Framing part 1

The framers started this month. The first picture shows one of the guys perched on top of a first floor joist, 8 feet up from the basement floor, getting ready to put the next piece of wood onto the hanger. This is why James isn't a framer, you really can't be afraid of heights to do this!
Some of the floor joists are glue-lam wood, to support some of the longer spans; most of the joists are 2x12's. The second photo shows some. The cut-out in the foreground is for the stairs down to the basement.

The next step after the joists was the subfloor; the 3rd photo shows the plywood going in. First a layer of glue on the joists, then the wood, then nails (with lines drawn on the wood to show where the joists are). Not great photo ops, mostly butt shots.

This 4th photo shows the 2 younger guys toting a beam from the solar kiln (which is 100 yards away next to the well). This was wood that James logged last year from hemlock and Douglas fir on the property, and had milled into beams by a mobile mill operator (see earlier posts). The wood has been stacked in a modified solar kiln all winter, drying. Dean, the framer, says it is some of the best and straightest wood he has worked with (although he also complains it is heavy). We harvested enought 2x8's to frame all of the exterior walls of the house, as well as many of the larger beams.

Now we're getting somewhere! By the end of March (this photo was taken on the 26th) we actually had a few walls up! This will be the south wall, with kitchen windows visible on the left (the sink will be facing those windows), and a door onto the deck from the family room on the right side of this wall. Dean the framer is in this picture, admiring his handiwork.

Becky has made several lunch-time dashes to the work site to discuss wall placement and window placement, fortunately it's only 5 miles from the office!

We're out of the ground!

There is an expression in construction, when the foundation is done and the wood starts going in, they say you are "out of the ground". It looks like we are finally there.'
Here is the first piece of wood going on to the foundation. The first shipment of wood was the wrong size, it needed to be 3" wood, and the hardware store didn't have enough so the framers only did a few of the beams the first day they were working.

Previous postings showed a huge concrete monolith rising out of the hillside; since then we have filled in the dirt around the foundation, finished the waterproofing on the concrete, and installed the French drains. All we can see now is the finished work. The dirt that Patrick and Katie are standing on in these photos used to be 12 feet up in the air. Katie is standing on what will be our front porch looking east, and Patrick is at the NW corner of the front porch.

We also had some excavating work done; we now have a navigable driveway up to the front of the house (which is quite useful when we want to have wood delivered etc). What used to be a 90 degree turn onto a 16% slope (not generally navigable by most truckes) has now been smoothed into a gentler curve. The electric company made it up last week to turn on the power. (So now we not only have a Portapotty, we have electricity!) Things are starting to move along!

Power Pole

It's raining alot these days, which slows us down. The picture on the right shows the waterproofing layer painted on the outside of the foundation; it needs 2 days of rain-free weather before it can be applied, so there is still lots more to paint on. The picture above left shows friend Dave Jeschke working a Bobcat to help fill in part of the power trench (the day he helped us, he was on the Bobcat and James was on a small excavater, it looked like dueling trucks as they went back and forth! Toys for boys). We dug the trench for power from the downhill neighbor up to our property line and got it filled last weekend; since then James has been working on the trench from the property line transformer, up the driveway to the the garage where the temporary power pole sits.

The picture on the left is the power trench as it runs along the last leg of the driveway, up the hill to the house and garage, 3 feet deep and a foot wide. The white conduit pipe carries the fiberoptic and power cables, and there is a phone line also in the ditch 12 inches away. On the right is James standing next to the temporary power pole. As he said, it's the first electrical project he has accomplished (and it passed inspection). Power folks are supposed to come on Tuesday to actually hook up the power, pulling the cables up through the conduit using the cord we placed (so far no live wires). We had to special order the rope as the standard spools weren't long enough to run the whoe length.

James also worked this week to re-cut the driveway; originally the last leg of the driveway was a 90 degree turn leading to a 16 degree slope, which no trucks could navigate. The new improved route takes a hypotenuse of that angle , which should make it navigable. (Pictures on a future post..)

Katie lends a hand

Martin Luther King day today was sunny and warm (57 degrees), and found us at the home site working.
Lest anyone think James is the only one working on the house, here are pictures of Katie and Becky patching divets in the foundation with Krikrete. Katie is shown below, doing the same patch work. We think she will be the youngest construction worker this project will see!

In this photo is James filling in geothermal trench #1 with
his Boy Toy (he says his resume can now include "heavy equipment operator"). Next on the list is digging geothermal trench #2, which will coincidentally lay 3 feet under the trench for bringing in power and cable (the geothermal lines lay 5 and 6 feet under, for the outgoing and incoming lines, and the power conduit only needs to be 3 feet down, given the mild winters and shallow frost line). Note the blue sky in the background, so rare in January around here.

While James filled in the trench, Becky and Katie used kwikrete to fill in divets in the foundation. (The cross braces that held the foundation forms in place had plastic cones at each end which get removed after the forms come down, leaving a ~1-2 inch cone-shaped indent in the foundation wall, which has to get patched to prevent leaks tracking along the metal brace left inside).

This last picture shows what we were patching, I took it in Nov while they were building the forms, showing the metal cross-pieces bridging the forms; the plastic cone that is eventually removed is the grey triangle on the right, and the 2" spoke of metal has a head that holds the brackets for the forms, and is removed when the wall is poured. You can also see the rebar inside the wall; the bars are 12" apart, which is closer than usual, because of the high wind we can expect on top of the mountain here. (As the foundation guy said, there is no way this house will blow off the mountain in a storm!)

We also added a layer of rock on a soft spot on our road this week; until it gets compacted down the only vehicles that can make it up are 4WD or AWD (thank goodness for the Jeeps and Subarus that we drive). We think there is a spring under the road where it goes past our downhill neighbor that is undermining the road at the same spot their septic line goes under the road. Also on the list this week is to redo the last few feet of the road: currently the last 30 feet are at a 16 degree incline, which has proved daunting (and impassable for delivery trucks).

Geothermal trenching, part 1

Here's a picture from last month of the inside of the basement after we poured the foundation (the wheelbarrow is there for scale). Those 12 foot high walls are daunting. It took until the very end of December to get all the forms taken down from pouring the foundation, what a huge project that was. After that we get to fill and patch the concrete where the various metal pieces went in, and waterproof parts of the foundation. Fortunately, since we are building on a hill, much of the water (rainfall etc) heads downhill and doesn't pose much of a flooding threat. Unfortunately, the flowing water itself can cause problems (keep reading....)

These photos are from yesterday: the trench is 6 feet deep, to carry the geothermal lines away from the house and back. (Part of the heating and cooling system for the house is a geothermal heat pump, which uses pipes set 6 feet underground to collect and distribute heat and cooling, at an even 50 degrees from the ground temperature, to help heat and cool the house). Since the lines need to be 6 feet deep, they needed to be laid under the electrical lines, which only need to be 4 feet deep, SO, we had to get this set in first. James dug a 150' trench, 6 feet deep, off the west side of the house. The blue tubing lays at the bottom of the trench, and the return tubing going back to the house has to lay a foot higher, pegged into position with metal stakes. James and I spent yesterday afternoon placing the stakes. The left photo is the trench running along side the house; the right photo is James down in the trench at the other end. We had a system of ropes and harnesses and ladders to keep him safe while he crawled through the trench to pound in the stakes. The pictures were taken before the rain started; shortly after that it got quite wet; by the end of the project, there were several inches of water running down the trench, with a few spots where the water was 2 feet high and over the top of his boots. (We have pictures of him emptying the water out of the boots). We were both spattered with mud by the end. Definitely one of those days when we have to keep the goal in mind; we are still trying to dry out clothing.

Foundation poured

A few pictures after the foundation was poured. Yes, that is snow dusting the ground on the left.


We poured the foundation on Dec 15th , after a week delay for weather. The Seattle area was hit with a cold snap when the temperature didn't get above freezing for 10 days; we couldn't pour the concrete in sub-freezing weather. The bright spot however was that the prolonged cold snap froze the roadbed, so when the concrete trucks did come up for the pour they did minimal damage to our dirt road! The grand total for the pour was 8 truckloads of concrete, for a grand total of 320,000 pounds of concrete.

Here it is, the foundation, waiting for the dirt to be filled back in around the walls. This picture is from the northeast corner, looking at what will eventually be our front door. The forms have been taken off much of the wall, but you can still see some on the left side of the picture.

This photo is inside the basement of the west wing of the house (on the original plans, this was to be a 4' deep crawl space, but the slope of the hill was more than we expected). The forms are off the wall, and you can see the cutout for door into the central part of the basement, and a window facing south from the basement.

Foundation pouring

We poured the foundation yesterday (12/15)! This is a picture of the concrete crew; their names are Jose, Jose, and Jose (really!) They are waiting for the next concrete truck to arrive with its load of concrete. This is a view of the 'west wing" of the basement (originally planned to be a crawl space, but the slope of the hill gave us a 12' deep basement). To pour the foundation, the forms had to be built up 12', with a scaffolding built up around the top for the guys to pour the concrete.

In this photo, Mark G and "Jose 1.5" are pouring concrete (pumped through the black pipe, and into the form) into the wall between the center part of the basement and the west wing; they are 12 feet above the ground, on forms and scaffolding. There are also 2 guys on the ground helping guide the concrete pipe (they happened to be named Jose, also), that is pumping concrete up the hill from the landing (a 16% grade that the trucks can't make).

Mark G, in the foreground, is placing bolts or screws that will eventually hold the house down onto the foundation. In the background is the guy who owns the concrete pump that we used to get all the concrete into the forms. All total, we needed 8 loads of concrete, each with 10 yards of concrete, each weighing 4,000 pound....that totaled up to 160 tons of concrete for the foundation....

This is a view of the north side of the house, facing toward what will eventually be the driveway. You can see the concrete leaking out between the forms. We fortunately never had a "blow-out" in the wall, however did have a blow-out in the base that will be under the masonry heater, which was quickly patched and refilled. If we had to have a blow=out, that was the best place to have it.

We were fortunate in weather: we had hoped to pour the foundation a week ago, but got put off because the weather was below freezing for over a week. As soon as the weather warmed up over freezing, we poured. As it turned out, having a deep freeze for 10 days before the Big Pour made the road up to the property very firm and frozen, and having big heavy concrete trucks on the road did much less damage than if the weather had been muddy.

Here you can see the concrete in the forms, and the bolts that will hold the house down. The tons of concrete we just poured should hold the house onto the hill, now we just have to be sure the wind doesn't blow the house away (that is the basis of the engineering for the building). The foundation guys let the concrete cure for a full day after pouring, and will start taking down the forms tomorrow
You should see it in person, it's amazing to look at!