patina. Copper roofs last hundreds of years and just look so much more interesting than asphalt ones. Problem is that they are just too expensive. But with my earth sheltered home project, I was going to have very few square ft of roof, so copper suddenly became affordable again. Making the tiles myself would also significantly reduce the cost. For this first part, I was really just wanting to put a copper cap on the front and back ridge of the garage. This post is about how I did that. At some other point, I may also make diamond tiles to cover a few hundred feet of regular roof… But first, this video
The Video
Alternatives
I had put stucco on the front and back of the garage and this ridge cap was to cover the 12-inch ridge along the top of the shotcrete wall… Looking back, I could have done it a few other ways. For instance, I could have just wrapped the top of the wall in lath and then just put stucco right up over the ridge. Another option would have been to put tile up along the ridge.
I had planned to use copper shingles for all the skylight caps also, but now that I am older and wiser, I plan to just cap the second skylight on the garage with copper and switch to using large format tiles (that I can get for about 1$/sqft) on the other 5 skylight curbs.
The tools
The Press Break Roll was pretty fun to use and getting it 40% off from Harbor Freight made it even better. One of these days I’ll put more details about it under the “tools” section of this website and maybe make a more focused video. In the meantime, I can put the original crate back on top of it to keep the dust off so it is ready to use next time I am in the mood.
Along with that, I needed a nice mallet for pounding the copper, good aviation snips for cutting it, pliers, etc. Generally speaking, pretty standard stuff.
The Gallery
Pictures help tell the story, so I put a bunch in the description of each image… Enjoy.
Here is my new press break roll. It weighs about 300 lbs and I was taking a break after getting it from the back of my truck to the top of the wheel barrow. Next I would need to get it up onto that wheeled cart I made just for this purpose…
Here I am using the Press function of the Harbor Freight Brake-Press-Roll to cut pieces from the copper coil.
The Brake on the Harbor Freight tool worked pretty well. Here I am lining up the second point in my fold line…
This front cap was my first attempt, lessons were learned as mistakes were made along the way, but I still enjoyed it.
Here is one of the tiles from the first section… Mistakes included that I didn’t fold down the top corners of the tabs, so they got in the way as the tiles started needing to curve back down… I also didn’t make the drip edge significant enough…
Here we are coming up the north west side…
The Go Pro caught this shot of me looking tired but satisfied after finishing the copper cap on the front of the garage.
Here is a close up of the last tile on the front. You can see the rivets used to hold it all together (in addition to the folds)
This section of the FoxBlocks leaked a bit and made an ugly lump that would have shown thru the copper. I chiseled it out and refilled with smooth mortar. Here Michael is troweling it off.
The Go Pro also caught this pic. Not sure why we are both looking at the camera. Maybe it was on purpose. 😉
The copper after it was placed over the smoothed ridge…
We had not left quite enough room for a standard garage install and had to get creative with our rear garage door. Here is the video…
The Video
Bells and Whistles
The door was from Lowes and came with the S3 winder so I wasn’t too worried about the torsion spring. I got a side mount garage door opener, specifically a Liftmaster 8500, and was really happy with it.
One interesting side thing: The Liftmaster 8500 had a bunch of extra special features, such as a wireless light, programmable control, etc. but the most interesting thing (to me anyway) was the way the sensors worked. Every other garage door I have owned had a sensor so that if you walked past as it was going down, it would stop and open up. This is the sensor that you always “hop over” if you want to sneak out of the garage as the door is going down. How do you improve on such a basic sensor function? When I first installed it, it didn’t seem to be working, but then I realized that the improvement is simply to wait and see if the obstacle is there for more than a moment. If you just walk past, it doesn’t trip it, no special hop-while-ducking required. You need to interrupt the beam for at least half a second to stop the door from coming down. Pretty minor, but it makes a nice difference 😉
The style of the home is something my wife and I are calling “Modern Tuscan“. To us, this means a stucco and stone exterior. While the majority of the Quonset hut will be buried, the Fox Block ICF endwalls would be visible (and prominent) and need to be stuccoed. But first, we would need to attach lath to hold the stucco. Since the work was pretty standard, I decided to hire a professional to take care of the actual stucco work. This is the story of how that all came together, but first, the video.
The Video
Lath overlap
As always, this is a journal of my progress, not a “how to”. I don’t always do things the right way at the start, although I do usually learn from my initial mistakes. For the lath, I read about attachment details like how often to put screws in each direction (and then I exceeded it), but I didn’t pay too much attention to the part about overlapping the lath and just butt jointed everything so the surface would be flatter for the stucco. Probably I was also thinking about saving on lath. At a later point, I changed my mind, so the later pieces are properly overlapped… Either way, the professional stucco guys said we did a good job and only needed to add some J-pieces to form the bottom edge.
The window
With such a large and prominent wall, I knew I needed a window to break up the space. Personally, I think a square window would have looked stupid, so I bit the bullet and budgeted for a nice round window. At least I went with a standard diameter window so it wouldn’t need to be custom.
However, when I finally got to this stucco stage, I wasn’t ready to order the windows. I want to order them all at once to get the bulk discount, and I wanted to build all (or most) of the bucks before I order, so… In the meantime, I decided to go with polycarbonate Lexan. This is pretty basic stuff that you can buy from Home Depot less than 1/10th the price of a window. The R-value is also pretty similar to a double pane window. I figured it would at least give us a temporary solution that would keep the inside dry over the winter.
It ended up looking so good, I might just decide to keep it this way. We will see how well it holds up to UV. Obviously, if it yellows or cracks over time, I will switch to glass. But it did claim to be “UV stable” and has looked fine so far, so I am optimistic.
Still, I wanted to make sure that the window opening was ready for proper glass so that the stucco edge would all be done correctly. We used wood strips to form a curb, and then put two layers of the tar paper to protect the wood and then a strip of lath to hold the stucco. Lots of screws…
Getting a Contractor
I have had many struggles with getting contractors to work on the more unusual parts of my build, but I was surprised to even have trouble getting something as basic as “stucco over ICF”. Very few of these companies advertise properly, probably because most are kept busy by professional builders and are not actually looking for work. Eventually, I went to the stucco supplier and asked for a list of names and recommendations. One of those paid off, but even then I had to wait quite a while to fit into the schedule.
Of course, the contractor, Hoffman Plastering, did a great job in terms of how nice and flat the wall was (they certainly had to compensate for my less than professional ICF job). Their classic worm finish was also excellent.
Cracking
However, in the months after the stucco was applied, we did get a bunch of fairly obvious cracks in various places and we have not been able to get them to come out and take a look. On the phone, they said that it was probably my fault. Essentially, they blamed the copper cap and said that water probably got behind the stucco and froze, but I was able to find pics showing the start of the cracks before the first freeze, also the cracks look more like ones that are caused by expansion and contraction of the stucco its self. Basically, I imagine that if the south wall expanded in the sunshine, this narrow region would be the highest stress concentration and the most likely to crack. The inspector thought it may have been that the top layer was applied too soon after the brown coat. The contractor may have rushed that step because the work was done in October. The cracks are not wide enough to get the edge of a coin or screwdriver in there, but are still concerning. The conclusion of this story is still on hold, but I should probably do something before winter when water might actually get in thru those cracks and cause further problems when it freezes.
Future Stucco?
I wish I could hire a contractor to stucco the rest of it. Their work was excellent (other than the cracking) and the quote to handle the rest of it was probably fair per square ft. The problem is just the large number of square ft required. The majority of the cost is the professional labor, the actual materials are a very small fraction of the cost. Therefore, I am guessing I will need to do it myself. With any luck, my skills will grow quickly.
Gallery
As per usual… A collection of pics related to the lath and stucco.
Lath is ready on the north side…
Working with Hunter Mitchell often made me smile.
A view thru the Polycarbonate Lexan window
The window ready for stucco
I put a septic hookup on the front of the house for friends with campers.
This was the stucco setup. Scaffolding ready in the back and a stucco mixing station in the front left.
I took pics of the ingredients. Basically, it was just cement, hydrated lime and masonry sand. I’ll probably have to do this myself next time.
The bags of hydrated lime looked pretty old ;^)
The stucco sample. I would say it looks pretty much exactly like the final work.
Scratch coat near the ends of the walls.
Scratch coat with the light base.
Scratch coat near the north garage door.
Scratch coat on the north side
Since I couldn’t come out (busy working to pay for the stucco), Sherri and Boys would go out to check on things and set up my camera.
Sherri and David posing while they set up the camera.
The wide angle GoPro always makes things look different.
Brown coat, first 7 ft.
Hoffman plastering did a great job with the stones.
Stone arch is in. Note the stones are not really wedge shaped, but it still looks good.
Stone arch is in
Scratch done.
A little progress pic of the brown coat, scratch coat and final stone work all in one shot.
Brown coat finished on the front.
This is a section on the north side by the garage door that was still only scratch coat 3 days before they were totally done. I suspect they rushed these last steps and the result will be that the final stucco will crack along with the base coat instead of being applied after it cracks.
This ugly spot will be covered over by window trim, but I wanted to show you how the guys from Hoffman plastering went the extra mile. The back wall had some issues with being plumb and straight near the rear windows. I thought it was just the way it was going to be, but they just went really thick (~2 inches) until they got it all nice and plumb again.
Suddenly, final stucco
Final stucco coat
The final job looked really excellent.
Stones above the door.
A close up of the top of the column between the stones. The white patch is just the electrical box for the lighting.
Final stucco near the round window. They did a great job on that edge.
A close up of the final stucco
A little while later after adding the lights and copper trim… (notice cracks are already starting to form to the left of the light)
The skid steer just barely fits under the stone arch… I hold my breath every time I go in or out.
Cracks started to firm. Here is a pic with my hand for scale. This is on the north side.
On the south side, the main cracks were across this narrow space between the corners of the doors and the outer edge. I can imagine that this is due to expansion finding the weakest part to crack…
Similar geometry on the South West corner leading to a similar crack.
