Rolling back a bit

After reviewing previous posts, it dawned upon me that there a TON of information that I haven't mentioned.  I'll try to recap some more so we can get to the more current information.

After reviewing our plans and exterior building materials, the HOA reluctantly accepted our house with conditions.  There was hesitation because apparently, there's a rule (I didn't find it in the HOA charter) that states that garages can not face the front of the property.  This rule is in place so that you're not looking into someone's garage and all their clutter, when the door is open.  However, the HOA ruled that we'll be able to retain our design since we're situated 250 ft. back from the road.  Indeed, you can't even see our house from the street... the street that only has, and probably will only ever have, two houses.  Unfortunately, they did deny us the use of the polyvinyl siding, so we'll have to use cement board.  Luckily, I've found a company named Nichiha that makes a great looking cedar cement board siding.  It's a little thicker than other cement boards, which produces a deeper shadow line and better grain quality.  It's probably more expensive too.

We met with the surveyor one fine summer afternoon to stake the corners of the house.  He was very helpful and allowed us to measure out a few placements and rotations, to achieve the best sitting and view.  We ended up moving the house 8 feet forward and 5 degrees counter clockwise from our original location, to get the best view of the great room.  Here's an overlay I created from an aerial shot from my quadcopter.






















As you can see, some of the larger white pines will have to come down, but at least we'll get to preserve the large oak in the back yard.  The stakes probably sat there a month while we battled (waited) the architect for the final design release.

In the meantime, we needed to finally secure our construction loan.  The process took a few months and required all banking and investment documents for the most recent 2 months.  Since it took so long, I did need submit extra documents as they became available.  In the end, the final closing on the mortgage took 20 minutes.  I guess it's easier to sign your life away than it is for them to decide they want it.

Additionally, we needed to purchase a special kind of home owners insurance.  Since there isn't technically a home to insure yet, we needed to purchase builders risk insurance.  It covers material theft, damage, and accidents.  When the build is complete, it changes to a normal home owners policy.

Some additional costs were also incurred before we could break ground.  The city required payments to be made for water and sewer permits and soil survey permits.  These probably totaled around ten thousand dollars.  That doesn't even include the actual running of these utilities to the house.  It's just a stamp on a piece of paper.

Build progress pictures are coming next....

Walls start to go up

The ICF for the basement walls were delivered and started to be assembled on 9-20-14.  A huge delivery was dropped on next to the street.  Luckily it's just foam, so transporting it back the 250 feet to the house site was pretty easy.

The footings were spiked but I didn't get to see it happen.  Here you can see about six courses of Integraspec block, each course being 12" in height.  There's a plastic channel on one side of that block that receives a plastic webbing.  This webbing acts as a spacer and holder for the horizontal rebar that gets placed every course.  There's also vertical rebar tied in, so the wall is a rebar mesh surrounded by concrete sandwiched between foam.  Pretty secure.

 This wall is the where the garage will come off of.  The wall the the left is the front of the house.

 Here you can see one of the basement walk outs.  It's flanked by two window openings and looks out onto the water.

 You can see the plastic webbing that holds the two sides of foam together.  The channel that accepts these spacers is also used as drywall "nailers"  The company logo is placed where the channels are so that when you're hanging the interior drywall, you can attach it directly to the ICF by screwing in at the logo.

 Here you can see the two basement walkouts in the back ground.  The foreground wall geometry is such because on the level above, this will be the front entrance.  You can see how they spike the footings.

Hmm. Something doesn't seem right

9-20-14.  After the walls started going up and I could really get a feel of the footprint of the house, I noticed something wasn't right.  Although the basement will not be finished when the house is completed, we've been planning how we want to utilize the space.  Quick sketches of wall placement, carving out room for storage, bathroom roughs, etc.  Standing on the elevator pad, I realized that the corners of the walls weren't lining up correctly.

 The angled corner in the center of this picture seemed off.  I called the framer (Matt) who said that the surveyors staked the corners of the house using the values from the blueprint, but he would go out the next day and measure things.  He mentioned that sometimes, blueprints don't transfer exactly to the real world, but I still felt that there was too much deviation to ignore.
  After mulling it over a bit, I took one of the aerial shots of the build and super imposed a the scaled blue print.  Sure enough, my suspicions were correct.  I emailed this picture off to the framer and he said he'll take measurements.

Matt said that he measured the wall lengths against the blueprint and everything was correct, but agreed that something was off.  A few hours later he discovered the issue.  The wall marked in white was labeled as a 22' wall on the blueprint, but if you took ruler to paper, it should measure 26'.  Some time in the revision process, the numerical measurement of that wall was not corrected and resulted in an incorrect corner stake.  Had it not been caught, this would have reduced space in the basement and first floor, resulting in a loss of a closet in the mudroom and a change of plans for the basement.  Luckily concrete wasn't poured in the walls and a fix was possible.

Pouring the foundation

We decided to make a trip to the build site on 9/16/2014 and just happened to be there on the day the footings were being poured.  It's nothing terribly exciting, but I'm surprised the ground was firm enough for the cement trucks to get back there.

 Here you can see the pad for the elevator already poured.  It's in the process of being screed level.

 The blue is the foam that will act as a form/frost control for the frost free footings.  There will also be horizontal foam buried on the exterior of the walls to help retain heat and prevent frost from getting too deep into the ground and getting to the concrete.

 The cement truck is sitting on excavated earth, so it's not hard packed down.  They just used the chute to direct where the concrete would go, and as it flowed, they would lift up the rebar sitting in the trench so that it was suspended in the concrete.

 The plywood served as a divider between the two heights of the footings; below grade and at grade.  The rebar is tied between the two elevations.

Here's how they lifted the rebar as the concrete flowed.  There's not enough weight or spring tension to the metal to press back down after the concrete has flowed under it.

After the concrete has hardened, the came back and "spiked" the footings.  That involves inserting vertical rebar where the walls of the ICF forms would be.  It ties in the footings to the concrete inside the ICF.

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.