Odd skills

One of the fascinating things about building a home is the range of skills required, and the diversity of the people who have those skills.
We've all seen and admired the talent of a good backhoe operator. Scott, who has been doing our excavation work, is truly a master at his craft. It's quite remarkable to see him sitting in the cab of a machine the size of our house, controlling a bucket that's the size of my car, and being able -- from forty feet away -- to scoop two inches of dirt from the bottom of a hole.
But I knew we'd need someone like Scott on the job. And someone who can lay block with precision. And someone who can tell at a glance whether a post is out of plumb.
I didn't know we'd need someone who's talented at unloading a truck, though. But this morning, that's what we got. Simcoe Block delivered the latest load of blocks, and I caught the tail end of the unloading. I watched their driver use a boom to hoist skids of cement blocks -- not strapped in place skids, mind you, but skids of loose-piled blocks -- and place them down in the bottom of the hole.
Some of them needed to go beyond the reach of the boom, but that wasn't a problem: our driver just started them swinging back and forth like a 5,000 pound pendulum, and when the skid reached the degree of swing he needed, he just dropped it down in place.
It was a small thing, I suppose, and just one of many deliveries he would have made that day. But it's just one more thing that made me say "huh. Who knew that was a skill one needed to have?"

Backfilling went well today. We can now see the grade that we'll be living with, and the driveway is roughed in sufficiently for trucks to back right up to the garage. Blocklayers back on site tomorrow (thursday) to build the rest of the above-grade walls. They're planing to push through if the weather holds, and aim to be done by Sunday.

Is it too late to change the roofline?

The problem with designing a house is that you keep on designing it, even after the blueprints are printed and construction has begun.
Designing your own home is fun. Waking up in the middle of the night, sweating about details that can't be changed and wondering if we got this or that right is not.
This morning, at 5 a.m., it was thoughts of how the walkout elevation is going to work, and whether the roofline is going to look too high from a particular viewpoint. I've got a much better idea about how to do it -- how we should have done it, perhaps -- and I found myself wondering why we didn't do it that way. And then I realized the reason we didn't is because we didn't know this problem would exist until we got shovels in the ground. We needed to clear the site to see the driveway slope. We needed to dig the footings before we knew exactly how low they had to go to hit undisturbed soil. We needed to X before we could Y, and by the time you do X it's too late to change Z.
The reality of a custom design on a complex piece of property is that there are many things decided on the fly. You can't possibly anticipate everything, particularly when everything is so interconnected. Changing the roofline would mean changing the screen porch, which would mean changing the windows, which would mean rethinking the furniture placement, which would probably create a problem that could only be resolved by changing the roofline again.
Maybe that's why people who build their own home often go on to build another: they're hoping that they will get it perfect.

Weather forecast is calling for freezing rain this morning, changing to rain this afternoon and overnight. Mild for the next couple of days, then turning colder again, with snow by the end of the week. If our excavator can get started on Monday (which depends on the amount of freezing rain we get), we should be able to get our cement work done before the cold hits again. Block layers won't be working on Monday, to allow the excavator to get in there and backfill.

Slow but (nearly) steady

Well the promise that "the blocklayers will be right behind the footings" turned out to be a little more optimistic than I would have liked. In fact, for nearly a week if you'd asked me who was laying our foundation, I would have said "nobody." Bad weather, bad planning, or just plain malfeasance... whatever it was, the block layers didn't get started until nearly a week after they were supposed to, all the while the temperature was giving me concern. But that's all behind us now, I hope, and we're nearly done the frost walls.

There's a freakish amount of fill to be added now -- because of the way the grade worked out, we either had to bring the basement slab up nearly three feet above grade level, or we had to face having a really steep driveway. We decided that we would regret a bad driveway more than we would regret a big bill for fill -- the pain of the latter is only felt a few times, but the pain of the former is felt every time it snows or freezes. 

So on Monday, weather permitting, the dump trucks arrive and start pouring sand into this lovely big hole. Once that's done, the blocklayers can finish their work and the framers can start.

If we're really, really lucky we may just have a main floor in place by Christmas. But I'm not counting on it. 

The weather has been kind to us so far, but we're pushing our luck for sure. It's starting to look like a real house, though, and that's kinda exciting.

Our first approval

Everyone likes approval. We crave it, we thrive on it, we spend our lives chasing it.
And today, we built on it.
The town's building inspector approved our footings. And so we celebrated by hiring a very expensive truck to pump cement in to the forms.
The weather's been cooperating so far, but it's going to get cold tonight. I'm watching the long range forecast obsessively, but it looks like we'll be able to get away with it. We're putting some sand into the pit tomorrow, pouring a bit more cement into the garage forms, and on Thursday it's on to the block work.

Oh yeah -- we started. Forgot to mention it

It's been a whirlwind. We had a design, then we got prices on what we thought was our final design. Then we redesigned our final design because it was tens of thousands over budget. Then we... well, let's just put all that behind us, shall we?

What matters is that we've broken ground. Not only have we broken it, we've made a big pile of it where there was no pile at all. Our excavation contractor dug the hole in just one day, and I stopped calling it 'the lot'  and started calling it 'the site.'

That was Thursday. On Friday we had the surveyors out to pin the footings, and this morning our masons showed up to form the footings. Footing inspection is at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, after which we can pour cement and then start laying blocks.

We're going with a block foundation, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I'd just assumed we would either pour cement or use ICF, most likely the former as ICF is supposedly so much more expensive. But when we priced it out, we found they were roughly the same price, by the time you factor everything in. Then we got a price on block, which turns out to be roughly 35% cheaper. Apparently it's a supply and demand thing -- there are only so many people with forms, but there are all kinds of block layers out there and pricing is aggressive.

Of course, when you do anything with concrete in December you do it with one eye on the weather. We've got some good weather today and tomorrow (highs of 9 or 10 and lows above zero), but it's going to cool off after that. Still, with lows of -1 to -5 for the rest of the week, it's still above normal and shouldn't cause too much problem. (Or so say the masons). To be safe, though, we're trying to cover everything up with earth as soon as we can, to keep the frost from getting under the footings or the slab. That means making sure anything that needs to be buried near a foundation wall  -- phone, hydro, water, etc., along with foundation drain tile -- gets buried while the hole is open.

There are still lots of decisions to be made, of course. That part won't stop for months yet. But it's more exciting than frightening now. Last week, as we were readying to dig, I felt like I was sitting in the car on the roller coaster, looking up at the steep climb ahead of me and thinking this was probably a bad idea. Now the ride is underway and it's too late to do anything but hang on. And occasionally scream like a little girl.

Tweaking the design

We got the first round of quarter plan drawings last night. I was surprised at how many changes Phil had made from our initial sketches -- some good, others not so much.
Sharon and I spent an hour (after getting back from the theatre, so a tired hour) going through and making notes, then sent it back.
Somehow we're back to the debate about whether to have a high cathedral ceiling over the living room, a decision I thought we had made ages ago. Funny how that goes -- just when you think you've won, you find out you haven't!
Tree-cutting is going well. Only a couple of big ones to bring down, a few mediums, and lots of little baby trees to kill. Of course it isn't the bringing them down that takes the time, it's limbing, dragging and stacking. Isaiah was out helping me the other evening, and I'll get some more labour out of him this weekend. It makes a big difference, and almost makes it worth all the cereal we have to buy to keep him fed.
We had a couple of burns over the winter (well, one in the winter and one that was really too far into a rather dry spring -- a near disaster that I'm not in a hurry to repeat!). The rest of the branches are being stacked well off to the sides of the property with the idea that we'll bring in a chipper when the house is built and convert them all into lots of lovely mulch for gardens. Sawlogs are also being stacked for future firewood-making days. Thank goodness for a good Stihl.
Chainsaws, by the way, are one of those tools where it really pays to buy the best you can. I bought a $200 Homelight chainsaw from Home Depot, and when it kacked out even a staff member at HD asked me why I was buying such a crappy saw. I now have a $650 Stihl, which I love using. Starts, runs, cuts, shuts off, all when it's supposed to.

Decisions at last!

So many options, so many possibilities, it's been more than a bit overwhelming. But we've made some key decisions in the past couple of months, and we're moving forward.
Like 95 per cent of home builders in North America, we're going with standard stick framing. It's cheap, it's proven, it's efficient. Tempting as it was to go all funky with bio sips or rammed earth, this is just too big an investment to play with. I'll build a straw bunkie or a rammed earth shed sometime, maybe a hand-hewn log cottage, but the house will be 2x6 on 16 inch centres.
We've signed on with Rolston Home Building Centre in Huntsville. Their lead designer is an engineer with tons of experience, and he really enjoys helping first home buyers through the process. And he lives four doors down from our new home, so he's really familiar with the property. We handed over a deposit last week, and are hoping to have quarter drawings from him within a week or so.
Once we've got that done, we go back and forth with him to finalize the design, file the site plan with the town, and await blueprints. With blueprints we can then get final bids from contractors and get our building permit (after we pay gajillions of dollars for it! Honestly, the fees are an unbelievable cash grab. Permits and development fees will cost more than the well and septic!)
The plan is to start building around the end of September and hopefully get it closed in before winter sets in. I'm acting as general contractor and hiring our framing contractor to also be the siteman and coordinate the trades. Once it's closed in, I'll take some time off work (been banking a lot of holidays and time in lieu!) to do a lot of the interior work -- flooring, trim, baths, closets, kitchen, fireplace surround, painting, etc. I ain't doin' drywall, though -- you need to know your limits.
In the meantime we've been prepping our current house for sale (the upstairs bathroom is now unrecognizeable.... in a good way). I'm taking a week off next week, and will spend much of that time either working on this house or cutting trees and prepping the site on Cedar Lane. Will a change be as good as a rest? Ask me this time next week.