Progress for July

Finally, the roof is completed and the 9 solar thermal panels are installed. Most of the basic landscaping has been completed and there are no piles of dirt anymore. There's still quite a bit of work to be done on the outside. The stucco job should begin next week or the week after. The front step landing and steps will be done soon. Some work has to be done on the south side window wells, which have sunk because they weren't installed properly by RockSolid Concrete. I'm putting a short retaining wall on the south side, near the property line, since I had to lower the side yard by about 2 1/2 feet due to errors in elevation by the architect. Otherwise, my basement windows on the south side would have been buried 2 1/2 feet below grade, letting in no air or light at all.
I finally was able to return to work at the end of July after my injury working on the house. I will be in physical therapy for another two months, and won't be able to do a lot of the finishing work I had intended to do. I'm still hoping to do some of it, but it will be difficult with only one hand.
I was going to put in a porch roof over the front door, extending to the bay window, but scaled that down due to budget considerations. Here's the mini-roof over the bay window.

I used Dens-Armor sheet rock, which is paperless, instead of the conventional stuff which has glue and cardboard on one side. It costs about twice as much, but is very mold-resistant, and has nothing to attract bugs. It also doesn't burn. It's a very green product.

This view is looking up at two of the three skylights in the stairwell, which will let in light as well as provide venting for hot air out of the house.

This is the view from the living room looking back towards the back bedroom, with the upstairs bath in the foreground.

Below is taken pretty much from the same spot, but looking through the interior window, which lets in light, through to the rear door.

The front bedroom/office, which will have glass french doors to open the living room up.

The inside looks a lot different with the walls in. Hopefully, the next update will be sooner than later.

A Slow June

June was a slow month. I was severely injured when I was in the basement nailing foam insulation to the basement ceiling and my wooden stepladder collapsed under me. I fell backwards, bouncing off the wall, and landed on the cement floor with my hands behind me, instinctively trying to break the fall. My left wrist and lower arm were literally shattered. The surgeon used bone cement to glue the fragments back together, as well as inserting a long plate holding the bigger pieces together with a dozen screws. There are also three pins which hopefully will be removed soon. The cast presses on them and it hurts when I move my arm too much. I'll permanently lose some mobility in the wrist, but hopefully will get back most of the use of my fingers. I still feel very lucky. It could have been so much worse.
Some pictures: my brother Cliff removed the driveway running through the back yard, and this picture was taken after I had started filling in the hole. I was just starting to get the hang of the Bobcat before the accident.
Here's the asphalt waiting to be picked up to be recycled. You can see the work Cliff did backfilling around the front window wells.

Here are the solar heat storage and heat transfer tanks.

Finally the sheet rock has been started! This is standing in the living room, looking towards the rear. The kitchen is on the right, the master bedroom windows on the right.

This is a view from the kitchen to the living room on the right. The office/guest bedroom is on the left, behind the dining room.

The front before backfilling. See the second picture above and current view to see the backfill.

The north window wells being installed.

The north window wells installed. I did the backfill myself with the bobcat.

The pots contain all the plants I ordered, mostly fruit plants. We are WAY behind on the landscaping.

More plants. Many I planted from seed. and they are still sitting there, waiting to be planted. The garden behind the pots is my neighbors'.

This is the wooden stepladder. If you have one, get rid of it. They are not safe! When I tell people how I was injured, everyone has their own horror story about stepladders, many worse than mine.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Although this is the same date as my last published blog, I wrote that one on May 15th, while I was in New Orleans on business. I was waiting for more to happen, but it never did, and time got away from me.

So today is June 5th, and I guess I should talk about the ugly. I've done a lot of light construction work in the past, and lots of work on ladders. I've never been seriously injured that I can remember. But that changed when I had a wooden stepladder collapse under me last Saturday at the house. Alagandro and I were nailing solid foam insulation on the underside of the first floor, to keep the heat from the radiant in-floor tubing radianting upwards. We both were on 5' ladders, standing between the rafters. I was on the fourth rung or so, and when I took a step down, the ladder collapsed. It shattered, and there wasn't time to do anything but fall. I fell backwards from about five feet up, landing on both wrists and my rear end. My left wrist was shattered; the surgeon said the bones looked like corn flakes. My right wrist was badly sprained, but not broken. My back hurt pretty badly, but turned out not to be broken, either. Overall, I think I got off pretty easily. I hit my head pretty hard on the wall. I could have broken my neck or back, or both arms. The wrist is pretty bad, but things could be a lot worse.



One good thing is that all the pain medications have helped my back pain. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back to work next week.



Progress on the house has been moving along. The basement floor has been polished, the sheetrock will be hung this week and next, and we have a contract for the stucco.



My brother, Cliff, and his wife Rosa, are going to help me with landscaping this weekend, and I can finally get some plants in. My injury will cause things to slow down, but not stop.

May Progress from May 15th

The problem with the roof and solar panels hasn’t been fixed yet, so I’m still unhappy with that. I’ve been assured this is going to be fixed, so stay tuned.

I’ve been away for the past two weeks on business, but was home for last weekend. My brother Cliff and his wife Rosa came over to the house for a few hours to help me with some landscaping. I have Cliff’s bobcat there temporarily. He moved some pallets and equipment around which were in the way, and finished filling in the place where the driveway had been. When my lot was adjoined to the Quinces’ lot next door, the owner put in a large horseshoe driveway which went around the perimeter of the property. I took out the part of the driveway which cut through my backyard, and will use what’s left of the driveway along the north side of the property. Part of the driveway was taken out when we dug the hole for the basement, and the asphalt driveway as a whole is not in that good of shape. It was old anyway, and all the heavy equipment on it didn’t help. But it is still a useable driveway, and eventually I’ll replace the asphalt with permeable pavers.

I’m told that Innovative Power Systems (IPS) is busy installing the solar apparatus in the basement mechanical room. The schedule for now is that Concrete Treatment, Inc. is polishing the basement cement floor. This will give it a finished look and make it much easier to keep clean. I’ll put area rugs on top in some places, I’m sure. But I won’t have the problem of stepping out of bed onto a cold cement floor, because the floor will always be warm in the winter, due to the radiant in-floor heating.

Once the basement floor is done (hopefully Monday or Tuesday), we will begin hanging the sheetrock. I originally was going to use magnesium oxide (MgO) board, which will not mold. There were a couple things that made me forgo the MgO board in favor of paperless sheetrock. The cost was the big item: MgO board costs about 4 times as much as conventional sheetrock. Although the U.S. has plenty of gypsum mines (that’s what sheetrock is made of), it has no magnesium oxide mines; they are all in Asia, mostly China. It’s not very “green” to use materials shipped halfway around the world. Instead, I’m using DensArmor, a paperless sheetrock. It’s the glue and cardboard that make conventional sheet rock undesirable, because the paper burns, grows mold, and it and the glue are food for bugs. DensArmor has a fiberglass mesh to hold it together instead of cardboard. It’s more expensive than conventional sheetrock, but I’d rather not have the VOCs from the glue, and the potential for mold.

Last weekend I finished filling in the north side of the house, where new window wells had been put in. One of the things that were left out of the building plans were the window wells. RockSolid Concrete put three cement window wells on the south side, but since they weren’t properly set on footings, they sank when the ground thawed (they were poured in the winter) and have pulled away from the house. Two of them aren’t too bad, but the third one has pulled away from the house quite a bit. RockSolid Concrete won’t fix them, and I won’t pay for them, so I guess I’m stuck with trying to fix the problem. The metal window wells on the north side, next to the driveway, look really good. Jeffrey Swainhart ordered them and installed them. They are close enough to the house to leave enough driveway there to use for my car. I built the house as far to the north as I could, to take advantage of the sun on the south side.

I’m still hoping to be able to get the house finished by the end of the summer. There are some big projects which still need to be done. I will be applying the clay plaster to the walls, and need to take a couple weeks vacation time to do that. The radiant in floor heating has yet to be installed on the first floor, mostly because the sheetrock hasn’t been hung yet. Once the sheetrock and floor are completed, we can start doing things like hanging doors, installing kitchen and bathroom cabinets, and doing the finishing work around the house. Although the house is wired and has plumbing installed, all the fixtures will need to be put in, and that can’t be done until the sheetrock and first floor are done. Nothing on the outside of the house is finished except the roof. The outside has to have stucco put on and I’m not sure how I’m going to finish the gables yet.

I’m hoping to accomplish a lot of landscaping this weekend. My sister Cathy, the landscape architect, is in town, staying with our mom while I’m away. I’ll have a full day with her to lay out the landscaping plan. I already bought quite a few plants, perennials, because the nursery’s stop selling things by the end of May. So I wanted to get my asparagus, fruit trees, raspberry canes, etc. before they disappeared, not to be seen until next spring. I have containers all over my mom’s yard and porch, full of plants. I’m hoping to get some of my plastic lumber soon and start laying out some raised beds. I still have a big pile of dirt in the back, but I think I can start putting some things in on the south side and work around the pile. Another thing to do that I have forgotten: I need to put a retaining wall along the south side, since I had to lower the elevation there. It’s about a two and a half foot drop from my neighbor’s yard. I lowered the elevation because the basement windows, which were supposed to be at ground level, are two feet below the ground.

More updating later…

Landscaping, Solar Panels

The solar panels are finally going on the roof, which was just finished last week. There are eight panels here, but there are supposed to be nine. Right now, nine don't fit. Unbelievable as it may seem, with all the planning that went into this roof design, and all the tens of thousands of dollars I've paid to designers, consultants, roof framers, and solar providers, my custom roof isn't the correct size for the solar panels it was designed for. I don't want to use this blog to name names and place blame, but I am extremely unhappy about this. How could this have happened? It's a custom designed roof!

I now realize why I couldn't find a builder to build this house. Builders who build houses have a limited number of plans they will use. They've made all the mistakes, and have these plans down pat. They won't deviate from them because too many things can go wrong, so they stick with what they know. I've tried to keep the negative out of this blog, but this is just one more thing in a long line of mistakes which have happened on this project. It's all a matter of people not paying attention to detail, and not double and triple checking figures. Unbelievable.

The problem is supposed to be fixed, so we'll see what happens. The mistake occured when we had 4 foot wide panels, and there is more space between the panels than the designer allowed for. Plus the roof framers were not given a figure that said, "you must allow this much room for the panels," so they took some liberties when framing the roof that took a few inches away, when there was absolutely no margin for error.This is my brother in his bobcat, backfilling the holes around the front window wells. It was supposed to rain, but luckily, it held off. A backhoe would have been better for this job, but the bobcat was free.

Here Cliff is taking out a little more of the side yard. I'll put a short retaining wall in along the property line with my neighbor. I had to bring the side yard down a bit when I realized the elevation on the drawings was incorrect and the tops of the basement windows were not at ground level, as the drawings showed, but a good two feet below ground level. I want light and air to get into the basement.

You can see below where the retaining wall will be--off the to the left.

Here's Cliff breaking up the driveway.

All the asphalt is piled in front for now, and will all be recycled. Old asphalt is melted down and mixed with new. After all, asphalt is mostly pure petroleum, and doesn't deteriorate for hundreds of years.

New Roof, Masonry in Front, Interior Wall Work

My green roof is nearly completed. A close up where you can see the seams. The solar panels will be clipped to the seams.

This is how the roof was delivered.

Parging the inside of the exterior walls. A brown coat of cement was applied to seal the walls and provide a smooth surface for the clay plaster. You can see the obvious difference when the Faswall blocks are covered.

The front walls nearly completed.

Below, the walls and window wells are complete except for the porch under the door. I need to fill in the part under the door with dirt, halfway up, to provide stability before Eberhard puts the cap (front porch) on the top to complete it.

Eberhard Construction put in a small retaining wall to hold the hill up to the front door, and put in one large window well in front of the two front basement windows. Eberhard had a great crew and did a very professional job.

Here, the blocks were delivered and readied for the walls.

Windows, Interior Framing Complete

Here is the view from the basement bay window. To the right in the middle window, you can see the black silt fence in front. The pile of dirt to the left of that will be no higher than the top of the silt , so there will be a lot of light coming in from the front. This is why I wanted the hill dug out in front, to expose the windows in front. I have been living in a basement with tiny windows for the past four years, and will be in heaven when I will have natural light and be able to OPEN the windows for fresh air. Mom will be living on the handicapped accessible first level.

This view shows the installed bay windows in front. The windows to the right of each are bedroom windows upstairs and downstairs. Below is my pride and joy, the cold room, which is along the back of the basement behind the laundry room. There are no heating tubes in the floor underneath, and the walls will be insulated. With no heat, and outside walls on 2 sides, I'm hoping to keep it under 60 degrees in the summer, and 45 to 50 degrees in the winter. I'll store root vegetables, squash, and apples there in the winter, as well as all my home canned goods.

This is the view from the front of the basement to the rear, looking through the bathroom and laundry room to the cold room. The black pipes are the plumbing. You can see that there is a lot of natural light coming into the basement.

Below are the two large heat storage tanks for the solar heat. Innovative Power Systems (IPS) is ready to start installing the solar heating system, but we still have to do some work on the inside, and the metal roof needs to go on. The roofer was supposed to start a month ago, but has come up with various excuses for the delay, which I'm not happy about. Hopefully, we'll have a roof (and it's GREEN, for the green house) in the next two weeks.

Here, you can see the upstairs front bedroom framed in, looking through the kitchen and dining room.

Below, the basement bedroom framed in. This photo doesn't show it, but the windows have been put in and let in just as much light as if it was above ground.

I thought I had more up-to-date photos, but I found I didn't, so I'll take some more this weekend. Most of the rough-ins have been done for the electric, the air exchange system and AC, and the plumbing.

Today, Jeffrey picked up a small electric cement mixer I had bought. Devin, my neighbor, is going to do the majority of the parging of the interior walls, which has to be completed before I can apply the clay plaster. It's a hard, messy job. The parging is just a thin application of cement to smooth out the walls and fill in the holes in the surface of the FasWall. Because it is cement with a rough surface, the clay plaster can be applied directly to it. If I used the plaster on the interior wallboard walls, I'd have to apply a special sandy surface first to get the clay to stick to the sheet rock. I will probably paint the interior walls, and just have the clay plaster on the interior of the outside walls. Clay plaster is expensive, and a lot of work to apply.

We are planning on having the rough-in inspections next week for the electric, plumbing, HVAC, and framing. After that, we'll get the sheet rock hung, and then finish the first floor radiant infloor heating installation.