The floor is done!

It is the middle of week 11.

Mark, Carol and I completed the deck yesterday, Wednesday, 20 June. 

We did all of our back checking for level and square and it is perfect!  Level within plus or minus 1/8" and square within 3/16" at 65'.

It took us about three days to complete the floor.  Mark and I put down the glue, set the plywood and took care of miscellaneous details and Carol put in 49 screws in each sheet of plywood, about 2,700 screws.  We used 18 quarts of glue.

We installed 10 wood foundation blocks within the floor framing, braced to the concrete floor/footings in the crawlspace to support the timberframe.

On Tuesday night Carol and I worked until about 8:00 pm, then set up chairs in what will be the engawa (veranda) and had cocktails.  It was chilly so we moved over to where the fireplace would be.

Next step is the timber frame.

End of week 10

We had a great week in heaven!!

This is the end of the tenth week of construction on our new home.  The 10th week was all about installing the floor joists.  The General Contractor (GC), Carol Borgen, tells me that the construction is right on schedule and under budget.

Mark Strege and I actually started framing up the floors on Friday the 8th of June.  We spent that Friday mapping out the elevations on the footings, making decisions on how we were going to build it level and started setting up the mud sill/ bottom plate (the 2x8 lumber that sits directly on top of the concrete wall).  The wall was fairly level on the north side but for some reason was low on the south side... I am taking credit for not reading the transit correctly.  We were told by Kevin Jenniges, our concrete guru, that footings and ICF walls can settle by a significant amount, so that may have something to do with it too.  The corners had lifted during the concrete pour so I had to spend a few hours chiseling them down with the hammer drill.

It took us a day and a half to get the bottom plate shimmed to level.  We started installing the wood I-joints on Monday afternoon.

By Tuesday we had about half of the joists installed. 

The I-joists are span rated at about 20 feet spaced on 16 inch centers so we had to build some structure under the joists to structurally support them.

The picture at right shows the crawl space, the space in the center will house two 625 gallon water tanks (because we have a very low flowing well), the water pump, pressure tank, water heater, and solar storage tanks.

The wall on the left side of the picture will be sheathed with 3/4 inch plywood.  All the heating pumps (we will have radiant heated floors), water distribution manifolds and other mechanical equipment will be mounted to this wall.

The space behind the wall will be storage.  The head room is about 5' 9" so Carol can walk upright but I have to duck.

While Mark and I were building floors Carol was installing the drain tile that runs around the perimeter of the foundation.

Chuck Howe, our excavator, e-mailed us on Thursday that he was going to be on site on Friday and backfill the "ditch" on the north side of the foundation so Carol and I worked late to get the crushed rock installed over the drain tile.  Carol drove the tractor and I shoveled the rock around... you can see that the work has been good for me, I continue to lose weight and get stronger.

The week draws to a close, below is a picture of the floor from "cell phone rock" (the only place we get good cell phone reception) on Friday afternoon.  Chuck Howe came in the morning and filled in the "ditch" on the north side of the foundation.  Mark and I added a couple more I-joists after the picture was taken before we decided to quit for the day, as the thunder storm was getting closer and it is never good to be on an open job site with lightening possible.

Living in this rural environment is delightful, every day we get to see some new critter.  Last week I caught sight of a yellow swallow tail butterfly on half a dozen occassions.  I haven't seen a swallow tail butterfly since I was  kid.  On Friday the butterfly below, which we think is a Variegated Fritillary, Euptoieta claudia, thanks to Urban Kiernan for help identifying, visited Mark and I, landing on each of us.

Schedule for next week:  Monday we will be ready to start laying the plywood floor.  We should complete the floor by Tuesday if it doesn't rain.  AND, Tom Bodensteiner, our timber framer, will be here on Wednesday or Thursday to start setting up the timber frame.  EXCITING!!!

Crawl space

We assumed that the crawl space was going to be small.  A couple of observations led us to this conclusion, the first being that the garage slab in the SE corner sits almost directly on rock.  The second, we rented an excavator a few years back and discovered rock only a foot underground on the east end of our site so we assumed the ridge of rock was contineous between the two spots.  So to our surprise when Howe Excavating, using a big bulldozer with a rip tooth, cleared out a lot of softer rock between the garage and the place we had dug with our small excavator and we realized a deeper crawl space. 

We had initially figured we were going to have about 2 feet of crawl space along the north wall, but now we have about 5' 6" of space.

We had initially planned to install a small slab, figuring that the only things that were going to be in the crawl space was the water and heating system.  Now we could also have some storage.  We poured a slab in the west 2/5ths of the crawl space.  The slab is insulated on the underside with 1" of XPS insulation and a vapor barrier to stop moisture migration and radon gas.

An additional slab will be poured between the new slab and the south wall (to your left in the picture below) later this summer.  There will be about 6'6" of head room in this part of the crawl space and we will use that for garden tools, lawn furniture, bicycles, etc.

The eastern 3/5ths of the crawl space has a huge rock protruding from the floor.  Not sure what we are going to do with that, we have talked about having an indoor Japanese Zen Garden and have also talked about setting up the train layout there... still too early to make a decision.

On Tuesday, June 5th, Jenniges Masonry poured the slab.

The schedule for the rest of the week was to let the slab set up for a couple of days and start the installation of the floors on Thursday, June 7th.  The weather looked bad on the 7th, in fact we had a thunderstorm, with over an inch of rain and an inch of hail.  I will post some pictures of that later.  Mark and I started the mud sill/bottom plate on Friday.

The timber frame erection has been delayed a couple of days to the 20th of June.

Insulated Concrete Forms

Time for a little catching up…

In the last episode we completed pouring the footings.  This episode is about forming up the crawl space walls.

We used Insulated Concrete Forms, referred to as ICFs, to form up walls.  Essentially the forms look like giant Legos, there are two blocks of foam separated with plastic spreaders, the top and bottom interlock just like Legos.   Each form is 12” tall, 13” thick and 48” long and weigh about 5 pounds.  Here Carol shows how they work.

23 pallets of GreenBlock brand ICFs were delivered on the 9^th of May, late in the afternoon.

Thursday morning we removed the wood forms from the footings and moved 10 yards of gravel into the center of the footings, this would eventually become the base for a concrete slab.

We started laying the ICFs on Friday morning.  Carol set up the blocks on the footings and installed the steel reinforcing bars, tying them together in the corners.  I played the go-fer, cutting blocks and rebar as necessary, installing the wood track on the footings that the ICFs fit into and verifying that things were square and level.

It took us only a few days to assemble the forms.  We even took off time to have supper on Saturday evening at the Sylvan Lake Lodge Restaurant to celebrate Mother’s Day.  The atmosphere, the food and the service were exceptional, we highly recommend it.  Sunday we worked part of a day and went climbing with Mark and Cheryl in the afternoon. 

Monday the 14^th, we completed the south wall about noon, as I was walking up to the garage for lunch, I felt a gust to wind and as I turned back toward the wall we had just completed, watched it blow over in slow motion.  We rebuilt the wall on Monday afternoon and got it braced for wind.  We also completed the forms for the tower, which were also ICFs but were manufactured by Dow Corning and called Fold Forms because they fold for transport.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Mark Strege was on site, he and I built the shoring system to hold the walls straight during pouring.

Carol and I worked on Thursday on miscellaneous odds and ends finishing late in the evening.

The crew from Jenniges Masonry arrived about 1:00 pm on Friday in a caravan with the concrete pumper in the rear.

Twenty minutes later the first of three concrete trucks arrived, each discharging 9 yards of concrete.

Immediately we had a blow out in a transition piece between the tower section and the main part of the house.  The site of the blow out was where we changed from Greenblock brand of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) to Owen Corning Fold Forms.  We worked for about 10 minutes feverishly and got that section braced.

The concrete crew worked their way around the forms in a counter clockwise rotation.  The GreenBlock stood up to the onslaught of the concrete pumper, the walls literally danced under the force of the concrete stream. 

The last part of the wall to be poured was the tower section and we had a couple more problems with the Fold Forms but managed to get everything secured and there was no major damage.

90 minutes after they arrived they left and we sighed a sigh of relief, no longer did we need to worry about the walls blowing down!