The Z-axis

We've finally begun to move out of two-dimensions!

The garage from the driveway

Standing in the house, looking past the entry, at the garage wall

Standing at the front door, looking at the garage wall

More garage...

Inside the garage

And about a week later, there is house! Eastern side, from the driveway

Viewing the eastern and northern wall while standing at the southeast corner of the house. The south wall of windows will be framed later.

Closer to the northern wall

Back (western end) of the garage, and the northern wall of the house in the foreground

Looking through the coat closet into the garage

Keeping the concrete industry in business

Once we had the slab of the house poured, we had to repeat the process for the garage and wood shop.

First a layer of compacted sand surrounded by concrete footers

Then a layer of 3/4" stone

Then the concrete was poured.

Garage + house = lots of impervious surfaces

Standing in the garage

Before we even poured the slab for the house, we found out that we needed a retaining wall to make sure the house stays on the hill.  Even more concrete.

It's not a particularly beautiful retaining wall, but most of it will be under the porch. We hope that the visible part can be made into a bench or a step eventually.  That should be it for concrete.  Next up...walls!  (literally)

The Monolithic Slab

When most people build slab on grade, they put some sort of flooring over it. We decided instead to polish the slab and have it serve double duty as our floor.  This is not only a cost saving measure, but will also allow the slab to be a better thermal mass for the passive solar heat.  So, we went in search of someone who specializes in concrete work, and found Michael at Melange Studio.  Michael does all sorts of things with concrete you'd never thought possible, and he does it really well.

The scoring lines are not just for aesthetics.  They also serve as control joints, to help minimize cracking.  Eventually, the slab will be polished, and will look like large tile.  We anticipate the radiant floor heat will make it lovely to walk on.  We do plan to use area rugs in key places to minimize the hardness.

Around this same time, they were drilling the well.  Our neighbor's well is only about 125 ft. But, as Fred told us with a completely straight face, they had their well "witched" by his mother, who apparently had a knack for finding water 125 feet below ground.  The fact that Fred had water was encouraging, but didn't necessarily mean that we'd find water as easily.  In fact, Dan's comment to us was "well, there is not trememdously good news about the well."  They drilled 300 feet and no water (yes, the deeper the well, the more expensive.)

The well driller

If they got to 500 feet with no water, they'd have to bring in the expensive granite cracking machine.  450...475...480...485...490 and kaboom.  Water thirty feet in the air.  Enough for a small subdivision.  Unfortunately, we weren't there to see it.  Here's our fancy well:

Impressive, no?

A good foundation

This post is dedicated to our brother-in-law, Mat, who is an engineer, and is addicted to this blog.

One of the most important features of our house is that it's designed to take advantage of the glazing on the south side for passive solar heat.  The idea behind passive solar is that heat is absorbed during the day, ideally into some sort of thermal mass, and then is released slowly, even after the sun goes down.  In our case, we planned to build "slab on grade" meaning that there is no basement.  Instead, the house is built on footings surrounding a concrete slab, which actually floats on several layers of fill.  By simply polishing the concrete, we will have a nice floor for the first floor, which will also act as the thermal mass.  One other important aspect of passive solar is the orientation of the house. The winter sun is lower in the sky than it is in the summer. In other words, in the northern hemisphere, the winter sun is closer to the southern horizon at noon than is the summer sun.  This has a few important implications.  First, ideally, the long axis of the house faces south, to take advantage of the low winter sun.  Second, the high summer sun can be blocked by using a 2-3' overhang over the windows.  The ideal orientation and amount of overhang can be calculated based on latitude (in fact, in the southern U.S., people try to avoid southern exposure, to limit heating.)  Unfortunately for us, by orienting the short axis of the house due south, we would be looking a bit too directly at our neighbor's house.  If you own 10 acres of land, you don't really want to be staring at the neighbors.  So, Matt used a combination of SketchUp and an on-line calculator to determine that we could be as far as 13° west of true south and still make effective use of passive solar heat.  This allowed us to set the north/south axis of the house.  The point where the ledge started to fall off dictated the western and northern edges.  So, we had our footprint.  They worked on the slab for the house first, and then started on the garage.

First the site was cleared:

Then a layer of sand was put down and compacted.  Gravel for the footers was also added.  And we got a porta potty (appropriately located on the septic field.)

The concrete footers were poured, and 3/4" gravel was added to the main floor.  Everything that goes under the floor has to be added now. The white pipes in this photo are for radon remediation.  The black pipes are our water drains, and the gray tubing is for electrical and A/V.

Passive solar heating is not nearly enough to keep us warm during the long Maine winters, so insulation and tubing for radiant floor heat were installed.

with extra tubing along the south side, where the windows come to floor:

And the control center for the radiant floor heat:

Everything is now ready to pour the slab!

Partay!

Since we were building on a big ol' piece of rock, the first order of business was to scrape the topsoil back to find out where the ledge was (by the way, I forgot to mention in the last post, that the excavator came back in the spring, finished the driveway, and put in the septic field.)  Dan had dug a few test holes, so we had a pretty good idea where the ledge was, but wouldn't know for sure until it was all cleared out. The highest point of ledge would dictate the lowest point of the floor.  So, we all met at the site to look at ledge.  It turned out that my Uncle Bob was visiting, and our friends Cheryl and Jean were in town, staying with our friends, Pam and Dave.  Since we were all going out for dinner that night, everyone came along to see the site.  Matt and I had kinda hoped we could smash a bottle of champagne on the side of the excavator or something before digging started, but it just didn't work out.  So, we brought a few bottles of champagne to celebrate.  Credit to Pam for taking pictures:

Jen, Cheryl, and Jean

Jen, Cheryl, Jean, Dave, and (Uncle) Bob  (check out my polka dot boots!)

Dan, Carol, and Matt

As it turned out, the ledge was exactly where we expected it, so no dynamite was necessary.  The highest point was in the garage.  To keep the more dense fumes from entering the house from the garage, most insurance companies like the garage to be lower than the house.  This meant the slab for the house would be elevated a bit.  This was the last time we saw the site without a foundation on it.  Within a few days, the beginning of a slab foundation was already in place.

Dan Dan

Interesting stuff is actually beginning to happen in real time, so I have a lot of ground to cover quickly.  We left off in November 2008, with half a driveway and a foot of snow.  Throughout that winter, Carol continued to fine tune the design, and around February, we started interviewing builders.  It's probably clear from the pictures in the last post that our house is not a typical New England cape or colonial.  It was really important that the builder have a good sense of the project and be someone we could trust and work well with.  One guy started talking before we got out of the car, and didn't come up for breath for about two hours.  At one point, my cold took over, and sent me into a coughing fit.  It wasn't until I was gasping for air that he offered me a glass of water, which I took outside.  Later, Matt jokingly accused me of faking it just to get away from the guy for a few minutes.  After interviewing a handful of contractors without much luck, Carol asked her old structural engineer, who happens to be the code enforcement officer for Hebron for suggestions.  His first thought was Dan Daniels.  Immediately on meeting Dan, we knew could do a great job and we would work well together.  In addition to owning a construction business, Dan also teaches construction at the local technical school.  We've all been amazed that we could find so much teaching experience in common, even though we teach very different types of students at very different types of schools.

Anyway, the first order of business was to get an estimate from Dan. I think I did a pretty good job remaining calm when we saw the bottom line, but Matt's face was pretty clear, and Dan still teases him about it.  The original estimate was 50% higher than our budget.  Whoops!  So, we moved the cantilevered living room back on to solid ground and removed some of the acres of blue stoned landscaping Carol had called for.  That helped but not nearly enough.

This began the most frustrating and painful part of the process.  It took six months to get the cost to a place where we could even see our original budget.  There were a lot of growing pains as Carol and Dan learned to work together.  And then there was the financing.  The first bank told us that they would lend us as much money as we wanted, but  not for this house (there was no way to appraise it according to their standards, because there are no comparable houses nearby.)  The banker we worked with at least e-mailed a bunch of her colleagues at other banks asking if they could help.  One took the bait, and worked with us to set up a very reasonable construction loan.  The only consolation for the delays was that it rained for all of June and July.  Finally, we had a design, a budget we could work with, and financing, and...it was November.  It was the beginning of what turned out to be a very mild winter, but we didn't know that and this is Maine, so we put off construction until the spring. 

We had made a lot of small changes along the way, so Carol spent this past winter updating and cleaning up the drawings.  Dan got the new drawings at the end of March, and had to get all new quotes, which took until mid-May.  And, wouldn't you know it?  While interest rates were going down over the winter, construction costs went up.  We got that worked out by the end of May, and then the bank decided they needed to update the appraisal.  It was a beautiful spring, perfect for building, and we were waiting on the bank.  It took a month to update the appraisal, and as we all know, the housing market has been pretty horrible recently.  So, the appraisal was about $65,000 lower than last fall.  Huh? Since the bank will only lend a percentage of the appraisal, and the building costs are higher than the appraisal we have to foot the bill for the remainder.  Luckily, the appraisal was the very lowest we needed it to be. 

So, at the beginning of July, Dan started digging, and we closed on the loan.  In that order.

Whew.  That was a lot of text, but at least I didn't go off on a rant about how the banks have now swung all the way to being too cautious, and the appraisers are afraid of their own shadows, and...oh, right.  I wasn't going to do that.  I promise never to write so much again. Why can't I write that much that fast when I'm writing grant proposals? If you've made it this far, you deserve some pretty pictures.  Here are a few I've found while putting together the blog (click for bigger.)

Mt. Washington in the fall from Greenwood Mtn.

Mt. Washington in spring with the Hebron Academy bell tower in the foreground

Peaking through the trees at the northern view.

Interesting ice pattern near the driveway.

Design (rinse and repeat)

Even before we had the deed to our property, Carol started designing.  We recently joked that the final house design is version 12.8.65.  We knew we wanted at least three bedrooms, a big kitchen and pantry, a living room with lots of sunlight, a screen porch, a two car garage, and a large wood shop (although it turns out the definition of "large" is dependent on whether it's Matt or me who is speaking.)  Matt wasn't too keen on a basement, and since we were building on ledge, it probably wasn't feasible without a lot of dynamite anyway.

During the design progress, courtyards and second wings came and went.  A tower grew, shrank to a bay window, and was ultimately reduced to a window. There was a long, extended mudroom, then there wasn't.  The outdoor grill was never in the right place until it was, then we couldn't understand why we never thought of that before.  We spent a lot of time in Carol's studio, drawing and erasing.  There was a lot of "no that won't work...how about...not quite...what if...that's it!"  It was exciting to think about the possibilities, but at the same time, very stressful (academics might see the parallels in research.)  At the same time, we were going through some other personal issues, including two surgeries, and no doubt that didn't help.  Often after our meetings with Carol, Matt would be pumped up, and I would be stressed about how to pay for it.  I've been assured by a psychologist friend that this falls right along the gender lines.

The design we finally settled on is a version of the one shown in the model at the top of page.  Essentially, a box on a box.  From left to right on the first floor: screen porch, living room, wood stove divider, dining room, kitchen, pantry, entry/stairs, bathroom, bedroom.  The second floor covers all but the living room of the first floor, and has a master bedroom/ dressing area, master bath, stairs/study, bathroom, and bedroom.  There is also about 300 sq. ft of storage in the second floor, to make up for the lack of basement.  The second floor overhangs the south side of the first floor, to prevent the high summer sun from baking the first floor.  Originally, both the living room and the screen porch would be cantilevered over the side of the hill, though the living room was later moved back onto land.  The garage is on the north side of the house, with the woodshop in the back of the garage.

Matt used the program SketchUp to model the interior:

Second floor. Disregard the weird periscope looking thing.

First floor.

And Carol's office made a model of the exterior:

The Road to Nowhere

Now that we owned 10 acres, we needed a way to get to it.  The best route was almost 1000 ft, from a small, dirt road:

The driveway would first need to go through some trees, then along a field, re-enter a wooded area, curve around and go up a hill.  From the road to the edge of the field, the driveway follows an old rock wall, currently only visible for about a month in the spring and a month in fall (in between snow and summer overgrowth.)

Between a quite stormy summer and several other jobs, the excavator didn't get to work on it until October.  He took off for a week at the beginning of November to finish another job, and then had some equipment fail.  In the meantime, it got cold and the ground froze.  So, we had half a driveway for the first winter.

From the road through the trees

Along the edge of the field

Back into the woods, where it drops off.

 The end of the road.  It's hard to tell, but the dropoff is about six feet.