Shop build - prep and slab

The shop building is separate and a pretty simple structure - just a basic rectangle 32'x80' divided into 2 sections 30' & 50' long.  The front section is shorter and is garage space for working on cars and the tractor.  The rear section is the wood shop.  The plan is to build this first so I have a place to store stuff and work on things for the house.  There were a lot of delays starting including permits and getting the materials in place.  Weather in May and June was also horrible and caused a lot of delays.  We are using Structural Insulated Panels or SIPs for all the walls and they require more engineering up front than regular framed walls, but then go up really fast. 

The excavator did the main roughing out of the pad and then I did the final grading with the tractor.  The foundation is a floating slab, but built with insulation to protect it from frost heaves.  This type of foundation is called a "Frost protected shallow foundation" and there are design specs available for various climate regions.  So here are the pics of the slab prep and build...

Pad with the center trench for a footing for the dividing wall and ready to start setting foam (starting around June 18 2013)

The rear half foam completed by me and my daughter in a couple hours:

Front half completed next.  Weights are to keep it from blowing away

After completing the perimeter foam, we added wire mesh reinforcement and then laid out radiant tubing for in-floor heat:

Here the forms are set for the slab pour

And these next photos are of the pour - 75 yds of concrete and a pumper truck to place it:

Here they are power troweling the pad.  This thing looks like a hoot to drive!

 Finished slab.  It was a hot day and there is a lot of concrete and insulation, so the heat generated was contained so it cured pretty fast.

Next up, the shop build...

Working ahead - making kitchen cabinets

I get a lot of strange looks when I tell people I have already made the cabinets for the kitchen of the house that does not yet exist.  Questions are usually about how you can do that ahead of time without having the final space to measure.  Well, Knowing I would not have enough time to make cabinets after the house was built, I did a few things in the house design to help allow me to build ahead.  The biggest items were limiting fixed reference points and building in adjustability.  For example, the main wall cabinet run has only one fixed wall at one end that it butts against, so the other end was left free floating so it does not matter if things are off 1/4" or even 6" for that matter.  The 45 deg sink cabinet is shorter than the 45 deg wall and will use fill plates to make up the space with the cabinets next to it to allow adjustabiliy.  And the island is free floating, of course, so it has room to adjust as needed.

One thing to keep in mind as you look at these photos, is that these are only the "guts" of the cabinets.  I only made the structural boxes and drawer cases ahead of time.  This will all get covered with a continuous finished front after installation.  That part will be made to fit at that time.  SO... if you think these do not look all that great, the fact is they don't, and they shouldn't. This is all the hidden stuff, but it saved a ton of time to do it ahead of time.  Time I will not have when the rest of the house needs to be worked on.

I made these in batches that I could fit in my shop and finish all at once.  Here is one batch in finishing:

 I also made a large pull out drawer for the island that has a 4-bin recycling center.  Here is the drawer unit with bins. It goes into that large case that is 2nd from the right in the above photo.  It required some massive heavy drawer slides.

The island will have cabinets on the inside that are curved fronts. Most of the times I see curves done by just placing a few straight lines along a curve to approximate a curve.  The reason that is done is that curves are very time consuming to make.  Here are a few shots of the 2 cured front cabinets I made for the island

This is the glue-up form for the drawer front

Starting to clamp down the laminates I used.  These are glued up from several thin layers of resawn ash  to allow them to bend and conform.  Epoxy glue holds the layers together after curing.

Now you see what all the holes are for...

Finished product.  2 assymentric curved front cabinets that are symmetric when put together.  This took several weeks to make the parts, dovetail the drawers (very complicated on a curve) and glue-up.  Remember to click on these to get larger images to see details

In then end I completed probably 80% of the case work for the kitchen ahead of time.  There is more to do, including the finished fronts, of course, but this will save a lot of time during the house build.

That's about it for all of the prep work and background.  We've been working on this and planning for a number of years.  For example the cabinets were built over the space of 1.5-2 yrs, the land clearing took 2.5 yrs, and the prep work for building the large retaining wall was much of a summer and fall.

From here forward I will get into the actual house build that started in June 2013.  I am hoping to catch up on these posts so I can post brief updates with a couple pictures more frequently that don't take so much time to pull together.

Next post will be the start of the shop build!

House plans

Here is a look at the house plans, in an overall, general set of views.  I didn't put dimensions on this as it tends to make the plans too hard to look at.  Rough square footage is about 3500 sf for the finished area of the house.  The Shop building is 32'x80'. 

One thing I will caution you on looking at these is that colors and finishes are nothing final.  I did not do much of anything with those design elements in the CAD model, other than getting shapes, forms and window sizes and placement correct.  So whether or not you like the colors you see, they will not be the same in the end.

Overall view of the lot and buildings.  It is steep uphill to the South (down)

Main living level

Lower Level - direct drive in garage (tuck under)

Small Upper level for views into the forest

Some 3D views and elevations.  The gray parts of the elevations are foundation and are largely underground (hidden).  Again, ignore colors at this point.

Retaining wall build

The retaining wall was another thing I wanted to do ahead of time, both to spread out expenses, and because I knew it would be a ton of work.

The retaining wall is pretty large, so we used large natural limestone blocks from a local quarry.  The same guy that did the excavation work has a quarry for gravel and blocks like this, so he was the source.  He delivered blocks and large 2"+ gravel for backfill, and I built almost all of the wall myself.  The blocks range anywhere from a few hundred pounds for the small ones to a few thousand for the big stuff.  There was even one that I could not lift with the equipment I had, so it got somewhat dragged into place on the bottom row.  I suspect that one was over 5000-6000 lbs.

Initially I thought an excavator with a thumb on the bucket would be the way to go, but the one I rented was too small to do the job, and it turns out to be very hard to find a larger one with a thumb, especially if you need it NOW.  Once I tried the mini-ex, I found it lacking and knew I needed something else.  The rock guy said a skid steer would do the job well.  The tractor was able to do some limited rock moving, but it was way over it's capacity here.  The skid steer turned out the be the right tool for the job as it had massive lift capacity and was very maneuverable.  It was also easy to get stuck in the sand as I got a wheeled version (probably should have got a tracked one).  I mostly used the pallet forks on the skid steer to lift and position blocks.

Here's the 3 tools at the start, before I sent the mini-ex back. (Remember you can click on the pics for larger ones)

To start, we spent a day laying out and sorting the blocks that were delivered by size, to help things go together better.  This is taken from above the wall location (on the left) and shows the whole clearing.

With the skid steer, I was able to start building the wall.  Here is the end of Day 1

After Day 3, I had 2 full layers done.  The order of work is to lay one layer, then back fill with stone (for drainage), and you need to do this one layer at a time or it becomes very difficult to place the next layer of rock.  It is too easy to have it slip behind the wall, and then you are in a world of hurt to get that rock back out:

Day 4 progress

After 5 days, it was starting to get up there a bit

And after Day 6, I had done about all I could do with the skid steer.  The upper deck was set too far back to reach with the skid steer, so I had to get the stone guy to come help out with his excavator for that.  Here is Day 6

Here is Chris (the rock guy) using his excavator on the upper deck, getting started.

After Day 2 of this, we were almost done:

A little more final cleanup on the 3rd day, and here are some views of the completed wall

Here's the final stats on the wall:

Blocks: 200 tons
Backfill crushed rock: 180 tons
Length: 170'
Max height : ~10'

That's a lotta rocks!  I was pretty wiped out by the end of that, and very glad I did not wait until we started building the house to do it.

That's it for the catch-up part of this story.  The wall was completed in Nov 2012.  Now we are up to this year and beginning the actual house build.  I will put a few views of the plans in the next post to show what it will look like.

Site prep work

With the driveway completed to the top of the hill in the fall of 2011, 2012 was spent clearing out more of the firewood that was left, and doing some final tree cutting for things like the septic area.  By fall  2012, that was all done and I wanted to move ahead with getting the site rough graded, and the rest of the stumps dug out.  I also wanted to get the large retaining wall in place ahead of time.  Because the lot is rather steeply sloped, we needed to cut into the hill a decent amount to make a flat spot.  That was going to require a massive retaining wall, and we wanted to use natural stone given how prominent it would be.

Here you can see the cut into the hill.  We broke up the wall into a 2-tiered terraced setup to keep it from looking too massive.   You can see the cut into the hill if you look closely down the line a bit (look for the orange flags).

And an overall look at the site with the hill cut on the right and the pad generally flattened out.  He stripped off the topsoil and piled it in 2 large piles - at the left, and way in the back.  Those will get spread back around for topsoil later.

Driveway build

We had done most of the clearing and hauling by just driving through the ditch for the first couple years.  I wanted to start getting a driveway going to make access easier, spread some of the costs out, and give it more time to settle and compact, so in the fall of 2011, we had an excavator put in the driveway from the road to the top of the hill.  This required digging up a bunch of large stumps and pushing around a lot of dirt and fill, which is way more than the tractor was capable of doing (especially in any reasonable time).

So here was the early drive through the ditch path, with the actual driveway path staked out.

Th equipment the excavator brought to do the driveway

And the results after a couple days of work

We planted some grass and covered it with hay to help erosion issues.

Here you can see a view from Google maps satellite view of the driveway the next spring (2012).  The path going straight down from the cul-de-sac is our driveway.  You can see the clearing a bit too.

Tractor - More Power!!

I realized I needed some equipment to move all this wood, so a tractor seemed like the obvious solution.  After looking into it a bit, I settled on a used Kubota L3130 with a front end loader and about 950 hours on the clock that i got from a local seller in March/April 2010.  Here it is when I got it (along with the used trailer I got at the same time)

It had the quick-attach feature on the loader, so you can use any normal skid steer/bo9bcat equipment there, so I picked up a set of quick-attach pallet forks to help load brush and haul logs.  You can see it peeking out from behind the tractor.  The guy I bought it from knew the local Kubota dealer real well, as it turned out he worked for Kubota as the regional rep.  They both said the forks would work great for what I needed so I gave it a try.  It did work but I would not call it great.  The following year (2011) I got what I should have got at the start - a quick-attach grapple for the loader.  Here's what that looks like.  Now THIS is the right tool for moving brush, logs and general land clearing work!

I had the tractor for about 3 years, and it worked quite well overall, but I was finding that I was power limited as it was the smallest motor in the series.  With that, starting construction this year, and a couple other factors, I decided to upgrade to one in the same series but with a much more power (52 vs 32 hp) and higher lift capacity, plus a cab.  This one is brand new and is another Kubota L5240.  I got the cab because: (1.) I'm not getting any younger, and (2.) snow clearing will be a major use over the long haul and (3.) I will keep it for a lifetime.  Here is the new one that arrived around Memorial Day this year (2013).

I immediately added hydraulics for the grapple

And then welded-on lifting hooks and a trailer receiver to the bucket.

And of course a radio...

This tractor has been a big help already, and the extra power and the cab (with A/C) have been great in the summer heat already.