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.

Clearing out and Firewood

Everything was blocked into 16-18" firewood blocks for later splitting.  The brush was all left behind to be burned.  The first thing I needed was a way to haul the wood out.  The plan was to stage it to my friend Brook's house where he had room to deal with it, and get it split.  I had the truck already, but to maximize hauling ability, I added some sides to it.

You could haul an awful lot of wood this way.  ...More than the truck was rated for, if you went too far.  Here is about 4100 lbs of oak ready for unloading at Brook's.  That was quite a heavy load.

After hauling for months and splitting it all up, we were into the next year.  This next pic is the entire oak firewood pile generated and split/stacked ready to sell.  17 face cords worth of 100% oak.

During the time I was hauling all of the wood out, I ran across a turkey nest in the weeds, while doing some brush cutting.  I left it alone and later on the eggs mostly hatched.

We had a number of very large brush piles that we needed to burn.  Most of these were the size of a school bus or bigger.  I'd guess we've burned 6 or 7 large piles to date.  Here is one of the early one in the early stages of going up.

Of course, the big question is how do you make such a large brush pile.  That first spring (2010) I realized I needed equipment to make this happen, so I ended up buying a used tractor.  That will be in the next post...

Building our new house - the beginning

I've been thinking about ways to update friends and family about our house build project.  I figured I would give a blog a try, as it seemed like it might be easier than building a web site for it (tried that previously - took a lot of time).  So here we go!

I'll start with the background as the initial work began in November 2009 when we started clearing trees.  I'll hit the highlights of the earlier work, and then as we get up to the present, it will be a lot more real-time as I can post pics as we go.  We recently broke ground (June 2013) so it is finally underway in earnest.

If you find these updates to be too much (I am assuming there is a way to update people that something new is posted), feel free to let me know and I can remove you from the list.  I don't want this to be annoying to anyone.


---------------------------

The start of clearing - Began over Thanksgiving 2009, and continued into Feb for the initial round of dropping and blocking up trees into firewood length blocks.  Here are shots from the first major day of work in Dec 2009.  Here is me with my new Stihl MS362 chainsaw.  I've gotten a ton of use out of that saw the past couple years.  (Poor cellphone photo...)

That is my friend Brook blocking up a tree and a shot of the mess we created in one day.

We completed dropping all the main clearing area and blocking it up that winter (expect when it was below 10 deg - too cold for me to work out in the woods!).  That wrapped up in late Feb 2010.  When spring came, the cleanup and hauling out began.  The intention was to sell this off for firewood as there was so much oak to get rid of, that there was not much else we could do with it.  I gave away a lot of the "lesser" fire wood (Basswood and poplar) as that isn't great to sell, but we sold almost all the oak, eventually.

The property is 10 ac, and was 100% wooded, so we had a lot of work to clear it out for a building site.  Here is a look at what the property looked like before we started, with the approximate area we cleared as the red blob and the driveway path.