Framing

At long last, framing has finally begun! It's interesting how this all seems to move in fits and starts; it seems like we go for weeks with very little progress, and then boom, we have a ground floor:

From Framing begins

And then, a couple weeks later, a second floor:

From Framing the main floor

The trenches behind the house have been backfilled, and the eco-block walls have been lowered and buried, which dramatically improves the rec room view:

From Backfilling

The dispersion trench, where all the drainage from the house gets dispersed back into the ground, has been completed as well:

From Framing continues

Of course, things aren't completely trouble-free. The big problem right now is electricity: the cost of bringing in underground power looks like it will be prohibitive, so we're going to need to have an electrical pole at the end of the driveway. That means that at least one of these maples is going to have to come down:

From Backfilling

We're hoping we can get away with just taking down the one overhanging the driveway, so we still have trees on either side; we really like how they frame the driveway and separate us a bit from the road.

Glitches notwithstanding, it's very exciting to finally see the house itself start to come together. There are a lot more pictures in the albums linked above- check them out!

Filling the foundation

We had a visit from the city's building inspector. We're told he thought that everything looked good, except he didn't think any of the dirt we'd dug out was usable as fill material- apparently the cit's had three garages washed out in the last year due to poor fill material underneath them, so they're cracking down on fill material. This means we needed to truck out that huge dirt pile and truck in a bunch of gravel and high-quality dry, compactable soil. Thus, more cost (trucking and dumping are not cheap) and more delay. The silver lining is that our house will be that much more secure with good quality fill underpinning it.

The other complication we're hitting is that we need to get an excavator behind the house to fill in the trenches between the house and the retaining walls, but with the clearing limits so close to the house and the steepness of the slopes, they're not sure they'll be able to fit it. Their options are basically to take the excavator along the rim of the slope by the garage:

From Filling the foundation

or up this slope here (without touching the plants):

From Filling the foundation

If they can't figure something out, those trenches may not be filled until next year, after the construction is completed. I'm not sure why they didn't think of this earlier.

One way or another, the foundation should be mostly done soon, and framing is still planned to start next week. Apparently we're going to start framing before the concrete floor is poured, which the foundation guy thinks is going to make things more complicated, but apparently they've got a framing crew basically sitting idle because of the delays we've been hitting, so they want to get moving.

The plans and the name

Two side notes: first, if you're interested in following along at home, here are the plans. They're not 100% up to date (in particular, they show a rockery on the South side that has been replaced with a concrete retaining wall), but they're pretty close.

Second, if you're curious about the blog name, the inspiration is from a speech by the King of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Listen, lad, I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all this was swamp. The King said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show him. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in these isles.

We felt this adequately summarized the experience of trying to get the house built, and was appropriate given the "wetland" (for which read "slightly damper patch of ground") that caused us so much trouble in the permitting phase. We had no idea how much more appropriate the name would become when we found out about the soil quality.

Drainage

I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, but... we've hit more delays due to the lousy soil. We've just had a day and night of torrential rain, and it turns out that the soil got even muddier than our geotech engineer expected, even given how lousy we already knew it was:

From Foundation drainage

Because of this, much of the pile of fill material we've accumulated is useless, and will have to be trucked out, so we're going to be delayed backfilling the foundation. We're also realizing we have a problem with the driveway:

From Foundation drainage

What you see here is the corner of the garage. The driveway comes in on the right, and the garage floor is at the level of about the top seam in the concrete (about six feet, for scale). The problem is that black fabric fence represents the limit of the area we're allowed to disturb, so to get the driveway at that level without putting any dirt outside the area of disturbance, we're going to have a very steep grade. We're not sure yet how we're going to do that; we may need another of those huge concrete block walls.

Mostly what's been happening this week is installing the foundation drainage. My dad in particular has been expressing concern about this, because foundation drainage is one of those things that's very difficult to fix later on. The drainage system we're putting in is fairly robust. The white pipes in the picture below are perforated sewer pipes, which drain water out of the foundation. The whole interior of the foundation is going to be covered in a foot of river rock gravel, burying those pipes, followed by a plastic moisture barrier and another layer of gravel. Probably the key element is those concrete block walls, which hold back moisture seeping downhill, and divert it around the house.

The good news is that this incredible rain is sort of a stress test for the drainage system, and it actually held up quite well:

From Foundation drainage

It's hard to capture in pictures, but the ground inside the foundation is quite solid and sturdy, even though the ground all around the house is treacherously muddy. We did get a puddle of water building up in one corner, and some erosion around the inside of one part of the foundation, but both of those areas are going to be filled in (see the album for pictures).

Despite these problems, our most recent visit did give us a couple reminders of why we chose this property in the first place:

From Foundation drainage

From Foundation drainage

It's going to take most of the week to backfill and finish the drainage system, but with luck we may be able to start framing before the end of the week!

Completed foundation

The foundation walls have all been poured now. I enjoy the clean, geometric look of the foundation footers:

From Completed foundation

Next up is installing the interior drainage and backfilling the soil we dug out to get to a load-bearing level, and then we start framing!

Foundation construction

The foundation is now under construction. The footer has been poured, and the foundation walls are starting to go up. It's exciting, because we can finally start to see the size and shape of the house itself:

From Framing the foundation

This picture and the next one are from when the footer was still being framed. Brie and Kael are standing in one of the kid's bedrooms. The open space on the left with the plywood stacked in the middle is the basement rec room, with the kitchen in about the same place one floor up. The garage is in the upper right.

It looks like the rec room view might not be as bad as I worried in the last post, but it's still not great. Here's Brie and Kael standing where the basement patio will be:

From Framing the foundation

The camera is inside the rec room, and the framing in front of them corresponds to the rec room wall, which will have the room's only window. The floor level will be a couple feet up, so that wall won't be quite as imposing. There will be a roof overhead, though (extending out to the framing behind them), so it's going to be a pretty enclosed, dark space. We'll probably grow some ivy or something to make the wall a little more attractive (masonry is also an option, but probably not worth the cost). The basement is mainly for the kids anyway, and hopefully they won't mind. The basement bedrooms both have windows on the downhill side (with no wall in the side), so they should be OK. The good news is we're saving quite a bit of money by not installing the rockeries that would have made this view more attractive: so much in fact that we're coming out about even, despite all the extra cost of dealing with the soil problems.

We considered not backfilling the space between the retaining wall and the uphill wall of the house, as seen here:

From Foundation wall framing

The unfilled space would have been behind the plywood framing, which marks the future foundation wall; the area in the foreground is the patio, which wouldn't have been filled in any event. We thought we could have saved money that way by not doing the backfilling, and building that back wall as an exterior wall rather than a foundation wall, but it turns out that would have required redoing the structural engineering, and it would have cost as much to truck out and dump the excess soil as it would cost to fill in that space, so we're sticking with the original plan.

Kael walks

In non-house-related news, Kael is walking:


His first birthday was last week. Here's him with his favorite present:


He's getting on toward being officially a toddler!

The new plan

We recently got a vivid demonstration of the unsoundness of the soil on our property:



The geotech engineer said we had to make a series of changes. Especially disappointing was the loss of a lovely maple that would have stood right next of the house. You can see the change in this side-by-side comparison (the maple is just to the left of the dirt pile:

From Foundation digging

From The Wall

The main changes. though, were that we had to put up a big concrete retaining wall on the uphill sides of the house, and we had to dig out the bad soil, which meant going well below the intended ground level for the house in some places:

From The Wall

This involved major changes to the ground plan for the South side of the house (the left of the above picture). We had been planning a set of rockeries to pull the ground away from the basement on that side, where there will be a door and a rec room window, but that's not going to be possible now. Instead, this may be the view out the rec room window:

From The Wall

ETA: Sorry for the broken links; they've now been fixed.

Underground surprises

We've hit our first real setback (since starting construction): the digging has uncovered a lot more clay in the soil than we expected.

From Foundation digging

It's pretty cool to look at, but from a more practical standpoint it's a problem, because clay expands when wet, and is much softer and less supportive than sand, which is what we thought we had. Compounding the problem, there's a lot of water seeping out of the walls of the dig.

From Foundation digging

Consequently, we couldn't start the foundation this week, and have had to put everything on hold while we try to get a geotechnical engineer out to see if we need to change our plans for the foundation. We have one scheduled to take a look on Monday, so we'll see what he says.

In other news, we've lost two more trees- the hemlock previously referenced, and a large alder. That should be the end of the tree-clearing, unless the maple at the garage corner winds up obstructing the driveway. We'd really like to keep that one, though. Alders are basically weeds, but maples are harder to replace, and this one adds a lot to the forested feel of the front part of the house.

Bug or Feature?

From House footprint

We discovered this at the land earlier this week. This used to be a dead tree trunk leaning against some nearby trees, but the top was chopped off during the clearing (just below the bottom of the frame of this picture), and now it's a perfect log bridge across a 15-foot-deep crevasse maybe 20 feet from the back door of the house. On the one hand, now we have a handy bridge to explore the rest of the property, but on the other hand, we'll have a little kid running loose on this land within a few years, and I can't help thinking of Bridge to Terabithia. We're talking about doing something like run a rope above the log as a handrail, but this could just make it that much more attractive.

In other news, the house footprint has been flagged, and digging has started on the foundation, but it looks like we're losing one more tree (a small Hemlock). There are more pictures at the link above.

First Day

We visited the site again yesterday, after the first day of construction. Already the site is transformed- the driveway has been cleared, and partially filled with rocks (and golf balls), and the footprint of the house has been cleared around the edges, though the trees in the middle aren't down yet. There's a huge pile of debris where our driveway apron will be.

First day

We're told the foundation should be dug out by the end of the week.

"Before" pictures

After a year and a half of planning, we're finally ready to start building the house. We break ground tomorrow, so we decided to get some last pictures of the site in its pre-construction state. We focused on the few trees that we're going to have to cut down.

Before the House