Foundation Part 3, Walls!
So, there are various types of forms for concrete, but we went with a type that you can rent easily and doesn't require any cutting of forms. They fit together relatively easily and can be done easily by 2 people. I rented mine from Astrof Form Rentals in Snohomish, WA. They are very helpful. I was working by myself, however, and still was able to do it, but the 1 1/8 thick panels weigh a bloody ton and particularly on the taller walls required a lot of muscling into place, a lot of cursing, heavily scratched up arms, and did I mention cursing? The most time consuming part was tying together the rebar web. Significant amounts of steel reinforce the concrete on my site now (several tons, all hand carried around and lifted into place and tied at every junction with metal wire.)
Oh yeah, the concrete. Since I'm new at this and worried about moisture, I decided to go with a product called Caltite. It's an industrial concrete water and vapor-proofing compound. Concrete normally acts like a sponge, drawing moisture in. I live in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle to be specific, and we have a little bit of moisture. Locals are referred to as Mossbacks, and this isn't considered an insult. You get the idea. So, I paid double to get this additive mixed in to the concrete, along with various admixtures that reduce the possibility of cracking. However, I'm now really darn sure that moisture won't get through the walls, even the partially below-level walls and affect any wood cabinetry that is installed on the inside of them. This is a nice piece of mind.
Foundation Part 2, Footings!
Footing
The foundation was one of the parts of the project that I had initially planned on contracting out entirely. Partially due to the architects' fees and partially because I'd done enough reading to feel comfortable with trying to do our foundation I ended up doing much of our concrete work. There are three main parts to our concrete foundations. The first is the footing, a 2-5 foot wide, 1 foot thick chunk of concrete that runs around the edge of the house, under all interior walls, and around the edge of the garage. On top of that are poured the walls. In the front of our house, acting to partially retain the hillside, is a 4-foot high wall. Our garage sits at alley level, about 10 feet below the ground floor level of our house. Since it's buried into the hillside it has a 9 foot back wall and 7 foot side walls made out of insanely reinforced concrete (#5 bars running both ways every 6".) After the walls are done comes the slabs for the floors. This last stage is the only one I contracted out because I wanted a pretty floor! We're leaving the concrete exposed in the house and the garage.
If you are doing your own concrete work, it can take quite a while if you have not done it before. It's worth hiring a day laborer or two. I ended up having to extend the rental time considerably, doubling the rental price. I think I might have broken even versus just buying 1 1/8 inch plywood. Their sheets have a plastic or resin coating on one side that allows the panels to release easily, but I imagine that just heavy-duty plywood coated with a lot of releasing agent (oil) would also work. Either way, for around $5-6K in rentals and rebar, and around $7200 in concrete I did a job that had been priced out close to $40K by several bids.
So, the first step are the footings, and are layed out pretty basically. I had a non-rectangular foundation, and so this took a bit longer. I also was working with my wife's uncle who is a former carpenter and a self-proclaimed NON-concrete guy. To make a long story short, I ended up wasting a hell of a lot of time discussing various potential ways to do the foundation instead of simply going with the concise easy ways I'd read about. The back and forth, wasted time, disagreements, errors, etc. at this stage made it pretty clear to me that I would be better off on my own. There was no point having both of us steadily get more and more pissed at eachother when we generally got along very well. The moral of the story is that it's probably not a good idea to work with family, but if you do make sure that one person is acknowledged as being in charge. Too many chefs in a kitchen ruins the soup. Or, there's lots of ways to get something done, but ultimately you just need to pick one and do it well.
After finishing the plumbing, I was able to go ahead and pour the footings. Because of our site, we had to use a telescoping boom pump truck to get the concrete into the forms. It's a pretty impressive piece of equipment, and watching someone carefully park the truck and unload the boom carefully under the power lines and up to the site was almost worth the price of having them come out. We got our concrete from Glacier NW and rented the pump truck from Brundage-Bone. I would highly recommend Brundage-Bone for pumping work. Highly professional, the driver actually helped us with the concrete work instead of just standing around and running the truck, and provided a lot of advice that I asked for and accepted willingly. I can't tell you how good it felt at the end of the day seeing the first stage of concrete finished! If you do this yourself, make sure that you have LOTS of help. I had 5 people and it was almost enough!
Foundation!
So, as it turns out, it's preferable to get the main sewer line installed BEFORE pouring a foundation. The timeline from the books I'd read had the groundwork plumbing done AFTER the foundation, but I realized that that would mean digging out under the footings at odd angles, and it would be far easier to just have the sewer line put in place before the pour. Unfortunately this all clicked together in my head AFTER the footing frames were almost done, the night before the pour. This was the first of many delays on the concrete pour date.
So, I decided to learn how to be a plumber. Specifically a sewer-line installer. I followed the recommended slope of 1/8 to 1/4 inch per foot and just worked my way back, digging the trench by hand. This was relatively more tedious because I often had to work around the forms, but it didn't take absurdly long. I think it was a full day of digging. I knew that I wanted cast iron pipe for the upstairs plumbing because it is essentially silent versus ABS or PVC which seems to amplify the sound of toilets flushing. For some reason, it made sense to me to continue the cast iron under the slab and out to where we met up with the clay sewer line that runs out the main in the street. The reasoning is that some of the line would run through the concrete and the cast iron would resist cracking if/when the foundation settled at all over time. This added greatly to the cost, since ABS is darn near free and cast iron is absurdly expensive. Oh well. I get the thing layed out and I'm pretty proud of it. The fittings are all rubber gasket fittings with two metals bands that have a worm-drive tightening mechanism. It went together quickly, even on the sections of pipe that I had to cut (rent a pipe-cutter!) and was essentially leak free. The inspector came out, and turned out to not be the regular inspector. He took one look at it, impressively holding water with a ten foot water column of pressure on it, and all he said was "that's nice, but it's no good." It turns out that the rubber fittings are only for outside use and what I needed are metal-armored fittings. So, I go back to the plumbing supply store and spend another couple of hundred dollars on heavy duty solid metal armored fittings. I slice my hand open several times, and there's something about that armoring layer that if the pipe isn't lined up perfectly it leaks like mad. Thinking that this can't be right, I called the inspection help line open between 7:30 and 8:30 am in the hope of getting an inspector. It turns out that there is an in-between fitting that has a crinkly thinner metal armoring that behaves a lot more like the ones that I installed in the first place. I put these on and was good to go. Until the next inspection.
The regular inspector came out and took one look and said "That's nice, but where's your backwater valve?" Now, I'm not a plumber and have never heard of a backwater valve. And after several weeks of plumbing (during which I'm not pouring concrete) I'm really ready to be done with this. So, it turns out that since I'm down the hill from the street, the manhole vents in the street lay above my ground level plumbing. In the event of a flood, sewer "water" would normally overflow at the manholes, or through any plumbing that's lower than it. Well, that would be my downstairs bathroom. And that would be downright foul and evil. So, while I was crushed, I did go out and try to find a supplier for a backwater valve. A backwater valve is basically a large check-valve that has a mechanical cover that can be opened and cleaned out. This clean-out is required by code and meant that somewhere along the sewer line I not only had to put this valve in, but have a mechanical box that would go through the slab and allow me to access it. The only possible place ended up being where the downstairs sink cabinet would be. Inside the cabinet would be the access. Oh well, it's not perfect, but finally the plumbing passed!
Now, on the the footing pour!
Architects
Oh yes, another aspect of building a custom home...
So, I'll be up-front. We had a $100,000 construction budget with plans to do most of the work ourself. We were looking at somewhere between a 2,000 and 3,000 square foot house. Any contractors reading this now are laughing their butts off! Typical rates for building an average home are $100-150 a square foot. We thought we could do it, with nice environmentally friendly materials for $33-50 per square foot. I'll explain later why I'm actually not insane. We're building a far nicer house than planned, bought more tools than planned, and are still coming in close to $70 per square foot including permits, architect fees and all materials, labor, etc. This does NOT include the land price. So it can be done.
Anyway, we'd written down all of the spaces that we wanted to include in our home, and where we'd like them. Architects refer to this as "programming." As in; "You have a lot more programming for upstairs rooms than downstairs rooms." So, we had read several books, many of which are listed below. We also bought books of house plans that you can order for reasonable prices ($500-$1000.) We didn't find any that we REALLY liked and when we tried to come up with a floor-plan we ended up with a huge box of a house that would have been comfortable but not particularly attractive. We also couldn't resolve a few details. It turned out that the neighbors down the hill were architects and the wife worked from home. We liked what they had done with their house and what they had done for other clients. We hired them to "fix" our plans and resolve our layout problems. Thus began a very expensive, but ultimately more than worth it, foray into modern design.
They came back with three basic sketches. One in which they resolved the problems in our plans (and did a very nice job of) and two more that took our programming and came up with other layouts. Their taste is much more modern. However, their layouts were far nicer, didn't end up being huge boxes and would be worth far more than what we were building. So, without getting too specific, we ended up spending WAY more money than we thought we would on an architect and the engineering work, but ended up with plans for a house that would be worth almost double what we had planned. It is easy to say now, but at the time it created a LOT of stress, and made us seriously question whether we'd be able to actually finish.
Temporary Power adventures
I nearly forgot about putting temporary power in! Another learning experience!
So, we needed power, and the city of Seattle is really particular about what sort of power pole they'd connect to. I figured it might be easier to buy a pre-made one from someone else who'd done this sort of work, but I didn't know enough about the requirements to be a good shopper. I ended up buying something that would not work for a decent amount of money and the only usable thing I got from it was the 20 foot long 4 x 6 post. I went down the Home Depot and bought the rest of the outdoor breaker/meter equipment and installed it. I included two sets of outlets on separate circuits in case we had large electrical demands. This turned out to be an excellent idea. Of course, I put outdoor, wet location boxes that can be used in the rain and that are protected by ground fault circuit interruptors (GFCI). Required by code, but even if not it is a really good idea. The last requirement for the pole is that it needed two 8 foot long ground rods driven into the ground that the grounding line from the box goes to. I'm not an electrician and always get the terminology mixed up between grounding line and grounded line. Regardless, that Wiring Simplified book mentioned earlier was useful and I installed everything correctly. The rods were insanely difficult. I could get them about 4-5 feet into the ground and then would hit really hard clay or some massive boulder. After about 20 trys I bought an 8 lb sledge hammer. I've decided that it is clay, because each slam would get the rod about 1/8". This was getting old. I went down to the local labor center and hired a guy to drive both poles in. It took him 4 hours of solid sledge hammering. He also helped clear some brush that was getting uppity around the site.
I had various suggestions for resolving this problem before I hired it out. Two 8' rods is actually more than most municipalities require for a house. Generally just one pole is sufficient. So, one suggestion was to cut the rods 5' long with a sharp end to make driving easier. This would be enough ground protection, particularly in moist Seattle. Another suggestion was to use a 3 foot drill bit (a flexible bit used to drill down into joint bays for electrical work) and filling it with water several times. I actually did this before I hired the guy. This is what allowed me to get the sledge hammer to push it in at all. I didn't want to go with the shorter ground rods except as a last resort. Fortunately it wasn't required. Looking back, this would have been a good time to buy and use a heavy-duty impact hammer (basically a medium sized jack-hammer.) I ended up renting and then buying a Hilti TE-76 that has a hammer-drill or impact hammer mode and they offer drivers for fitting over the end of ground rods to drive them in. I essentially would have just had to pull the trigger and let the tool do the work. Unfortunately I did not realize just how often I was going to rent that darn drill (at around $80 a pop) so it didn't even occur to me to buy one. They are around $1600 new, and rarely show up for sale locally. However, I ended up buying one near the end of all the concrete work off of eBay for around $800. It has worked great. If you need to do any concrete drilling and even think you might need it more than twice, go buy a used TE-76 (or a new one if you plan on doing this several times.) They drill through concrete like butter and have various attachments for breaking up heavy clay in the yard. I know that Bosch also makes some nice heavy-duty hammer-drills, but this was the one I had tried and liked. Hilti also makes smaller (more affordable) units, but once you have a large hole to drill through a concrete wall and it takes 2-hours to do you'll wish you'd bought the larger one. Also, get the ATC option on the drill. I forget what it stands for, but if the bit binds in the concrete, it disconnects the bit from the motor and keeps you from breaking a wrist or wrenching your back. Again, if you can't work on the project for a week or more, who care's that you "saved" $400!
Often, buying is less expensive than renting, and this is a theme that will pop up several more times!
Clean Slate
In these photos you can start seeing the evolution of the property. The house was down and we were seeing how we exactly the house would fit. We raked the site clean and marked out the edges. Everything that I had read about foundations was to add about 3 feet around the perimeter to allow room to work and to move things around. This early in the project I allowed myself to be influenced by everybody else who thought that 1 foot would be just fine. BIG MISTAKE!!!! If you have a gut feeling and info to back it up, particularly if it involves overkill you should really go with it. This happened with both the house and garage foundations and had to be resolved with laborious hand-digging and hiring someone to work a pick-axe for a day, and eventually just bringing the excavator back. All told not following my intuition cost $1000 by going with too small of pads.
Anyway, it was extremely cool to have the site being carved up and creating a nice flat work surface to start building. It seemed easier to create a large flat area and build the footings up rather than dig the footings in. I'm not sure how it would have worked the other way, but this seemed to work out fine.
One problem we ran into was the level of the sewer. As you can see in the photos, the site slopes down from the street. Oddly, the main sewer line is in the street UP the hill, buried about 12' deep. As our architect pointed out, in the 1920's when the sewer was installed, accuracy wasn't paramount. So, 12' could probably mean anything from 10' to 14'. Someone probably looked down in the hole and said it looked like 12'. Also, who knows what slope the thing was at? So, we had to dig. I pulled the sewer card (fortunately it was on-line at the city planning website) and made our best guess as to where we would hit it near the house. We had a shared line with the neighbors, and we wanted to hit the branch that drained our house only. We were lucky and found it, but it was 3 feet shallower than we expected. We factored in the necessary slope for the plumbing lines for the house (working backwards from the furthest plumbing fixture) and that meant the pad for our house would have to be higher than we thought. Originally the street side of the house was going to have a 4' concrete wall almost completely buried. Now, only the bottom foot would be. It changes the look of the house a bit, but I don't mind how it came out.
The garage is on the alley side and you can see one picture of the little Kubota excavator that the guy used. Amazingly this small tractor dug out our house pad, garage pad, and leveled it all to within 1" in a day and a half, including removing an existing rockery. If you end up doing stuff yourself it seems cheaper to hire out some parts of it. Obviously buying a tractor would be expensive ($12-20K) and unless you are an experienced driver it takes a LONG time to get it right. So, even renting a tractor at $200-350 a day ended up being a lot more expensive.
Tear it down!
So, my father-in-law had access to a mid-size Bobcat tractor with front forks. The thinking was that we'd remove the windows first to prevent broken glass from littering the site (VERY IMPORTANT STEP!) then "loosen up" the house structure by cutting through many of the top plates, connections between walls, and by removing some of the support posts underneath the house. the house was in such bad condition that this seemed like it would go very easily. Unfortunately, appearances were deceiving. We went through the walls with chainsaws, reciprocating saws, removed panelling, removed support posts, and we still couldn't knock the house down with the Bobcat. So, we kept removing panelling until we could knock things down. I hired a couple of high-school kids and my wife's uncle to help out. One of the kids was the perfect construction/deconstruction assistant. He was about 6' 2", weighed about 250 and was strong as can be. I'm 6'4" and 210 lbs, but this kid was a seriously strong guy. Anyway we found out that even cheap old wood panelling adds significan't shear strength and that a shaky house can still take quite a bit to take down. In the process we found a beehive inside one exterior wall (oddly enough they didn't appreciate having a chainsaw go through the hive...) We also found a few wasp nests including some that were apparently in the ground under the house. These lead to various work-breaks to avoid stings.
After the house was down, we had a dumpster dropped off to take away all of the junk. Getting the stuff into the dumpster was a chore. Even with the Bobcat, it was a pain in the neck. For later work we found a good excavator driver. It would have been the right choice to take the house down also. He worked for $500 a day and was incredibly efficient with his rig. So, next time... I'm getting quite the list of "next times..."!
Cool new tool
I know this is out of sequence, as the blog hasn't caught up to the real life project yet, but I just found a cool product which is great for framing. Two things commonly affect the straightness of lumber, even from a good lumber yard. Boards can be "crowned" which means that they curve consistenly along their length, or can be twisted. Crowning is relatively easy to deal with, as long as it isn't too bad. Simply make sure that all of the framing crowns in the same direction, leaving out any boards that crown excessively. Twisting is harder. Normal levers or prybars aren't designed to really grab on to the framing. For most of the project so far, I've secured one end of the board, and used clamps to pull as much of the twist out as possible. this works okay, as long as there is something convenient to clamp to. I just came across this "new to me" tool, a simple pry-bar with a clamp designed to grab 2" dimensional lumber (e.g. 2x4, 2x6, 2x8, etc.) In real time, I'm starting the roof framing now, and this tool will hopefully make a big difference!
What to do?
So, the house seemed to be in too bad of shape for my meager skills. I could remodel and make it look nice, but redoing a foundation on an existing structure was WAY out of my skillset. We called around for bids on putting a solid concrete skirt foundation underneath the existing structure as well as creating a footprint for an addition that would really take advantage of the view. This would run us about $25,000. Our wonderful real estate agent, Sharon Williams, hired an engineer to do an inspection. We had wood rot, powder-post beetles, a foundation (on a hillside, mind you) made up of those concrete blocks used to build decks. Some of the posts running up from these concrete blocks no longer were in contact with the house. The bathroom sink drain was not connected to the plumbing system and just ran out under the house. There were rats, the place smelled, and there was mildew growing on the walls. We decided that this wasn't a matter of remodeling. This was a tear-down.
It seemed like a good idea...
So, my wife and I are both massage therapists here in Seattle. She has an established practice and essentially works full-time. I've been at it for about 2 years now and essentially work 1 day a week. We've dreamed of building a custom home and have read many books such as "Building the Custom Home" by John Folds and Roy Hoops and "The Not So Big House" series by Susan Susanka.
We owned a small 750 square foot house at the time, but with the arrival of our wonderful daughter we quickly ran out of room. We thought about adding on to our house, or converting part of our garage into an office/guest apartment. After drawing up plans for that (which took forever as I had NO idea what I was doing) I had been forced to read exciting books like "The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing" put out by Black and Decker, "Framing Floors, Walls, Ceilings" in the "Best of Fine Homebuilding" series, and "Wiring Simplified" by Richter/Schwan/Hartwell.
I had a college degree (genetics from UC Davis) and had been inspired by a brief job at Bayer Pharmaceuticals working with engineers to believe that people can actually build things and make them work. I tested the waters by running an electrical panel to our garage, installing a gas furnace (including a new gas line and ducting) and some other light carpentry. It all came out okay (in other words the house neither blew up nor burnt down) and I was feeling fairly confident in tackling the garage remodel. Then, a small house around the corner from us went up for sale at a really low price and we thought we could remodel it and move in. It had a larger lot and a great view... and no foundation.
Welcome to Virgin Builder!
It's January here in Seattle and as such it is raining. We're not cursed with the tempestuous downpours of other regions, but we end up with a thick grey drizzle that seems almost constant. Natives are appropriately referred to as "Mossbacks" and thus winter is NOT a good time to be building. So, how did this happen? Why would someone with no construction experience dive into a project like this, especially with a two year old daughter and almost no time to do it? Well, that and more is what this blog is about. I actually started building 7 months ago and purchased the property just over a year ago. I plan to catalog what happened along the way and within a short time have the events on the blog be caught up with what is actually happening on the project. I also want to to catalog the books, materials, and suppliers that have been helpful along the way (as well as ones that weren't.) For the books and relevant tools, I'll post them as link buttons to Amazon.com, both to make them easy to find as well as producing some small revenue stream. I mean, really small. How many people are likely to read this thing anyway?! =) Materials and suppliers will be simply mentions, because I'm not creative enough to find links to pictures for every thing I use. I will try to be specific so that people can find similar materials if they should so choose. And please, e-mail me! I'm always open to questions, comments, and anything besides outright flames. I mean, feel free to write "What the hell were you thinking doing 'X', 'Y', or 'Z'", but please keep the "You're a F'ing retard" comments to a slow dribble please. I mean, I've got a two year-old, a new massage practice, and I'm building a home. I obviously don't need MORE pointless stress.
