Getting some water

It's a long story and I won't go through it all here, but I finally got the water line installed and saved about $350 compared to the best quote I had gotten. These pictures follow the line from near the water meter (top, east) back to the building (bottom, west). The second picture shows a side trench which leads to a hydrant (3rd picture) close to where we plan to create a new, larger vegetable garden.







Before the trench was filled we also dropped in a new telephone line and a flexible conduit through which Smithville Telephone will eventually push a fiber optic line. We will not have to dig another trench when their installation schedule gets them here in the next two years. (Our rural road is not way high up on their priority list.)

The tarp along the trench was a futile attempt to minimize the rain water getting into the trench.

All three lines came through tubes we placed in the concrete footing. They run from there, under the floor (that would soon be poured) and come up inside the future walls of the utility/laundry room.

Winter mini-vacation

Cabin fever was setting in and there wasn't anything we could do at the house site, so I booked a few nights at McCormick's Creek State Park. When we loaded the car and started out the driveway we got about twenty feet before getting stuck in deep snow. I started to dig out but it was going very slowly when the neighbor across the road came home from work, started up his tractor and plowed us out. What a guy! He'd already spent the whole day at his job plowing parking lots.

There are miles of trails at McCormick's Creek and the roads in the park were in better shape than those outside. The arrived we decided to hike one of the trails and some of the nearly deserted roads.

We weren't the only ones using the plowed roads. Sandy encountered these two not far from the inn. As we walked along they stayed ahead of us until they headed into the woods. When we caught up, I saw this guy who'd been browsing for anything he could eat.





We ventured quite a way along a trail, down a long stairway and to the creek which was beautiful covered by snow and ice. The trail crossed the creek and it wasn't completely frozen so we just crept along the bank until we saw the falls through the ice cycles.


The stay was over before we knew it and we headed home to feed the cat.

A serious snowfall

The second week of February brought a few days of serious snow. Here are a few pictures of what we saw from the windows.

This young dear was hungry enough to come up close to the barn.






With a foot of snow, our feathered friends lined up on the vegetable fences at the feeders waiting their turns.







Air traffic was piled up, too. As each bird got its share, the next one moved up the tree and onto the suit feeder.

3 months just fly by

It's been nearly three months since the last entry. After the concrete walls were built, the weather turned cold and things slowed way down.

It's hard to write when there's nothing to show, and by the time there was something to show I was sort of out of the blogging habit.

Let's see if I can catch up over the next few days.

Enough for Santa Claus

We had a snow fall last Friday night. It wasn't as much as those north of us got, and it paled in comparison with what the east coast got, but it was pretty and left the whole property covered.

Sometime Saturday afternoon I glanced out the bathroom window and noticed some movement on the hill west of the Greene View Springs property. Looking more carefully I realized it was a deer, and then another, and another. Soon there was a small herd of eight deer making their way down the neighbor's hill.

They approached the property line, barbed wire fence tentatively, just a few at first. Then one jumped the fence and the others followed quickly.

They proceeded south just below the hill on our side of the property were it was difficult to follow them. Then, without any warning, they all trotted toward our garden below the apartment. They were moving as a group, but not quickly.

I thought I'd have time to fetch a camera and get back to the window. I was wrong. By the time I had camera in hand the deer had already bolted into the woods.

All I could do was point and press. Here's what I got.

Amazing what a few warm days allow

Last week, after a long stretch of very cold weather, we got about five days with no freezing temperatures. In fact, last Saturday it was over 50 degrees.

That made it a great day to install all of the drains and the distribution lines for the house. The picture below shows a view of the utility room with the half bath behind it.


In the front, on the right, are the hot and cold lines that will be attached to the water manifold like the manifold that was installed in the apartment.

The white pipes in the gravel are drains. The utility room's floor drain is in the foreground. The other rains are for the sink and washing machine in the utility room and, at the back left, the lavatory in the half bath.

Before we can pour the concrete floor there is a lot of work to do. The source water line will come in through the frost footing. Electricity will be run into the utility room and some of the electric circuit lines will run through the floor. Also there will be a pipe to exhaust the range top which will be on a island in the kitchen.

Once all of those are in we can add more gravel, put down the vapor barrier, lay 54 sheets of 2" polystyrene panels and place the radiant heat PEX lines.

I hope we can have all that done about the same time the weather allows us to get the concrete pump and concrete truks back onto the site. Right now it's just too muddy.

It's been cold

We left home on Christmas day for a trip to Delaware, North Carolina and Florida visiting family. It's nice to go away while the days are shortest. By the time we got home, the growing length of the day was noticeably different than from when we left.

It was cold for most of the trip, and especially cold for the folks in Florida who are not used to freezing temperatures. On one day it was colder in Florida than here at home.

It was clear, though, as demonstrated by the picture below, that it wasn't warmer here very much.

These tracks on our largest pond were made by deer, dogs and one rabbit.

Mud becomes rock

The last week hasn't been one to write home about. The earthen walls behind the new concrete walls continued to deteriorate. My task was to excavate around the form-a-drains and shovel in crushed stone along their outsides so no soil was in contact with them and crushed stone could be dumped on top of them. This would provide a clear path through the crushed stone through which water could drain keeping it off of the concrete walls.

By early this week I had dug along the wall footings and replaced soil with stone, a length of 116 feet, except for about 15 feet at the west end of the master bedroom wall where it meets the bathroom wall.

In that area the soil was so wet it just oozed from the wall toward the footing at about the consistency of cake mix. As fast as I could muck it out it replaced itself. Worse, there was no practical place to toss what I was able to pick up. It had to be carried in buckets all the way around to the east wall, or west to at least the laundry room wall. Dropping it against the earth wall near where it came from just caused it to fill in faster.

The space was barely large enough to walk through. No mechanical equipment could get to it because the wall sections are each too short to reach into with a backhoe or other large shovel.

I spent the better part of two days trying to deal with it. It was a nasty job and I'm glad it's finally over.

Freezing weather actually helped by slowing down the water flow and freezing the mud. Also, all day Wednesday, Sandy cleaned out the trenches on both sides of the lower frost footings while I lined them all with polystyrene.

Here's what the wall "canyons" looked like looking west after sunset Wednesday evening. Visible along the wall is a "clean" section of the polystyrene-covered footing. Just past that, beyond where the shovel is standing, is where the mud slurry begins. It's eerie, isn't it, seeing the tree roots hinging along the edge?



My contractor guru, Dick Stumpner, suggested we just abandon the form-a-drain and install another drain on top of the footing against the walls. This new drain is wrapped in a sleeve to exclude soil which might eventually filter through the stone and clog it.

This approach still required the footings to be cleared, but only down to the footing tops and only a bit wider than the new drain, 6 inches or so. More was better, but in a few areas, considering the muddy soil, the drain width was the best we could do.

Much of the wall length had already been cleared by Thursday morning when the excavating team arrived and we started unrolling drain pipe almost at once. Stone was delivered and they began to dump the crushed stone over the walls onto the pipe. We covered it a foot or two deep to hold it down as we progressed around the wall, digging out a bit of soil here and there to allow the pipe to lay flat on top of the footing.

By the end of Thursday we had all the drain pipe in, from both ends of the wall, to within about 20 feet of each other. Today we worked for about two hours to clear the last 20 feet.

We were able to get a backhoe above the northeast corner of the walls and use it to scrape out most of the north section behind the master bedroom wall. Then stone was dumped over that section so we'd have a place to pile muck from the problem area. Not too long after that the two drain sections were connected.

We spent the rest of the day dumping stone over various wall sections and spreading it into the corners that the backhoe bucket couldn't get close to. Here's what it looks like now.


Weather permitting, we'll pick it up again on Monday morning.

Clearing the footing drains

About the time the concrete walls were finished some of the earthen wall behind them caved in. At some places the fallen material covered the new footings and the outside drain form with heavy clay. To be sure this does not inhibit water behind the wall from draining away, I have been shoveling a trench at least 8 inches wide next to the drains and down far enough to expose the slits in them that allow water in. Then I'm filling the trench with gravel to be sure there will be a path for water when the backfill is added or in case more caves in before the fill is added.



We had snow on the ground this morning so I did some things in the apartment all day. There's a good chance of rain in the morning and for the next few days, up to a half inch or more.

I hope to get the rest of the clay and mud off the drains despite that because it's forecast to be as cold as 12 degrees before the weekend. I might have to lay some of the polystyrene panels over top of the canyon if I have to dig while it's raining. The temperature is forecast to be in the low 40's, not bad for this time of year.

Malcolm Wells, Pioneer of Underground Housing, 1926-2009

Sometime in the last ten years I learned about Malcolm Wells. Soon after I got ahold of one of his books. It is full of good sense and humor.

With no offense intended to friends and relatives, here's just a small fragment of his philosophy of building:

"We live in an era of glitzy buildings and trophy houses: big, ugly, show-off monsters that stand--or I should say stomp--on land stripped bare by the construction work and replanted with toxic green lawns. If the buildings could talk they would be speechless with embarrassment..."

Mr Wells died on November 27th at age 83. I wish I could have met him and I encourage you to visit his web site. You will not be disappointed. It is full of his ideas and sketches of various underground buildings. The web site was created and maintained by his fans since he never really seemed to grasp the internet.

After seeing the damage that our new house is doing to the hillside, I feel like a hypocrite when I recommend his works. I hope we can restore the landscape as closely as possible to what it was and end up with a home that allows nature to reclaim most of the surface it covers.

Maybe not too much work today

This picture through the warm apartment window speaks for itself.

2 days old and already sinking

Or maybe the camera is just tilted.

Now that the walls are done it's time to insulate them. I'm using 2 layers of 2-inch extruded polystyrene on the walls and one layer on the tops of the footings. Two layers will provide an R-20 insulating value.

You can see some of the insulation already placed in this picture.


The strange figure in the window below is working on clearing the form drains.


Could he be the Travelocity gnome?

Concrete - Video

Enough of the still pictures. Here's a scan of the finished footings and walls.



When the concrete floor is poured it will be level with the top of the short wall in front. Most of that wall will be underground with the top just an inch or so above the patio level

Concrete - Day 4

It was a short day. The crew came early, knocked out all the connectors, took down all the forms, lifted all the cages of forms back onto the truck, cleaned up and took off. I barely had time to take any pictures.

Here the outside forms have already been removed and lifted over the wall. The walkways at the top of the inside forms have been removed and some of the cages have already been reloaded to the truck.



They left two guys behind to spray the outside of all the walls and footings. One is handling the hose at the top of the wall while the visible one is spraying below. Some of the waterproofing is visible on the wall section to the right.



I took off to buy the first load of insulation panels which will go up two thick - 4 inches, giving us R-20 insulation on the outside of the concrete walls. They were gone by the time I got back.

Concrete - Day 3

Our third day of the concrete work was much nicer than anyone had expected. It rained 7/10ths of an inch overnight which turned our polystyrene-lined frost footings into miniature canals. But, as the day went on, the temperature rose and, except for the mud mostly outside the building's footprint, it was a pleasant working environment.


The crew knocked out some of the polystyrene that protruded above the footing and dug a small trench at each end of the south wall.

The trench on the east side directed the muddy water into the low area between the dirt pile and the original slope of the hill. This ran down and into the drain I had laid last week under the path below. The drain worked great and the ponds were filling up.


You can see why I need to raise the height of the upper pond's overflow pipe. The water level could be much higher without jeopardizing the pond.

The crew set right to work setting forms on both sides of the rebar that had been placed and tied the day before. While they were doing that the rest of the wall sections' reenforcement was cut, bent and tied into the bars embedded in the footings.


The forms were going up quickly, though some corners on the outside had become tighter to work in than the day before. The chunk of soil and rock seen here is the largest to have broken off along the back wall, but there were lots of other smaller pieces and some parts of the walls were dripping with runoff from above.


The forms they used have a brick pattern. We will be covering most if not all of the interior wall, so the brick facade will be unseen when the house is finished, but it will look interesting in the mean time.

By this time the concrete pump arrived. What an enormous machine! By the time they got it into place and ready to go, there was hardly any driveway left. Huge ruts were created and a few more trees bit the dust.


By then the walls had been braced, a working ledge had been installed along the top ...


and the window block-outs were in place, so they were ready to start pumping.


The boom on the pump had four large segments. When it is deployed it looks somewhat like a gigantic grasshopper.


As the pump's outlet moved along the wall, John followed along with a long concrete vibrator that reached to near the bottom of the forms to encourage the concrete to fill all the nooks and corners of the forms.


The forms for the stem wall are shorter, of course, so they go together more quickly, and they require very little rebar compared with the 9-foot walls. Sitting on the footing is a section of plastic pipe that was embedded in the wall for the drain to the septic system. Tubes were also placed for incoming water, electricity and telephone. These were covered with duct tape to be knocked out when the forms come off.


Here's a view from the hillside above. Progress continues on the pumping, even as work is still going on on the frost footing wall around the greenhouse.


The crew was very efficient and little time was wasted. It seemed everyone was adept at every job so there was never any waiting for the "right" person to get something done. If anyone needed help, the next person along could be drafted for any task.