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..."!
