Ya gotta believe me, I'm being framed!

The framing crew is here and things are clipping right along.  I drive by our property every day on the way to and from work, so I can see if there is activity in the morning, usually around 7 am.  I always stop on the way home to see what has happened that day and snap a few pics.

Sunday afternoon.

This series of photos was taken each day this past week, starting Sunday afternoon, just to get a good before picture.  We've had a stellar week of great building weather, so Kevin Lovejoy and his crew were able to make great progress.

On Sunday we have a foundation ready to go and a pile of foam insulation.

Monday evening, the first floor joists are all in place along with the supporting beam in the basement.  This is the first time I've been able to access the basement as there was finally a ladder available to climb down.

This won't be finished at the outset, but we plan to add a small exercise room and finish off a portion for that man-cave that I've always wanted.  Since I was in High School, I've dreamed of having a pool table but never had the right space for it.  Good things come to those who wait.

Monday evening

By Tuesday evening, the decking has been glued and screwed down and the outside walls are starting to take shape.  There's lots of little intricacies involved in the framing.  There is an outside wall that contains all the headers and structural stuff needed to keep the house standing.  Then there is an interior mirror wall to accommodate 12 inches of dense packed  cellulose insulation.

On Wednesday evening I was pleased, (thrilled actually), to walk inside the house for the first time to get a feel for the size of the

Looking East through the mud room.
 

downstairs.

You can see from these photos the cool green sheathing and tape that forms the vapor barrier on the outside of the house.

By Thursday evening, all of the interior walls on the first floor were in place.  Now we can finally get a sense of the size and flow of the rooms as well as the views from the windows.  Even though it was a bit overcast, the Adirondacks were stunning.  We chose 9 foot ceilings for the first floor and I'm glad we did.  The extra height and large window openings really provide an airy feel.

One of the windows on the south side.
 

You can get a sense of the size of the windows on the south side.  The pretty blonde in the picture stands about 5 foot 2.  These windows are triple glazed and Nate Hayward tells me they will generate more BTU's in the winter than our heat exchangers will.  I'll have a little more data on these in a future post. 

 

We've maximized the glass on the southern exposure and minimized it on the north side of the house.  I believe we'll have two windows on that side.  All we had to do was look around our little neighborhood to see examples of just the opposite. 

 

Another area that received great attention was sealing the gap between the foundation and the sill plate.  Most builders would lay a strip of foam under the sill and call it a day.  Ours ran two beads of heavy duty caulk under the sill and compressed that into place.  They then caulked the seam outside the sill, then sprayed foam insulation on the inside of the 


A view of the front of our house.

sheathing and compressed that into place.  Lastly, more of the special tape will be applied to the bottom of the sheathing.  You can see an example of this on the front of the house.  If air permeates one of these boundaries, it still needs to get thru three more in order to find its way into our house.

 

Unfortunately, the 9 am delivery of materials to install the second floor deck arrived around 2 pm, so Kevin and his crew lost some momentum on Friday.  We are still thrilled at the amount that was accomplished in one week.

 

Stay tuned, there's lot's more to come...

 

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Based on the plans, I thought it would be bigger!

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None:  your project is lame!


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More than one:  DUDE!!

It’s been just three weeks since our building permit became effective, and a great deal has happened in that time.  If you were to walk by the property, you might not think this is the case.  Looks can be deceiving.  There is and was a whole lot going on that you may never see again.  

Foundation accessorized.

Once the foundation cures for a few days, a tar based waterproof sealer is applied.  This is the “little black dress” that all foundations covet!!  As far as I can tell, all of Addison County sits atop clay, so the groundwater is pretty close to the surface.  As an aside, this is also why some properties require a mound system rather than a cheaper leach field.  Two of benefits of this building lot were access to town water, and an installed mound system for use by our little association.  

So back to wet basements, which is what we really want to avoid.  After the foundation dressing, the perimeter drain is installed around the outside of the footings.  This is a four inch pipe with holes that surrounds the foundation just above the footers.  This pipe is laid on gravel, covered with a cloth landscaping fabric to prevent the holes from clogging with sand, and then covered in sand.  These are all connected together and to a drain line that directs the water to blue sky and little drainage ditch at the western edge of the building envelope.  I don’t have a photo of our drain before it was covered, but you can see the white vertical pipes at the corners of the foundation in this photo.  These are clean-outs for the perimeter drain.  Should the drain get clogged, you can run a garden hose in to un-clog them.  

You can also see a little of our geo-thermal loop in this photo.  I wrote about this in a previous post.  In short, this is roughly 300 feet of plastic tubing that runs out of the basement, around the house and back in.  We’ll use this to steal some of the ambient heat from the earth to make our heat exchangers even more efficient.  Don’t worry, the earth has heat to spare!

I never want to see you again.

Next our hard working excavator dug another huge hole to drop in our 1,500 gallon septic tank.  The sewer pipe runs through the foundation wall to the top of the septic tank, another line runs out of it to the line that feeds our aforementioned mound system.  I’m told you never want to see the septic tank again.  If you do, it means something has gone horribly wrong, which is usually really expensive and happens at the worst possible time (like there is a good time to be swimming in sh**.).

Additional trenches are dug for the water and utility lines, which in our case are fed from different corners of our lot.  

The foundation is backfilled with sand, and the garage and basement are filled to the appropriate level with gravel to await the concrete pad, which will be poured later.  

As I watched them add and level gravel for the basement floor I noticed a four inch pipe that runs from the center of the basement to one of the foundation walls.  It was being covered with gravel and had a 90 degree elbow on the wall end to extend it above the level of the poured floor.  

“Hey Nate, what’s that for”?  Nate Hayward from Hayward Design Build is our builder extraordinaire.  “Well Gary, that is for radon mitigation.  We always add a pipe below the cellar floor and vent it up through the roof.  If you ever get a high radon count, you just add an in-line fan to the vent which will suck all the radon from beneath the foundation”.  I can’t imagine what this would cost if you had to install this later by digging a trench in the foundation, running the pipe up and out through the roof, etc.  Adding it now, just in case, costs next to nothing.  

Porch pillars.

Lastly, the pillars for our front porch and side deck are installed.  You can see just the tops of these babies in this photo.  

I’ve had some experience building some decks and rebuilding some porches.  I’ve always dug holes by hand, poured a footing for each one, or more recently used those “dinosaur feet”, then mixed up a bunch of bags of concrete to create each necessary porch pier.  What a wicked pain!!  It’s expensive, rarely much fun, and adds at least two days before you can start building anything. 

I was introduced to these pre-cast pillars when I built a deck for my sister earlier this summer.  Hard to tell from the picture, but these are about 5 feet tall with a big base at the bottom.  The excavator digs a big hole, drops them in place and you’re done.  Couldn’t be simpler!!

The only down side is, this is not a DIY installation.  These things weigh a ton, (sometimes literally based on the design), so you need big equipment to get them in place.  If you already have an excavator on site it’s a no-brainer.

Now we wait for the framing crew.  Next time, I’ll tell you about windows that generate heat in the winter…

Bevis and the Brush Hogs

For a few weeks, I felt like a kid again.  I remember how time seemed to move so slowly when you were waiting for something to happen.  Like the end of Chemistry class so I could go play hockey.  Time sure dragged while we were waiting to hear from the bank about this construction loan.

Funding a building project is quite different than getting a conventional mortgage.  When you buy an existing house, you hire an appraiser to look at the property, and they will compare it to other properties, generally in the same area that have sold recently.  Then you sign a forest full of paperwork and the property is yours.  Couldn't be simpler.

With a construction project, you still hire an appraiser to review the property, but in this case, they need to determine what the house will look like in 6 months.  They might go out and look at the land to see if it's a Florida swamp, but generally the valuation on the house is more difficult.  Again, they prefer to compare it to similar size houses that have been built and sold recently.  In our case, we had a few problems with that.

First off, we're building in Addison County where there is much less new residential construction than in Chittenden County.  We're also building a high performance home.  There are none of those in Addison County, and lastly, once you build a high performance home, you typically hang on to it, so no high performance homes have sold anywhere near here recently.

Long story short, that appraisal took much longer than we anticipated.  Thankfully we had an appraiser, and make no mistake about it, you do not have any choice in the matter, that got it.  He understood the inherent value in a high performance home even though there was no hard evidence to support it.  And since this house cost 15% more to build, the appraisal needed to come in that much higher than a regular energy star home.  Our guy took the time to speak extensively with our builder to understand all the expensive stuff that makes this house different.

When the bank finally received the appraisal, they had to review it because the appraisal was 15% higher.  We were told at the very beginning of the process that there is no evidence that high performance homes sell for more than conventional homes.  This is crazy!!  They are so much more economical to heat and cool it just makes sense they would be worth more.  Again, the problem is not many have been built and fewer have been sold.  Eventually, the world will catch on, but it sure is a pain to be a trail blazer.

Finally everything fell into place and we closed on the land and the construction loan on the same day.  Our builder got our building permit, we waited the required 15 days, and all of a sudden, things started happening very fast.  The next series of photos were all taken within 10 days.

Bevis and the Brush Hogs.

First all the growth is cut with something called a brush hog, which would be a great name for a rock band.  I know that "Bevis and the Brush Hogs" would be HOT!!.  Next the surveyor stakes out the boundaries of the lot and the building envelope, which is the part of the land on which we are allowed to build.  Next the builder comes and stakes out where the house will go.

Staked.

Sure, it's a bit of a hole, but we like it.

Footings are in.

Foundation complete.

A quick aside here.  Our builder mentioned several times that the orientation of the building on the lot is key.  So many times he'll see an otherwise beautiful home with the garage on the south side of the house.  That way in the winter, you'll enjoy that afternoon sun, as long as you're willing to sit in the garage!!  So he spent a good part of the time orienting the house with a compass.

The next day, I stop by the land and there is a big hole in the ground and several huge piles of dirt.  By the end of the second week, we have footings and a foundation.

Our builder sent us a note at the end of the week to tell us they will give the foundation a few days to cure and then they will be back to lay out the geo-thermal loop and backfill the foundation…

The geo-WHAT??

Up to this point, I must say I was completely ignorant about the geo-thermal loop.  Not anymore dear readers, and if you continue to the end of this post, you too will be conversant in the topic.  You will be a hit at cocktail parties, and you won't even need to wear the lamp shade on your head!!

To understand this, you need a little background on how a high performance home is built and heated.  First of all, it is super insulated.  I've attached a sketch of the insulation in just the basement.  I'll discuss more of the insulation specifics as the house is built.  Secondly, the house is sealed very well so fresh air must be constantly circulated from the exterior.  Lastly it uses a heat exchanger, actually ours will have two, to heat the incoming air using the outside temperature.  It works like your refrigerator, except that it is incredibly efficient, and you can't keep beer in it.

In the heat exchanger, the old warmer air is used to heat the new cooler air.  As much as 90% of the stale air heat is maintained during this transfer process.  So by now you are probably screaming at your computer "but what the heck is a geo-thermal loop!!"

The geo-thermal loop, my friends, is a plastic pipe that runs out of the basement at the very bottom of the foundation wall.  It loops around the house, roughly seven feet underground, and comes back in on the opposite side of the house.  Water, or eco-friendly anti-freeze is constantly pumped through it and it gives our heat exchanger a little help conditioning the outside air.  The temperature at seven feet is a fairly constant 50 degrees fahrenheit at our latitude, winter and summer.  So this gives the heat exchanger that extra boost that it needs to be even more efficient.

And here's the kicker, in the summer, you just flip a switch and the heat exchanger works in the opposite direction.  It takes the hot air out of the house and exchanges it for cooler air, again with a boost from our geo-thermal friend.

There's a few videos that explains how this works.  You can find one of them here.  Admit it, you want a geo-thermal loop now too, don't you??

Next time, I'll talk more about the progress and other cool features of our home to be.

Tiny signs of progress and the power of CAD

Yes, that is our building permit posted proudly on our new property.  We returned from an outstanding trip to Idaho to visit our daughter to find this evidence of progress.  It seems like a long and dusty trail to get to this point.

We met with our future builder at the urging of our real estate agent.  We came prepared to discuss all of the specifics of our project (NOT !!).  Actually we had some vague ideas of what we wanted in a house.

It was our intention from the beginning, in fact well before the beginning, to build a nice little ranch to grow old in.  The allure of one floor living is especially acute when I descend the stairs early in the morning looking for that first caffeine score.  I feel like roadkill, really old roadkill.  And the idea of carrying the laundry from the second floor to the basement and then back up again when it's done seems ludicrous.  Seriously, who came up with that idea?  So a ranch made perfect sense.

Unless you're building it.  There's a good reason why you don't see a lot of ranches built these days.  Our builder explained it well.  Everything is bigger.  The foundation is the entire square footage of the house.  More excavation, more concrete, more roof.  The cost per square foot is close to 40% more than  a two story cape.  So I guess I'll be sucking it up and dealing with stairs for a few more years.  One welcome exception, the laundry room is on the second floor.

Our builder was incredibly patient dealing with our changes, hence the beauty of computer aided design.  He would forward a set of floor plans to us, and we would each make changes, often conflicting changes.  I would suggest moving a wall here, adding a closet there, and Stephanie would be doing the same thing from her office.  Our builder just clicked a few times and new plans would magically appear in our email.

What room required the most changes you ask?  You would think it would be something key, like the kitchen or perhaps the main living area.  Not even close.  The closet in the master bedroom required the most discussion.  We messed with the size and the adjoining closet and the door at least fifteen times.  Our builder would number the plans each time he made a change.  I believe the final plan was called "Taylor Ferrisburgh 19".  To our credit, he told us the record was 28 different iterations.  Good thing there wasn't another closet in our plans!!

At the first meeting with our builder, he introduced us to two levels of home efficiency.  The energy star home or the silver standard is considered to be a very good quality home, according to Efficiency Vermont.  The ceiling insulation must be R-49, walls must be R-20, appliances must be all energy star rated, the list goes on and on.  A sliver standard home is considered to be a very efficient home.

But why opt for silver when you can have gold?  The gold standard as rated by Efficiency Vermont includes ceiling insulation to R-80, walls are R-40, appliances are all CEE Tier 1, 2 or 3.  I don't even know what half of this all means, but it does sound impressive!!  Plan on spending 15% more for a High Performance home than you would for an energy star home.

First Floor

After much discussion, soul searching and sleepless nights, we decided to go for the gold standard.  It makes me feel like I'm doing something positive for the environment, we'll be lowering our carbon footprint and best of all, I'll be able to heat this puppy with a Bic lighter.

Second Floor

So here are the sorta final plans as well as an elevation for the front.  At the time of writing this, we are the proud owners of a very rocky driveway, a hole in the ground and several huge piles of dirt.  Next time I'll share some of our experiences with the bank and the joy of finally making some headway.

Stay tuned - film at 11…

Our home, someday!