Posts and Beams

Several years back Flora and I discovered the big open spaces that are possible in both log and timberframe homes. We loved the look, went to some shows, toured some houses, and decided that is what we wanted. After I bought our lot I also bought a 110 year old barn frame and had it trucked down from the Pittsburgh area. It was only after we had a design created around that frame that we discovered how darned expensive it is to build a timberframe home because you are essentially framing it twice; once with the timberframe and once with the structural panels you attach outside the frame. Ultimately we did not build that house and the frame has been sitting around in pieces ever since, much of it rotting away.

Here Mario and Chad wrap the laminated ridge beam in barn wood to give it a more finished look. 

The house we are building now has much the same shape as that original design only this one is framed conventionally using laminated beams for the support structure. We had not though given up on using some of our barn beams in a decorative way. A few weeks back Mario, Chad, and I looked through the barn beams and chose a few that would supply the pieces we needed. I spent a week working them into shape and providing a proper finish to the wood. I didn't want to lose the original character but I didn't want them to be too nasty either.

Finally, last weekend we were ready to lift them into place to be used as posts on what we fondly call "the big wall". I assembled a team of able-bodied guys, rented a cable lift, and we went to work. The biggest piece was a 17 foot long 8" x 10" white oak beam that probably weighed 500 pounds or more. The lift was strong enough to get it the eight feet off the floor that were required to slide it into place, but how to control it once it was up in the air was the problem. I still had in place a tall scaffold that I had borrowed from the drywall subcontractor, so with Chad and Mario up on the scaffold, Rich, Chuy, and I wrestled it from the ground while Flora took pictures. The following pictures tell the story.

We pulled the end of the post up into the air, using an appliance dolly under the bottom of it, until it was rolled into an upright poistion

A safety rope secures the post while we devise a lifting strategy

With safety rope removed, Chad and Mario steady the post as it is cranked up eight feet to the top of the beam that will support it

Mario steadies the post while Chad makes some "minor adjustments" with a sledge hammer

Mario attaches the last of the securing screws

All posts in place

After this post was in place, Mario, Chad, and I lifted the rest of the shorter posts into place and secured them to complete the look. We used other pieces of wood from the barn to provide decorative elements in various places around the room, including replacing a required metal post in the middle of the room with another 8 x 10 wooden post. So, while it is true that this might not be the timberframe home we once dreamed of, we do have the big open spaces and much of the look and feel with none of the inherent problems of a timberframe home, and we saved over $100K in the deal; what's not to like about that?

Paint

It's funny how every new aspect of the house is so exciting. We were talking the other night about how excited we were when we first got our concrete slab poured in the basement and later when the Superior walls went up. So while I would like the think that getting the interior painted is the greatest thing that has happened, I guess these are just more steps in the build.

We had no idea it would be so tough to choose paint colors. I have spent so many years of my life living in houses with white walls, I knew that I wanted some color, but I also knew that in an open concept house where so many rooms could be seen from one place, all of the colors needed to work together. I also knew that I wanted a bright red accent wall in the great room; Flora was definitely not convinced that this was a good idea. But after a few weeks of working through color charts room by room, we finally had everything picked out and did a walk-through with our painter.

There were eight people on the paint crew. They spent the first day was masking, the second day the ceilings were painted, and finally on the third day the color was rolled onto the walls. We now have some green bedrooms and one that is yellow. Bathroom colors range from lavender to robin's egg blue. In the great room I got my red accent wall and it looks amazing. Now that the house is painted I can finally begin tiling the floors.

Although the painters were very glad to have the tall scaffolds to work from while painting the ceilings, I am really looking forward to getting them out of my living room! 

Deck Bracing

When we designed our house with big decks ten feet above the ground I did not consider all of the things that would be necessary to make it happen. The deck is supported by 6 x 6 inch "legs" and on top of those is a frame made from pressure treated 4 x 12s into which the joists are nailed. All of this structure supports the decking boards. Each leg is placed on top of a 3' x 3' x 18" deep poured concrete footing. The thing I didn't consider is the bracing that would be required.

I decided that if it were done right, the angle braces need not look too ugly, and it gave me a little woodworking project to do while the siding and roofing were being installed by their crews. I had argued with the framing subcontractor that it really should have been his job and that I thought it was included in the bid, but I  knew that if I wanted it to look good I had better take the job on myself. So I put together a little workshop in the garage and set about designing, fabricating, and installing the 24 pieces of bracing. Calculating the length of the braces required that I trot out the Pythagorean theorem, something I had not thought about in a long long time. The bottom of the braces had to be bolted in 1/3 of the way down the post, as measured from the top of the post. I rounded off the corners of the 4 x 4s to match the look of the 6 x 6 posts, notched the top and bottom to fit around the deck beam and the post, and drilled them with a drill press in an attempt to get a straight hole. Creating the first brace took several hours but after I had done a few I got it down to about an hour each. 

Our set of plans that were drawn up by the engineer specified "Bracing as required". I asked the engineer what that meant and he said there were several ways of doing it and our framers would know what to do. After our house framing was complete I asked the framing subcontractor about the bracing and he said it was not included in the framing bid. He claimed that we had talked about it early on but that had not been the case as I was still under the assumption that bracing was a part of the line item that said "Deck framing complete". He said that he never includes deck bracing in his bids because homeowners often require very labor-intensive treatments of the bracing since it is always very visible.

I called the county building department lead engineer and asked him what bracing would be required by the building code and he said that we had three options:

• X-bracing on each side of the deck - that would be a large X-shaped brace made of 2 x 6s bolted into place between the posts of the three sides of the deck. These structures would be big and ugly and I could not really figure out a good way to hide them so I decided against X-bracing.
• Hire an engineer to design some kind of custom bracing that employed a combination of lateral braces under the deck framing and blocking nailed between the framing members. This option sounded expensive and complicated and in the end could prove to also be unsightly.
• 4 x 4 angle braces 1/3 third the length  of the post on two sides of each post. there were 12 posts supporting the deck so that meant 24 pieces of bracing that had to be fabricated and through-bolted in place with 5/8" bolts. That all seemed like overkill and a really big job but maybe the best of the three options. 

Installing them meant drilling through the 6 x 6 posts and the bottom of the post and through the 4 x 12 beam under the deck. I found it hilarious that the building department would not allow the electrician to drill a 1/4" hole in an engineered beam, claiming that it might weaken it too much but here I was required to drill all of these 3/4" holes through engineered beams by the same building department. Since I wanted to bolt them on the inside of the posts, I also had to notch out the ledger that supported the joists in most cases. The whole job took about a week but when it was done I liked the look. The county inspector liked them too and they passed his inspection with no modification.   

This view shows deck supports with bracing installed.

Now on to the task of putting on the deck boards and the railings, sizable jobs on a deck this big (854 square feet).

The View from on High

One of the best things about being a contractor is getting to play with really cool toys! Since the roofs on the house are so high I had been not only unable to do any work way up there but had not been able to even see the work up close that had been completed. So when the solar guys said that they needed to rent a 45' lift for getting their panels onto the roof I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to finally get to see things topside and touch up any issues. The siding had been pre-painted but there were still minor things to repair and there was caulking to do.

The machine showed up on a Wednesday and the solar guys needed it only for Thursday. That meant that if I would pay for Friday I could have it for the entire weekend. The rental company dropped the lift off up in the restaurant parking lot and it was only when I went there to eat lunch that I spotted it in their parking lot.  I saw that the key was in the ignition but I had not a clue how to even start the thing, let alone drive it or raise it up. It probably took an hour to figure it all out, get it down the house, and raise it up to the top of the roof. After that, I was an expert and I laid out a plan for getting the most out of it while I had it. 

I started on the front exposure, which is only about 25 feet high, where I finally got to see and repair the scratches and scuffs the siding people had made with their ladders. 

On the other side of the house the height of the roof is closer to 38 feet, which is definitely not a height I like to work from on a ladder, so I was glad to have the machine. On each of the three days I used it to caulk and touch-up until it was nearly dark out, but still, by the time I had to drive it back up to be picked up I was sorry to let it go. After I win the lottery I can get one and park it next to my Ferrari!

Finishing the Exterior

This is a big topic, one that deserves more than a single posting; but for now this will have to do. The siding and roofing have now been completed, gutters are installed, and we have passed our framing and mechanical rough in inspections. Siding installation took weeks longer than expected because the crew showed up only occasionally, but overall they did a great job. After talking to the Hardiplank siding sales rep, we ordered pre-painted siding expecting that if the crew was careful we could avoid having to paint the exterior of the house. Because some of the walls are35 feet high this is a big deal. We were not disappointed, and aside from some scuffing here and there that will have to be touched up, the paint looks great.

Weeks earlier I had allowed the plumbers to penetrate the roof with their vents expecting that the metal roof would be installed in short order. But since the siding guys had to not only get on the roof to do their thing, but actually had to tie into the roof with their scaffolding, roof installation could not begin until they were out of there. This meant that every time we got rain, water poured through the roof and puddled on the sub-floor. This made Flora very nervous and although she was continually placing buckets under the leaks, workers kept stealing the buckets and thwarting her efforts. Nobody was happier when the roof was finally watertight.

Another problem that resulted from jobs being done in the wrong sequence (my bad) was doing the finish grading before the gutters were on the house. Each time it rained the waterfalls of water pouring off the 35 foot roofs eroded the dirt below and washed it away. Gutters were installed today so now I can repair the back-filled areas that were damaged.

Next will be installation of insulation, then drywall. Tomorrow the cabinet people come to do the kitchen cabinet layout and the next day we will go to see more slabs of granite before we order our counter tops. We still have a lot to do, but things are moving quickly and we still hope to have the house complete by the end of the year.  

Back-filling the Trench

The residential building code requires an overdig of at least two feet around the outside of a basement wall to allow access for waterproofing and laying a foundation drain. Since I figured that too much access to the foundation was better than too little I chose to make the ditch around the basement walls about twice that wide. The implications were that while it would be easy to get in there and do what had to be done, it would also mean having to fill about twice as much material.

The foundation drain was placed before the walls were set in place and waterproofing had been completed on one of our typical 95 degree summer days. While I don't generally allow drinking of the jobsite, since no power tools were being used, I allowed an exception this time. So during the hottest part of the day we swilled ice cold beer and slapped on the tar with rollers.


















We could not backfill until the first-floor decking was built and attached. The top of the superior walls is bolted to this floor deck every four feet with large bolts and these bolts and the weight of the floor combine to strengthen the walls against the pressure of the soil as it is piled up against the outside of the walls. I chose to wait even longer until all of the framing was done but now was the time. I wanted to get on to our final grading and build our front steps that lead up to the deck and this required that the backfilling task be completed first.

I called multiple excavation companies and they all had waiting lists as long as a month, so because of my impatient nature I decided to take on the task myself instead of waiting.

Two large piles of dirt had been left when the basement was excavated to be used for backfill so it was a matter of moving about 80 cubic yards of the stuff one bucket at a time and dropping it into the hole. I had estimated that it would be a 4 hour task but in reality it required about twice that long.

My machine is old and it smokes and groans but ultimately Slowly the piles of soil were depleted and the trench was filled.

Framing (part 2)

The total framing job took less than four weeks and every day there were new changes to see. Really though, it was seeing the roof lines go up that was the most exciting of all. The roof in our great-room soars 27 feet above the floor and big beams are required to support those 24' long rafters. The ridge beam spans the top of the room and the rafters are nailed into it. This beam is 5 1/2" wide and 18" high and it is composed of three big LVLs that are nailed side-by-side. One end of this beam is held in place by the other roof but the front is supported by a post (see this connection in picture at right) that rests on the foundation 37 feet below. The ridge beam and the post are bolted together and several other large beams attach to them to support the roof load. There is also a 3 1/2" x 24" horizontal beam that attaches that is meant to stiffen the entire front wall to meet the 90 mph wind load requirement. This beam will provide a "plate shelf" that spans the entire front of the house.

The framers spent much of a day building a large scaffold and I was there early the next morning to watch and take pictures as the 6-man crew lifted the huge pieces into place. I guess I expected something dramatic but like the rest of the house, the roof took shape one piece at a time. Two rafters had been nailed in place the previous day for placement of the back end of the ridge beam and a post was put in place to hold the front end.  The crew lifted the 3 pieces that would make up the ridge beam into place first, assembled them together, and then began lifting and nailing in the rafters. Within a couple hours they had several of the members in  place and by the end of the day most of the rafters were nailed in. The next day the rest of the rafters were installed (pic at left shows the roof with a few rafters missing) and framing began on the big south-facing "wall of windows". After that, sheathing was added to the walls and roof and they were each covered by membranes in preparation for roofing and siding.


Indeed the frame is what makes the house what it is. After framing is done, windows and doors are added and then plumbers, electricians, and HVAC installers come in and chop holes in it all. Then the insulation crew caulks the holes and stuffs every nook and cranny with insulation so that the drywall guys can cover it all up in preparation for paint. The framing crew was there for a week and I really got used to their laughter and hammering. Things now are much quieter.

Framing (part 1)

This is the stage of building where the house finally begins to look like a house. Prior to this you don't really have much but a pile of concrete but then a framing crew begins to turn a big stack of lumber into walls, floors, and roofs and the shape of the house begins to appear. Naturally, in our house we had to finish the basement level first. Concrete walls were in place for all the places where soil would be back-filled against them but on the open parts of this level the walls would be built from wood. Multiple lumber deliveries were necessary before framing could begin.

Anchor bolts had been embedded in the edges of the concrete and the tops of the pre-poured walls had holes in them that would allow the first floor framing to be bolted to them. In concept framing seems simple enough but in reality it requires a lot of planning and calculations to make sure that each of the substructures that is built fits together with this rest of the structure when they are mated together. The door and window openings have to be the right size to fit doors and windows that will be coming later and must be located in exactly the right location with the wall. Many of the dimensions are not specified on the house drawings (for example, rafter lengths) so each of these must be calculated to ensure that every stick of lumber is right.  The framing crew has a lead framer who is responsible for this and for keeping each of the crew members busy and usually each of them is working on a different part of the structure so it is a lot to manage.

Our lead framer was named Ramon. The photo at the right show Ramon leveling a wall. He was very good at explaining the options each time I had another decision to make (and there were many of these every day). Things like the location of the kitchen window, which depended upon the kitchen layout (which was yet to be determined) needed to be established before the wall that holds that window could be built. The kitchen design was, in our opinion, the one weak link within our overall house design, which is to say, the way it appeared on the drawings was not going to totally meet our needs. We identified this deficiency early on and even tried to hire a kitchen designer to help us with the details, but by the time framing started we still did not have a revised kitchen plan.



The single window the was in the kitchen needed to be located above the main sink but we did not yet know exactly where the sink needed to be because we had not yet figured out the right location for the stove or cooktop (whichever we decided to install). I preferred to install a cooktop on an island opposite the sink, but the kitchen (as shown on the plans) was too narrow for an island. The kitchen was essentially U-shaped with one side against a wall and the other defined by a post that held up the second floor loft. Kitchen walkways should be a minimum of 36" wide and with one on each side of the island, we would have only 12" left for the island. With all these problems I hired a kitchen designer. I sent her a set of plans and a week later she came out and laid out a schedule, a set of deliverables, and a price that we quickly agreed to. To make a long story short, she left and never returned and we lost several weeks and still had no kitchen plan.

At that point I decided that I would have to take the kitchen design on myself and with the help of some Web sites I was able to move the side peninsula over and draw up a plan that I think we can live with. Once that was done we established the location of the kitchen window and provided it to the framers who by then were well on their way to completing the basement framing. The basement has 10 foot high ceilings and those walls, when completed, looked very tall. The floor deck above that was framed with 2x12s, which added another foot of height, so the floor of the main living space then is 11 feet above the basement floor, making it s long climb up those stairs. A floor framing inspection was performed, the floor was sheathed, and then the first floor walls were built. The photo above shows some of the first floor framing, including the 14 foot side walls that will support the front roof.

We were happy to have the first floor walls in place so that we could finally see the outline of our rooms in full scale rather than just on paper.

Finally some mud is poured

The most aggravating thing about being a contractor is trying to find reliable people. I guess that in that regard it is like running any other business, but somehow I expected it to be better than hiring individuals. When I ran my plant nursery in Florida I always had a tough time finding and keeping help but I was paying only barely over minimum wage and finding reliable and trainable people who want to work for low wages is never easy. In this case, supposedly the subcontractors I am hiring are business people who are running their businesses to make money and as such I would expect that most or many or at least some of them would return phone calls, show up when they promise, and do the job they are being paid to do. That doesn't sound like too much to ask does it?

My basement walls were installed in April (see a previous blog entry about that experience). A few weeks prior to that I had found a framing contractor who had built a house for a neighbor and had done what appeared to be a great job.  The neighbor could not say enough good things about the guy, so I called him and arranged a meeting. We got together and talked about my job and he left with a set of  my plans promising to call me with a framing bid by the end of the week. The week went by, then the weekend, and sometime in the middle of the next week I called him back and he told me he had not had time, had lots of jobs going, would get it done soon, blah, blah, blah. This was to become a common song and dance. A week or so later I called him again and got a similar story. After a third call I decided to look elsewhere for a framer; he never did get me that bid and as far as I know, he still has my set of plans.

While I was looking at the neighbor's house I also noticed what a nice job someone had done forming and finishing his concrete sidewalks, so I got the subcontractor's name and number. The same guy had been recommended to me by another general contractor so I thought this might be a good place to start. I called him and he said he was very busy but would fit my little job (about a 25 yard pouring my basement slab) into his schedule with no problem, just give him a call a week  or so before I was ready. I emailed him a set of plans and called him as he had requested when I was about ready. He finally got back to me about a week later and said he could come out to my job site in about a week. By then my basement walls were done and I was anxious to get on with the show. I had to call him a couple more times and he finally agreed to a meeting and he actually showed up. We walked around with a set of plans for about an hour and discussed how to attack the job; this was on a Thursday and he said that he could form and pour it the next week. The next week came and went and he again failed to return my calls. By then it was the end of yet another week with no progress and I was getting frustrated. While I was playing telephone tag with this guy I got a couple more leads and got three more bids from other concrete subs. Two were within a couple of hundred dollars of each other and the other one was about $2000 more for some reason. I decided to go with the guy who was based out of Chapel Hill; the other guy was from Raleigh, which is about 35 miles away.




It was a good weekend; I was finally going to get the job done, a month late but done nonetheless. His price was for labor only so I picked up two 48" x 100' rolls of 6" wire mesh, #4 rebar, 6 mil poly, and anchor bolts. He would bring the tie wire and the chairs that hold the rebar up off the ground, order the concrete (and get me his discounted price), and most importantly, his crew. His crew came out and leveled the stone that was in place, measured and formed the slab, put down the poly, mesh, and rebar and got ready for the next day's pour. It turned out that when the Superior walls crew had run their plate vibrator over the 1/4' stone base that those walls were to rest on, they had reduced the base height by nearly an inch. That meant that the 3/4" stone base that was to be under the slab was also an inch too high and all of that material had to be removed to maintain the correct final surface height. It was so hot that day that I allowed the contractor to use my skid steer to do the job and he completed it in about a half hour.

So when his guys rolled in to do the pour on May 31st it became clear that after a six week break, we were finally back in action. The whole job went smoothly. Temperatures were in the mid 90s and it was miserable out but the concrete finishers did a good job for the most part and now we can move on with framing, the part of this job that will make this concrete-lined hole in the ground into something with more resemblance to a house.

Choosing plumbing fixtures - Cooler than it sounds!

The dream of building my own house started a long time ago but who thinks that it will/can ever happen? I became enamored with timberframe homes a few years ago and even went so far as to buy an antique timberframe (on Ebay) and hired an architect to design a house around it. About that same time I bought a stack of books about home building, including one called The Owner Builder Book. The author explained and demonstrated throughout the book that anyone with a strong desire, some diversified experience, and half a brain can be his owner general contractor. That book also had associated with it a website with a forum and through that forum several of us formed a local owner/builder group, had a few meetings, and shared ideas. Several others from the group went on to complete their house but losing my job kind of put a damper on my own project.

A couple years later after watching the others complete their houses I reassessed my finances and decided that we really could build a downscaled version of our house with the same look and feel but sans timberframe. Last winter I looked through probably thousands of online house designs and Flora and I finally boiled it down to a single design that would give us everything we wanted. I found an engineer who would put our design into AutoCAD and give us a sealed set of drawings for a reasonable price and we started rolling.

We already owned our 3.6 acre lot so with a roughed out budget we set off knowing that we would eventually have to get a bank involved to provide further financing. Last week was the week we went to the bank to sign up for our construction loan and boy what an experience that was. Think about a job interview and an IRS audit rolled into one and that should give an indication of what it was like. I can't blame them for being careful since being able to qualify for a loan does not in itself mean that someone is qualified to build his own house. But what a stack of paperwork I had to fill out. One of the things I had to do was to get actual firm prices on all the things I had just estimated so today we went to a wholesale plumbing fixture company and spent about two hours making decisions about all of our fixtures. It was very helpful to have a knowledgeable person guiding us through the process and yet one more time I was reminded about what crappy service we come to expect in this Wal-mart/Home Depot world. The big box stores seem to have a motto "our service is crappy and so is our stuff but hey, trust us, our prices are low".

My rough budget had shown $4800 for fixtures and our total today came out to just under $4300 but I do still have a couple additional bathroom sinks to buy but still I was amazed that I was that close. I discussed the experience with Flora afterward and we both agreed that it was great fun being able to pick and choose exactly what every sink, stool, and faucet would be and we can hardly wait to use our new shower. Since we spend a lot of time in the kitchen we picked out some really cool things to use there including this faucet. It has not been that long ago that the only kitchen sink choices were porcelain-coated steel or stainless steel each in a couple of sizes. These days there are thousands of choices. We ended up with a big double stainless steel sink that is kind of restaurant style and with that great faucet who knows; maybe I will even do dishes from time to time!

Installing the Superior Walls

If you look at the prints for our house you will see that the basement walls that are embedded in the hillside are shown as concrete blocks filled with rebar and concrete. As long as these walls are totally filled with concrete they are waterproof and very strong. To complete such a wall you would to hire someone to layout the footers, a second crew to excavate the footers, a third crew to form and pour the footers, and then after they pass inspection, a crew of masons to lay the blocks. Since these are 10' walls, they would have to lay blocks to 5' high and then have a concrete truck come and fill them. After that concrete has hardened the second 5' section can be placed on top of them and then those are filled. So besides having to juggle a lot of different crews, an additional problem is that it is nearly impossible to be sure that all of the cells in the wall are actually filled with concrete; invariably there are some voids and these tend to weaken the wall and they often leak.

So we chose an alternative known as Superior Walls. These walls are produced in a factory, transported to the job site on a flatbed truck, erected with a crane, and bolted together. Since these walls are placed directly into a bed of compacted gravel, no poured footers are required. Additionally, the walls are guaranteed not to leak (although this county also requires that they be painted with waterproofing compound). Superior Walls are slightly more expensive but to me it was a no-brainer since it guaranteed a better foundation with a lot less subcontractors getting involved. Oh, and I forgot to mention that they come fully-insulated and with the studs in place, ready for drywall!

The Superior Walls crew was scheduled to arrive first thing Monday morning and I figured I had plenty of time for some last minute things at the job site on Friday. So at 6:15 AM on Friday I was awakened by the telephone and wondered who in the heck might be calling at such an hour. Not being a morning person I was sound asleep and in such a state there is no way I can get to the phone within 4 rings, so I rolled over and let the voice mail take care of it - that is why I pay for it right? A few minutes later it rang again. This time I was awake so I picked it up and the voice on the other end announced that he was waiting for me at my gate (which was locked) and that the crew would be there within a few minutes. The best laid plans right? By the time I was able to get dressed, pour myself some coffee, and get to the job site, my contact had left but I was at least able to get there before the trucks started rolling in.

It was my kind of job; everyone knew what he was doing and all I had to do was stand around with my hand in my pockets and watch. I just love watching work getting done! While Critch was extending and setting the outriggers on the crane truck, the rest of the crew was setting up lines and running a plate tamper over the gravel to ensure that it was level and well packed where the walls would go. It was not long before the first wall was attached to the crane and swung into place. A second wall was soon bolted to it and ensured that it could not fall over. While the crane swung back to hookup the third wall section, the two installers caulked both sides of the joint they had just assembled. The four man crew was a well-oiled machine and quickly completed the job. Within tow hours they were done and gone.  You can see the open ends with embedded wood for attaching the rest of the wall framing for the wooden walls that are not buried in the hillside.  

So the house build is off to a great start; now if I can only keep the momentum going!

Digging the Big Hole

One of the attributes of our lot is that it allows a house to be embedded in the hillside so that part of it is earth-sheltered and the other side is open. I remember a house I saw back in Denver that had a walkout basement and I liked the concept. The thing about most basements is that they are dark and dank and you have to descend a staircase to get into them; this one was not that way and the fact that you could walk straight out of it and it had windows made the basement into a nice space. Unlike Denver, basements in the south are very often a bad idea because of all the rain we get, but a walkout can work if the drainage is right and allows rainwater to be directed away from the foundation.

In April we had the basement excavated. They used a machine they called a loader (before talking to the owner I would have called it a bulldozer but he explained the difference to me). He used the big machine on tracks not only to excavate the hole but also to push over some fairly large trees. The largest of them was a white oak with a trunk diameter of about 30". When we had the site cleared a few years ago we had chosen to save this tree, but that year was very hot and dry and the root damage from creating the nearby road spelled its doom.  In all we took down 7 large hardwood trees that were either too dangerous to have so close to the house or that blocked too much of the sun. I have spent many hours since then cutting them up and burning the limbs. When we had originally cleared the lot I had the contractor do all of this work at that time. This time, after doing it all myself (with some help from friends and family) I now have more appreciation for how much hard work is involved. I always hate to remove large trees; we counted the rings in one of them and it was over 150 years old. On the other hand, more than one of them ended up being hollow, which really weakens them. Having a 90' tall tree fall on your house is never a good thing.

The deepest corner of the excavation is about seven feet deep and at about three feet under the surface we started running into a large shelf of granite. In some parts of the country that would have meant jack hamming or blasting, but we were lucky and most of the rock was already fractured and all that was required was a few extra hours of picking away at it with the loader (at $110 per hour). When our basement slab is poured, the concrete will be placed over a bed of gravel. We sloped the earth under that a few inches so that any water that might penetrate will run down hill and away from the house rather than puddling there.  

In all the excavation required most of two days plus a bit longer due to some miscalculations on my part in laying out the stakes, but in the end we had a right nice hole in the ground! Next, we will lay in a layer of gravel and level it for installation of the basement walls.

And so it Begins!

Show me the man who has watched "This Old House" for a season who has not been intrigued by the idea of building his own house? I have seen lots of people on that show (who had less skills than I have) take on the task and come up with a house that fits their every desire. Of course having the TOH team there to help would be a big plus. But I thought we could do it ourselves; after all, I'm a handy guy. Flora and I had been looking for the perfect building lot for years when we finally found one that fit all of our requirements:

• Big mature hardwood trees
• An open south-facing exposure to allow use of solar features
• A south-facing hillside that would allow a walk-out basement
• A large open space for gardening
• A location close enough to town for convenience but far enough away to avoid the noise of a city
• A lot that would not allow anyone to build next door
• Surrounded by nice houses
• A lot of at least 2 acres
• No restrictive covenants that limit what I can do on my own land
• No nearby high tension power lines or cell towers
• The lot had to be affordable

It was a long list and we looked at plenty of them. There was a building boom on and developers were snapping up the good lots quickly and driving the price higher and higher. I had never looked at building sites in the United States (we already had our lot in Nova Scotia) so it was a learning process. Anything within close proximity to Chapel Hill was outrageously expensive and the ones that were not had inherent problems. We found one on Daisy Lane in 2005 that looked pretty good and put an offer on it, The lot was 2.5 acres and they would not budge from the listed $50,000 asking price. We decided that if everything was perfect with the lot it would be worth the money so we agreed to the price, but only if the land would perc.

For you city-dwellers who do not know about perc tests, please allow me to explain. Out in the country, away from city water and sewer systems, each house usually has its own well and septic system. The prevailing municipality (in this case, Orange County) is responsible for ensuring that these systems are in compliance with all of the rules and for testing the soil to make sure that liquids will percolate through them adequately. That is called a perc test. Generally, lots that don't perc cannot generally be used for building and are therefore worth a lot less money than lots that perc. The size of a septic field is loosely based on the number of people who will live in the house and they base that on how many bedrooms a house will have. In the case of the house I wanted to build on Daisy Lane, I stipulated in the purchase agreement that it must perc for a 4 bedroom house. Unfortunately, the perc test results said that there was only one small area on the lot that would suitable for a septic field and it was only large enough to support a 3 bedroom house, the owner refused to reduce the price, so I backed out of the sale.

We looked at more lots and it was a year later that my friend Chuy (owner of Chapel Hill's famous Fiesta Grill Restaurant) told me that the restaurant's landlord had called him and was subdividing the ten acre lot the restaurant was on and selling off part of it to raise some cash. Chuy and I took a walk into the woods there one spring morning and I loved it! We had a tough time getting through the thickets, but it had everything on my list. Chuy was looking for a house at the time but was not interested in the lot. Flora and I took out a loan and made the deal. A year later we had 1/2 acre cleared for a house and a road put in and after that, a well was drilled. I also had the big logs from trees that were cut down milled into lumber. All of those things were documented here: http://www.cardcity.com/nchome/index.htm.

In that same time-frame I had fallen in love with timberframed houses. I love the big beams and the large open spaces they create. We looked at a lot of them and went to some timberframe home shows and after comparing them with the conventionally-build homes we had seen, we decided that only a timberframe would do for us. The problem was that they were inordinately expensive, even if you keep down the number of luxury features. I decided that maybe a reclaimed frame (rather than I newly manufactured one) would be the way to go so I started looking around and ended up finding one on Ebay. I drove up to Pittsburgh to look at at it, liked it, bought it, and had it trucked down. We had an architect design us a house around it and prepared to build our dream house. I even submitted a plan and a copy of our blueprints to "This Old House" to see if they were interested in participating; they do one build up north each year and another in a more southerly (warmer) location. I never heard back from them.

South-facing view

2-car garage and walk-out multipurpose room

1st floor decks, great room, and  master BR suite

Unfortunately, my employer at the time (IBM) decided at about that same time that they could get a couple of Chinese writers to do the work I was doing and save some money in the transaction to I was laid off just before we broke ground. (Remember back when commies were bad, bad, bad, back before mega-corporations decided how to ship all of the jobs over to Communist China to save them money?) As we had driven around this country a decade earlier we had seen the closed factories and the ghost towns from coast to coast that had resulted from corporate outsourcing and now it was going to take away OUR dream (rather than the dreams of somebody else). With no income stream that was the end of the timberframe dream.

Last fall though, I did some figuring and decided that maybe we could find a house somewhere to buy. Now that prices had fallen a little made me think that the timing might be right. We found a realtor, defined the parameters of what we wanted, and started looking at used homes. Unfortunately, you don't get much these days for $250K, especially if you want it to include 2+ acres. We looked at used houses through much of the winter but in the end it became clear that the only way to get what we wanted was to build it ourselves. So with the help of an engineer who eventually used CAD to put my ideas on paper, we designed a house that had much of the look and feel of the timberframe house we had designed earlier, but using conventional framing methods. What we ended up with gave us a 3 BR/3 bath passive solar house with a walk-out basement, and a great room with 25 foot ceilings and my numbers show that we can build it for about $100K less than the timberframe. My plan was to keep the footprint fairly small, gain the basement space (fairly cheap space to build), make the house as energy efficient as possible, and save money by being my own general contractor.

Guest BR, office, and loft

Our building permit was issued on 04/05/2011 and our owner/builder experience has begun! I have gotten bids for several of the tasks and have met a lot of nice people. Stay tuned for chapter 1 - excavation.