Making way for the house

Land clearing began some time around August 27th.  If I recall correctly, the week before, we made it out there and the framer and his small crew were taking down trees.  It's unfortunate that some of the larger trees needed to come down, but we were able to keep a large oak in the middle of what will be the back yard.  We're also not going to touch the rest of the 6 acres of trees.

Just some of the trees removed

Our next weeks visit provided us with an excavated footprint and Form-a-drain footings.

Aerial shot.

If you don't know what the procedure, The footings are what the rest of the house walls sit on.  These are about two and a half feet across.  Typically, wood would be used as a concrete form, rebar is placed in the excavated cavity, and concrete is poured and leveled.  Afterwards, the wood forms are removed, the footings are spiked with rebar to which the walls are anchored.  We're using form-a-drain, which consists of a rectangular PVC channel that is used as the concrete form, but stays in place to act as the drain tile.  One side of the Form-a-drain is perforated so that water attempting to infiltrate the foundation will instead drain away in the product.

Below grade footings.

As you can see, only half the foundation will be using the form-a-drain.  This is because half of the house will be at a lower elevation.  The lower elevations will be the basement wall, with two walk out doorways and four windows.  For these footings, rebar is still used, but I'm told the foundation will be a "frost free footing".  As it was described to me, expanded polystyrene foam will be used as a form.  After the footings are poured, the ground outside the footprint of the house will be excavated.  Gravel will be placed for drainage and a horizontal slab of foam will be placed before back filling to grade.  This will keep the ground heat "in" and prevent frost from freezing down to the concrete.

Here you can see the height differential between the first floor grade and the basement grade.  It will actually be more than the excavated earth shown here since we're going with a 10 foot basement.

Fast Forward

A lot has happened since the last post and things are rolling now.  It's almost the end of the year, one year after we first broached the subject of building our own house.  Here's the recap of the past 9 months.

After many delays, we finally got the final design from the architect completed.  Some of the delays were additions we wanted, but most of them were due to an over worked architect.

We met with a surveyor from Alpine Engineering and staked out the envelope of the house.  It was interesting because we had just enough room to have some freedom to place the house.  Since we wanted a better view out the great-room windows, we moved the house forward 8 ft. and rotated it 5 degrees.  This meant that the house would take out some of the largest pines on the lot, but we're not short on trees for this build.

Next, the excavator and his crew cleared the lot of trees.  This process took a couple of weeks since there was a malfunction with the excavators trailer.  After the lot was cleared, the house was re-staked so the basement could be excavated.

Footing trenches were then dug and forms were placed for the foundation walls.  A product called "Form-a-drain" was used on the below grade footings.  Usually when a concrete form is poured, wood is used to form a mold, the concrete is poured, then the wood is taken away.  With the Form-a-drain, the forms are made of thick plastic rectangular channels with drain slots on one side.  These forms stay in place after the concrete pour, and double as the drain tile.  For the areas of the footing that are at grade (walk out) a trench is poured 24" deep and thick foam is used as the form.  The outside dirt is pulled away and replaced with pea gravel.  This pea gravel will act as the drain tile.  Next, a layer of rigid foam is laid down on the exterior of the housing footprint then back filled over. This creates a "frostless footing".  The foam will act as an insulator, retaining the ground heat and keeping the surface temperatures from freezing the ground.

I'm told that the footings have been poured and spiked, and three courses of ICF block have been laid.  I'll get some pictures and post more.... I promise.

Elevations!

We've finally gotten elevations from our architect and decided upon some exterior materials.  The samples and drawings were delivered to the HOA and they'll hold a meeting on 1/21/14 to make their decision.



I think it captures the look of a modern victorian pretty well.  There are some cosmetic changes we would like to make and it's a little difficult to envision the materials we've chosen.

The lowest stone pictured is a cultured stone, but we would really like to use a natural stone.  The culture looks nice, but can develop cracks, which ruins the illusion of being solid stone.  Since the finish isn't throughout the stone, any chip off can reveal the underlying concrete.

The middle stone is also a culture stone, but I think it looks very natural.  Perhaps we'll save some money and use it.

The top material has my largest concern.  As per HOA rules, 60% of the front of the house needs to be either brick (non-white) stone, concrete, stucco or truvit.  The side and back elevations must have 50% of those materials applied to the first story.  No vinyl or aluminum siding is allowed.  The only other alternatives for siding is cement board or wood, which is,in my opinion, a horrible option.
While cement board is very resilient and low maintenance, it still requires repainting every 10-15 years, and is subject to some decay, due to its organic fiber content.  Installation is more difficult and can result in breakage.  The cement board facsimile of a cedar shake is only 0.25" thick and has very light surface grain imitation.
Wood siding requires paint every 2-5 years for protection, which is an unacceptable amount of upkeep and cost.

We found a polypropylene siding, which is technically described as a thermoplastic siding.  It mimics wood siding wonderfully with a larger shadow line and wood grain, while having much less maintenance.  The option we chose even has some surface coloration that mimics aging of the shake, adding to its realism.  The material cost is about the same as cement board, with some savings on installation, and a lot of saving on maintenance.  We're hoping that the HOA will reason with us and allow it, especially since our house sits 250 feet back in the woods.



The rear of the house has less Victorian charm than the front.  I hope that will change when the finishes are applied.  Railing and dentil molding can add a lot to the look of a house.

Our Architect 2

So over the course of a few months we've gone back and forth with the design of the house, how it flows, what windows go where, how it sits on the land, and general room layout.  We're just about done nailing down all the details.  Here's what I hope is the second to last version.

As you can see, there were some changes.  The garage was canted out and made front facing because of the limitations of the lot we finally settled on.  This gave us the opportunity to add another powder room off the mudroom so we don't have to trudge through the house from the garage or the back yard to go to the rotunda powder room.  The back deck/gazebo was a last minute revision.  We feel that it will bring that living space out into the back yard more, rather than tucking it against the great room.  Also, you can see that we added a door off the great room so we can access the covered porch in that area.  While it makes me a little uneasy to have all these exterior entries, security measures can be put in place to harden those points.  What isn't shown is any basement planning.  We're told that the elevator shaft, which will be constructed in ICF, will extend down to the basement with it's own footings.  The stairway part of the rotunda will continue down as well.  The basement will be unfinished, but drywalled with stubs for two bathrooms.  We'll come up with a general finishing plan, but will need to implement them after the build is complete.  We're still deciding on a walk out or daylight windows.

The other day, we met John at the build site so we could get a general idea where we wanted the house situated.  He'll contact the surveying company so they can put stakes down for the footprint of the house.  That, in combination with the house plans and exterior elevations and building materials will go to the home owners associate for approval.

Exterior building materials are a bit of a sticking point with us.  As you can see from our house inspiration

We're building a modern Victorian style house.  Well the home owners association laws for the subdivision states that the front two stories of the house must comprise of 65% stone, brick, dryvit, or stucco.  The other sides of the house must have 65% of those materials on the first floor.  The kicker is that no vinyl or aluminum siding is allowed.  For a Victorian with all that lovely shake siding, that leaves two choices, real wood siding, or concrete siding, both of which require some painting maintenance. Granted the concrete siding will only require paint every 15 years, that's quite a bit of cost.  Our team will approach the HOA with the river stone we plan on using for our below grade and first floor exterior, and a high quality vinyl cedar look siding from Certainteed.  Hopefully they'll realize that it's a superior material for longevity and realism, and that we're over 600 feet from the road in the woods.  Crossing fingers.

Our Architect

Our architect on this build is John Holowicki of Architecturally Speaking.  He was recommended to us by our builder Ken Trever since they have worked well together in the past.
  In the months (and maybe years) leading up to this project, Tanja amd I have often combed through online and in print house plans, deciding what worked and didn't work for us.  It first solidified around some plans we found online for a modern victorian.  We loved the idea of a central rotunda and a main hallway that shot from the front of the house all the way to the greatroom in the back, but we were unsure of the diagonal design.  I amalgamated these plans with a few others and tried to eliminate rooms we felt we wouldn't need, like a formal living room.  We knew we wanted a master on the second story, but felt that we might want an elevator for when we get older.  This shifted the guest bedroom down to the first floor with three bedrooms and laundry on the second.  From these ideas, I created this.

We took these and some exterior shots of our inspiration house to John.  He took our rough ideas and designed a house that works.

John really cleaned up the pantry/butlers pantry area and made the mudroom work.  He introduced the idea of a two way fireplace to somewhat divide the great room from the sitting area, which should work out nicely.  I'm still thinking of a way to arrange the great room furniture since we would like to have a TV, but are reluctant to put it above the fireplace again.  We knew we wanted some elements changed, but didn't know that the final layout would be necessary to best fit our build location.

Our builder

We signed a building contract with Ken Trever, owner of Energy Efficient Healthy Homes.  It doesn't get any more descriptive than that.  He specializes in building Insulated Concrete Formed homes.  There's lots of information available on the topic, but here's the short story.
   Instead of building a home out of 2x6 wood, plywood, and exterior sheathing, the house is built of stacked hollow Styrofoam forms into which concrete and rebar is poured. What you end up with is an air tight exterior wall with insulation sandwiching about 10" of concrete.  The material itself has a nice R-value but what makes it worth it is that it's fire-resistant for 2-4 hours, tornado and hurricane proof, insect and mold proof.  It also doesn't have the same air permeability as standard wood constructed house so it ends up being much more energy efficient, not to mention sound proof.
   I met Ken at one of his builds near our current house and knew that he would be our builder.  Five years later, here we are.
   We have an initial estimate of the cost to build.  I'm not going to list prices here, but I will list some features.

• ~4800 sq ft. on two stories.
• Full basement to roof ICF construction.
• Clarkdietrich trade ready steel floor joists.
• Cement sub floors on all levels.
• Geothermal (ground source) heating and cooling

I'll update with more info as the process goes along.  Most items will be completely covered by our construction loan.  Some will need some extra money to upgrade.  Project completion time is contracted to be 8-10 months from ground breaking.  Tanja's parents are betting it will take 18 months.  I hope to prove them wrong.

1/8/2017 Update: I didn't prove them wrong.  Ken Trever is no longer our builder.

First!

This is the first post of what I hope will be many on our journey in building our new and final ICF house.  We're just in the beginning of the build process with our land purchase complete, plans near finished, and builder contract signed.  All that's left is Home Owners Association (HOA) approval, building permits, completion of the construction loan, and of course, building of the house.  I hope you find this information informative and maybe a little entertaining.  Enjoy!