Time flys ... Oops! make that "flies!"

It has been more than two months since my last entry. Frankly, I've been discouraged with our progress and have had little to say or show for most of that time.

I have worked with an engineer in New York to verify that the posts and beams we want to use are strong enough to support the living roof and to define the concrete requirements for the house to be sure it will both support the posts and hold back the hillside to the north.

While that exchange was going on I have been gathering cost information for electricity, water, septic system, excavation and various items we will need in the new building.

Then, with the engineer's specifications in hand, it was time to get estimates for the concrete work. This proved to be more difficult than I ever expected.

The concrete specs are not typical in the eyes of all the contractors I've contacted. There are very large piers under some of the most loaded posts. The walls' thicknesses change from south to north, as do the depths and thicknesses of footings. Part of the north wall will have nearly 9 feet of hillside against it, and it is mostly clay soil, about as unstable as any soil could be. Insufficient strength in the wall or the post supports, or the posts and beams themselves for that matter, could allow us to be found some day under a pile of dirt from the hill or the roof.

I contacted five concrete contractors. All but one were given all the specs, plans and pictures. One never got that far as he was offered a large commercial project before we met. One called back to ask more questions, then never contacted us again. Two presented quotes that didn't pick up correct wall and footing lengths from the drawings. Almost all said they would rather use a different rebar configuration than the specs called for.

I encouraged all of them to visit the site so they wouldn't be surprised later by the access restrictions (and be tempted to cut some corners to make up for any extra effort the site required that they hadn't considered when bidding).

I was careful to tell everyone that we would be lining the footings with insulated panels before the concrete was poured. One said, "I won't pour concrete footings on top of insulation." I replied, "Then I guess we're done talking." As you might guess, he stayed to get the specs and submitted a bid.

Each of these exchanges seemed to take a week or so, even the guy who backed out didn't do so until I had waited about 10 days to meet with him.

Finally, after decided that we would deal with the floor and piers separately, I asked for new bids and got one that we can live with. We'll check out some of their projects before we start, but it looks like we've finally got our concrete work lined up.

Yesterday I called our excavator and got on his schedule for next week. The weather has been good and is forecast to be nice for about a week more at least, so we're planning to get this project started.

I have tried to keep busy while waiting for a good concrete bid. Next I'll post a few pictures taken since August.

Our hike to work

Here's another of the trails we've built on the Greene View Springs property. This one is used nearly every day for access to the new house site. It runs from near the current gardens just below the barn down into the wooded area below. Along the way you can see some cardboard on the trail. It will eventually be covered with wood chips like can be seen at the start of this clip.

This trail is rather steep once it enters the woods. It almost levels out as it turns nearly due east towards the trail in the earlier post.

Soon the house site can be seen up to the left. Farther along are stacks of trees that have been removed and saved for later use next to the end of the driveway. The clip ends where the earlier clip begins as found in the second video reference in an earlier post.

I'm embedding this video rather than linking to it. Let me know if you like this method better than the links.



One thing the camera can't show is how much cooler it is in the woods.

Examining our house plans

If you've been following us for long you know some months ago we were advised for a number of reasons to move our site about 100 feet uphill, so the original pictures of the site we staked do not show where we now are planning to build.

I don't want to post something else we will not use, but we are far enough along with our house plans to risk sharing them.

For those who just want a simple picture of the plans, here is a view from the front, southeast corner.This picture was produced with a program called SketchUp which is now a Google product. It is easy to use though it requires a short time to learn its many features.

For those readers who would like to understand the plans better you will want to use SketchUp so you can tilt and rotate the plans to see the house from various perspectives. Here is the link for the free SketchUp download http://sketchup.google.com/download/gsu.html.

Currently I am trying a free service called TeraDepot. To access the latest posted version of our plans, refer to the section in the left column near the top labeled "See our latest house plans". When you get to TeraDepot, select the "Free Download" option, enter the security code that will appear, and the file will download.

So, if you download and install SketchUp, and you download the latest version of the plans, you will be able to tilt and turn the 3D view around, hide parts of it to see other parts better (like hiding the outside walls, or the roof,) and even make changes to the plan for your own amusement.

The SketchUp "Tool" that will be most useful is called "Orbit." It appears in the tool bar at the top of the screen as two arrows sort of wrapped around each other, to the left of the "hand" icon. To turn parts of the plan off or on use the "Layers" feature found under the "Windows" pull-down menu.

I hope you take the time to try this out. SketchUp is a lot of fun, and once you install it you can use it for your own projects.

Send a note if you try and have problems along the way.

UPDATE: This post has been modified with new instructions for downloading the house plans. 9/8/09]

We've been staking out

We've spent much of this week, except for the two coldest days and the afternoon of the fire, staking out the house site.



The strings mark the outside walls and the view is looking west, from inside the boundary of the living room. There is a window planned in the short wall in the foreground to allow a view of the stream below the spring. The diagonal string that runs the full width of the picture is our north-south reference line running downhill that was established by aligning the shadows of two thin sticks at solar noon a few days ago. By the way, solar noon on that day was just seconds before 1 PM EST. Next week, after Daylight Savings Time begins, it will be about 2 PM EDT.

The large fallen tree has probably been there for 10 years and will be removed to a garden area before excavation begins on the site.



This picture looks uphill from just south of the south-east corner of the house where the kitchen will be. The hill is not as steep here and the bedroom at the back sits where there is a depression through which water runs when it rains. You can tell where the damp places are by the very light brown dry grass there.

We've got to get some advice on whether we can safely route that water around the north-east corner before it continues down the hill. We'd like to have a small retaining pond behind the bedroom which would contain the flow from most rain events.

We ran out of yellow string so we used "CAUTION" tape for the back wall of the bedroom. It's much easier to see in the picture, but not as accurate as string.

If this location is OK for the house we will lose two large trees because the excavation will be too close to them to expect them to survive the amount of root loss. The top of the house will be about 2 feet above the current grade at the north-west corner and about 6 feet above grade at the north-east corner of the master bedroom. I hope we will excavate enough soil to berm the entire north side of the building.

And the survey says...

A few weeks ago we surveyed, on foot, the general area of the Greene View Springs property where we hope to build our home. The remainder was also surveyed by using the surveyor's GPS equipment and downloading data at two of the four corners of the property.

The final product, since it includes more than 16 acres, was scaled at 1" = 100'. That's useful for overall site planning, but we had to blow it up quite a bit for our house-siting purpose. Here's a part of the plan at a larger scale, though I realize the scale is a relative thing when displayed on your computer screen.


This view represents about 1/6th of the total area of Greene View Springs. The large irregular polygon that surrounds the core of the plan shows the area surveyed by actual "shots" on the ground. The remainder is data from satellite surveys of the whole area. This level of information is available for the entire country.

The odd pentagon near the top represents a very large collection of large rocks that encircle an area that could be an interesting feature when we have time to exploit it. There are many rocks on the hillside. We're hoping they will be an asset and not a problem when we start to excavate.

The numbers on the numbered tree symbols each represent a size and species of tree. The two "14's", for example, are 12" popular trees; the "9" is a 30" poplar. We shot about 25 of the larger trees to help us orient the plan when we're walking around the site.

Through the middle is a "flow-line" that begins at the spring and flows to the southeast. We hope to place the house so that the spring can been seen from the west end of the building. We also hope to have a deck on the south and west sides that will overlook the stream below the spring, along the flow-line.

Though we have not determined the exact site for the house, we know where we would like it to be. Imagine a building, 60' long, more or less, running west to east from just east of the tree symbol numbered "6" and between the trees numbered "6" (above) and "14" (below).

It would be placed into the hillside with the south side just above the existing level (approx. 693') and the north side barely extending above grade in some places. The roof will start near grade at the north and rise as it runs south to allow winter sun to enter at the top of the south interior rooms.

The building may be deeper north to south in some places. If so, the deeper sections will likely protrude north into the hillside more than the rest, rather than extend to the south which would block all but midday sunlight to other south-side rooms and areas.

The view to the south from the site takes in the large hillside that is shown in the winter panorama in the blog header.

The two trees along the fence row at the county road show where we would like to bring a driveway onto the site. Cutting to the road at this point, where the grade is just a few feet above the roadway, will avoid building the driveway uphill from the wettest spot on the whole property. This will avoid a climb of about 20 feet which could become a problem in bad weather.

None of these plans are final, of course, because we haven't done any core sampling to see what's under the house site and the driveway route.

Survey Day

A week ago, four days before the big snow storm, we had a surveyor and his helper come to the property to survey the hoped-for building site and the area surrounding it. The final product will be a contour map of Greene View Springs with more detail in the area we walked. The rest of the property will also be shown using data from aerial photos.

The most important tool of a surveyor is called a "total station," named as such because it incorporates both a distance meter for measuring distances and a "theodolite" for measuring angles. Here Andy has set up his station on the hill north of the pond looking back toward our hoped for home site.

 

It sends a beam of infrared light toward a prism, shown here supported by an extendable pole held by the surveyor, Eric. The light reflects off the prism directly back to the total station, and, by measuring the time it takes to return, the station calculates the distance, direction and vertical angle between the two.

 

The information from the total station is recorded in a data collector for later downloading into a computer in the office.

Eric also directed me as we tried to get "shots" at representative spots on the property. I'm not running in the first picture; I'm tripping over one of our %&#$! grape vines! The second picture shows the prism a little better. The last picture shows just a few of the many large trees we marked so they would be shot and shown on the topographic map, our final product.

   

And while we were having fun thrashing through the woods, Sandy was working so hard she didn't need her jacket, cutting rose bushes I had cut off earlier in the week into small pieces so they can be more easily removed when the weather allows.



Behind that mass of brush is the mouth of our small spring. If the house will fit close enough we'll be able to see the spring from the house's west side.