This week, my parents drove down 4 hours (from Canada) to help me out for a week. We got in the remainder of the steel studs and finished the lath and strap. Here is the timelapse video;
I had actually hoped to get to the shotcrete this week, but, as hard as we worked, we still have a few more days to go. I also have not yet got ahold of my Shotcrete guy, which is not a good sign…
For the next few days, I will try to get the rest of the rebar and electrical in place. I am still waiting on the N-12 pipe that I plan to use for the earth tubes and duct work. It should arrive soon. I am also getting a pair of tires and a few other parts to fix up my Skid Steer. Meanwhile, I am a bit concerned about the budget and getting very concerned about the schedule. It has been such a cool summer that I am guessing we will have an early and cold winter.
But at least the house is looking pretty cool.
Many lessons were learned over the past few weeks that I will eventually write down. One of the key lessons was that you have to brace and then strap before you add the lath… I will write out more after I see how things turned out with the shotcrete. I am concerned that the lath may bulge inward (like an overstuffed quilt) and make for a very difficult inner surface to plaster. I am still pretty confident that the lath backing is superior to the rigid insulation backing that Formworks uses.
In the sourcing area, I had a few ups and downs. One thing was that I bought another ton of #4 and 20 pieces of #3 rebar and found that I was billed almost double what I had paid for a ton in the past. I should have haggled. I won’t let that happen again. I also bought several tools for working with rebar. I had to buy them on Amazon.com because none of my local stores carry them. Some worked very well, such as my (made in China) rebar hickey. Others didn’t work well at all, such as my (also made in China) wire twisting pliers. I also had some hiccups ordering the earth tube pipes, but those details are as boring as they were frustrating.
I spent a starry night out at the property with my father and two boys. Of course, I checked out the North Star (Polaris) and confirmed that I was off true north by about 5 degrees (toward magnetic north instead). Oh well, I probably should have set it up via the stars instead of the combination of a smartphone app, a compass and a map of magnetic declination. Five degrees won’t effect performance much.
My bank swallows are feeding their chicks. It turns out that hungry chicks are even noisier than mating swallows. I got some pics and video here.
I asked my father to help me with an anti-theft device for my Skid Steer. Apparently, they are very often stolen from building 
sites and then used to steal other stuff. This is made easier by the fact that one key fits most skid steers of the same brand. This was my fathers solution. ==>
Actually, as effective as removing the front wheels is, my father is an automotive electrician, so he came up with something much better than that, but it is top secret. Taking off the tires was just to get new ones… It turns out that I would need new tires to drive Over the Tire Tracks anyway, so lets see if they help me get around on the sand without the expensive tracks.
Earlier in the week, we did actually use the Skid steer to move some dirt around to level the port-o-potty. The kids each drove it (sitting on my lap) and really enjoyed it. Of course, their mother was not around for that, so there are no photos.
That’s it for now. Later this week, I will be going out with friends to work on rebar and electrical. Actually, I think these are tasks I can also do on my own if I have to.
I want the walls to be nice and plumb. This is usually managed with diagonal bracing to position and keep the wall where you want it. To add a bit of finer control over the wall, you will often see builders use a turnbuckle. These allow the builder to make fine adjustments. Often these are needed both to plumb the formwork and to help brace against concrete blowouts, etc. so they need to be big strong expensive things… Sometimes you see whole systems of bracing…
In the system on the right, the yellow parts are threaded and can be turned to adjust plumb. They also provide a nice working scaffold for the second half of the wall, brace against the concrete, etc. These cost hundreds of dollars each, but would be totally worth it if I were an ICF contractor.
In my design, the steel studs are considerably lighter, so they will be much easier to push into plumb. The walls are curved and the studs will be tied together with the metal lath, so they should be able to resist the shotcrete on their own. This frees me to go for a much lighter design.
I got some inspiration from this example (on the left). You can see that the bottom is a piece of angle iron screwed into a 2×4. They welded a nut to the angle iron with a threaded rod connected to another bracket that they attach to the vertical form work… The end of the threaded rod is cut to take a screw driver. Adjustments turn the threaded rod and make it move thru the welded nut. This allows for fine adjustments on the overall lengths of each support. Adjusting the length provides the fine tuning needed to plumb the wall. I can buy a turnbuckle like this from an ICF distributor. The problem is this little piece of hardware costs $16.99, plus shipping, and I would need a bunch of them.
So I made my own.
I used my new welder to weld the nuts to the angle iron (less than a minute). Then I used my grinder to make a hex end on each threaded bolt so that I can drive them with a socket on my drill (just over a minute). I ended up making 3 different sizes, 1/4, 5/16ths and 3/8ths, just so I could compare them.
I could get 1/4 inch locknuts from Home Depot, but they don’t carry them in the other two sizes. I could probably order them for 5/16th and 3/8ths, but I ended up just tightening two regular nuts together for a similar effect. The rest is just a 6 inch bolt in one direction (for the length adjustment) and a 3 inch bolt in the other (for a pivot), plus washers… I will screw the second wood block into the steel studs and the angle iron gets attached to an 8 ft piece of 2×2 wood which is staked into the ground.
Total cost is less than 2 dollars each for the big one and almost down to a dollar for the 1/4 inch version. I would need to make about 40 of these before the savings would pay off my welder and related tools. The 8′ piece of 2×2 costs and additional $1.50 each.
Here is a close up on the welded nut and ground hex end.
Tomorrow, I will try these out before making any more.
Serenity Now
Writing this blog definitely makes me think a bit more about how things are going. I am a bit disappointed that I don’t have much progress… But it feels a bit worse because I don’t have a good title for this week (or a timelapse video). Is that strange?
I guess the actual lack of progress will feel much worse when winter arrives. I had planned on working all the long weekends; but, like the May Two-Four weekend, the 4th of July weekend didn’t give much progress toward the final construction. But it did let me recover from my cold and have some good family time.
These are some over detailed explanations for those who want to understand the struggle. If you just want the short version of the updates, you can “like” Home in the Earth on Facebook.
No Steel for You
I had planned on getting a delivery of steel studs last Wednesday. These are not the crappy kind you get in fixed lengths from Home Depot… These are special MarinoWare 20 gauge studs, specially cut for my order, ranging from 9 ft to 26 ft long. Previously, my work week had been minimized because the order didn’t go thru properly. This time, I think the problem was more related to too many people taking advantage of the 4th of July long weekend and too many construction crews not ordering steel. There wasn’t enough of a shipment coming to my distributor to justify sending a truck long enough to carry my 26 ft studs. No problem for them, they would just send it after the holiday… Messed up my plans though, and it would have been a beautiful work weekend too.
No Scaffold for You
But I still planned on getting a scaffold delivery on Wednesday. This is not your regular home depot scaffold either. This is a proper 26 ft tall made-in-the-USA scaffold tower with lots of extra stability. I needed it to erect those 26 ft tall steel studs that form the central tower. They had shipped it out the previous week and emailed me a link to a tracking website (for some shipping company I had never heard of). I had checked the link a few times but the website wasn’t working. By Wednesday morning, after the steel order failed, and the tracking link still wasn’t working, I phoned the shipping company directly (SAIA?) I gave them my tracking number and they told me they had no record of that shipment. I called the scaffold company and asked them about it. The email they had sent me on the day it shipped had all the correct information, what she now read me from her computer had all the wrong information, including my address and a shipping date 3 days later and a different shipping company (with a different tracking number). She looked up the tracking number for me, but it was also a dud, and so she had no idea where the package was. After all those mistakes, I asked her to please confirm what she shipped. But she wouldn’t read me what it said on her version of the Bill of Lading, she just said she was sure they had shipped the right thing and she would call me back (she did about 8 hours later, long after I had figured it out). The third company involved was some sort of middle-man logistics and customer service company that looks after emailing out that original tracking number. It seems that the SAIA company couldn’t get their trucks in a row, so after 3 days of sitting on a dock, they switched me to FedEx with a new tracking number. The guy looked it up while we were on the phone and said, “I am sorry sir, but your package was supposed to be delivered today, but it is in Mississippi instead. Maybe Tuesday”. Wow.
I was just about to cancel my brother in law who would soon be headed over to help me when I decided to check the new tracking number myself. It turns out that the guy on the phone doesn’t know his state codes. It didn’t say Mississippi, it said “MI”, which is for Michigan. The package had been in town since first thing that morning and would be delivered that day. I called FedEx, they confirmed that a driver would call me to confirm what time he would deliver because they wouldn’t leave it unless I was there.
My brother-in-law, John, arrived, and we packed up my car. My younger son was also going to come with us. We were less than 5 minutes down the road (of the 55 minute trip) when FedEx called to book a time for the following day… I guess they didn’t have enough drivers on that week due to the holiday. So we turned around and went home.
Scaffold
Thursday, I went out to meet the FedEx driver and get my 1200 lbs of scaffold. He got there early, so I found an 18 wheeler waiting for me in the circle at the bottom of my driveway. As I guessed, he had no way to unload the truck. Since I had no heavy equipment on site, I had the fun of unloading the truck piece by piece (the FedEx guy handed the pieces down to me) into my trailer. I used the trailer to make the trip up my driveway and then unloaded it into my shipping container for use next week. It was tempting, but wouldn’t be wise to try and assemble something like this by myself.
Instead, I focused on prepping the spot where the tower would go. I had designed things so that the scaffold tower would sit (nice and firmly) on the circular footing. Even the 30 inch outriggers will fit on the footing, although I will have to leave openings thru the metal lath. I confirmed this by putting one of the diagonal braces across, but it was a bit close to the edge. I thought it would be best to fill in the center of the footing with dirt so that there wouldn’t be any problems if it shifted a few inches.
Transit
I had bought a David White builders transit on Craig’s List Tuesday evening. I bought it from an old guy (at least in his 60’s) and so I assumed it was his. I asked about some of the adjustment knobs and he said he didn’t know how to use it because it had been his grandfathers. I asked how old it was, and he said he didn’t know, but his grandfather retired from being a surveyor for the city of Detroit in the 1940’s. After I got home, I looked up the serial number and found it was made in 1937. It clearly still works very well (perhaps it has another 77 years in it).
using my “new” transit, I confirmed that at least one of the concrete pads is a bit off, but it will still work out. All my other angles (I had been using my marked center stone) were right on. I had rented a crappy transit from the rental place several times because I didn’t want to buy a new one (too expensive), but this used one will pay its self off in a few uses. Having the right angle is just too important in a home as unusual as mine.
Skid Steer
Well, now it was still pretty early in the afternoon and there wasn’t much left for me to do on site… But I had come prepared with a list of Craig’s List skid steers with in an hour of my property, so it was time for a few hours of driving around. I ended up with a John Deere 260 Skid Steer.
This post is already too long, I put more more details on why I chose a Skid Steer in another post. (or just like us on Facebook to see the post from last week).
Window bucks and welders…
Saturday, I had a couple friends come over to hang out, which was nice, but too rare. We ended up seeing a movie, but first, they helped me cut out some window bucks in preparation for next weeks framing.
I didn’t end up finding the welder that I wanted. I have a couple possible options on Craig’s List to consider, but first I want to chat with my welding-expert uncle. He was busy all weekend, but I will call him tonight. Basically, I want the most economical MIG/MAG setup I can get, I don’t want to spend thousands on an industrial scale rig. That can also be another post.
sites and then used to steal other stuff. This is made easier by the fact that one key fits most skid steers of the same brand. This was my fathers solution. ==>
