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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 7/2/2010
What an awesomely good feeling to
finally be done with the first-floor radiant heat! As of sundown all
of the tubing is in, all of the manifolds are mounted, and the only
thing left to do now is seal and pressure-test the whole shebang.
There are six zones in total on this final manifold, four in the garages proper, and two slated to eventually be embedded in the outside concrete apron fronting the garage entrances. The most difficult loop to run was the far one to the apartment garage, since it has since very long Send and Return lines (running the length of the main garage), and we ended up using my earlier technique of laying out each run first before tying down the various loops, so that it was very apparent where we had good spacing and where we had to lay in the other zones. The stubs for the exterior loops (an ice-melt system for the apron) were a bit problematic. There was no point in installing the tubing yet, since they would just be big bundles of PVC that would be in the way for weeks to come, but we knew that we had to be able to allow for the loops in the future or the upcoming concrete pour will fill the PVC sleeves. We eventually put together four lengths of pipe (two Send and two Returns) that extend from the manifold and then take a 90-degree turn to extend outside the front of the first garage opening. Everything was then sealed with several layers of duct tape to prevent concrete from sloshing into the tubes, and we zip-tied the whole bundle together to keep it relatively stable. When we're ready to put in the external loops, we'll fish the tubing through each loop as needed; LoopCAD says that two 300' loops will work perfectly, and it's always a tad pessimistic. Once the concrete is poured, the sleeves won't be in any danger of moving at all, and when we eventually pour the exterior slab, they'll be buried safe and sound under the concrete.
All of this tubing work ended up taking us a bit longer than the second
floor did when we tackled that back in January, but there were more loops (17 in all) and manifolds (4) than the
task we had faced before (cold weather combined with newbie level of
knowledge). Colleen also took off on her trip to see her family
which definitely put a crimp in the progress, since it was all on
my shoulders for much of the period that she was gone, but by the same token (let's be fair) this also
simplified things somewhat—the main house was far and away the more
“contentious” portion of the layout and not having to argue about
it had its advantages...
On the other hand, our level of
knowledge is FAR greater than it was when we started and that showed.
Back in January we were lucky to get a single loop done in a day;
today we knocked out all four loops in the garage AND stubbed
out two others for the exterior apron (to be poured later) in half a
day—and frankly we did a better job than we did upstairs, too. We know how the tubing is
going to try to bend, and where it needs zip ties vs. those nifty
little plastic clips, and we know how important it is to get the
underlying wire mesh laid out correctly to simply the job. We know
when to double-check the nifty LoopCAD estimate against the reality
of how much tubing is left in a circuit, and we know how to label
everything quickly and efficiently so we don't confuse ourselves
when we're hooking up the manifolds. Our penetrations are
much cleaner this time around than they were last
time, and we were able to mount the manifolds directly onto
the ICF rather than have them free-standing in what will (eventually)
be walls.
We just did it so much better this time
around. I'm very proud of our work.
Colleen deserves most of the credit for today's success, of
course. She knocked out most of three loops all by herself while I
alternated between wrestling with the interior loop (lots of
curves—didn't want to do that to her) and tying down ill-behaved
wire mesh (it really wanted to snap up this time around, undoubtedly because we used more of the mesh from the more tightly-wound
interior of the coils). I'd help her get a loop started, since that
required a lot of pulling under the wall from the manifold location (under the stairs) into the garage, and later when she was making
the home run back to the manifold, I'd help straighten out the tighter
coils and push them back through the protective PVC sleeves to the
return manifold outlets. It was a good system and we worked together
well.
The hook-up of the loops and the
pressure test will happen sometime next week, probably Wednesday or
Thursday once the folks over at ABC Plumbing have soldered up some
air-fill nozzles and pressure gauges for me. Not sure when the
inspection is scheduled at this point. And of course, we're not quite done with the radiant just yet--down the road (sometime
before drywall) I'll need to install the final interior radiant loop
on the third-floor tower (this will use a staple-up approach, since
that's all on conventional trusses rather then embedded in concrete)
and at some point just before we have our final concrete pour for the
exterior driveway apron, we'll install another pair of loops for the
snowmelt system.
Next up on our list of Things To Do
(funny thing, it seems to get longer rather than shorter
as each days' work ends... that's just weird, isn't it?) is
the installation of the fabled well packer. With that installed and
the new pitless adapter drilled, we can finally get that gaping
trench between the well and the house filled back in and remove one
more temptation of the weather gods (no rain no rain no rain no
rain!). Enjoy the pics. For reasons that utterly escape me, we forgot to take a snapshot of the garage manifold; I'll add that when I can remember to take a shot.
We're both exhausted, but this sure is
fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The pantry window has become my temporary "tool stash" area. |
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| The apartment garage! That bundle of tubing leaning against the wall is going into the next area over. |
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| Looking down the length of the main garage. Note the long feed lines towards the front. |
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| Another shot looking into the garage from the kitchen. |
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| Exterior shot of the apartment garage. That big hole in the front is where the garage drains come together; they haven't been joined up and properly buried yet (that's soon). |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/30/2010
Well now, with July upon us and the
summer half over, we now have an end date in sight—October 27th.
That's when the construction-loan term
is done, and so that's when we've got to have our Certificate of
Occupancy (CO).
After the big burst of activity in the
mid-spring period, we slowed down a bit, with the need to redesign the
septic system and the pretty-much-took-over-everything plumbing work,
followed by our radiant-heat installation. Those last two in
particular took a lot of time and pretty much took over everything,
since you can't have folks stomping around on the tubing and it's
hard to do any work inside when the ground is all dug up.
But now we're just about past that, and it's time
to kick it up a notch. We've got one more section to flesh out for radiant heat and then that part of the job will be done. The solar installer has been selected and
I've got trees to clear, and we've got to get the window wells
reinforced before the pour (not scheduled yet, but soon). The new
septic redesign means they can get started installing and digging and
whatnot with regards to that, and we've got to install the new well
packer, so we can connect up the water lines and get that trench all
filled in again.
Oh yeah... and then there's that
fireplace to build and electrical to install and a half-dozen windows
yet to go into the tower...
Definitely kicking it up a notch! I
think we're gonna be tired come October... :)
But dang, this is fun!!!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/30/2010
I made some excellent progress once I got the rather complicated main-house loops done a few days ago.
In large part this was because this "wing" of the house is much simpler than many other areas have been. There are only three zones in this area (the smallest of all the manifolds in Tanglewood), and by happy coincidence they lined up well with the major divisions at this end of the house--the master bathroom, the master bedroom, and the hall-and-utility area that links the main house with all of this. The only complications in the layout were the floor penetrations (which I'm getting pretty good at avoiding) and the bullet-nose shape at the end of the house in the bathroom, but that was easily solved with a serpentine loop that skirts the edge, then gradually expands in a back-and-forth series of loops before running back to the manifold. The bedroom and hall areas were dead simple, since they're basically just big rectangles, with only a single largish penetration near the picture window where the planter will be.
Taking a lesson from the layout work in the main area, I put down the Send lines of all three loops at the start--this allowed me to confirm the layout I'd planned, plus make minor adjustments for spacing between the future Send and Return lines for all of the loops. Once I had those in place, things went very quickly.
Next up--the garage! Once that's done, we can get the first-floor pour scheduled.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!! :)
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold the master bedroom zones! All nice and neat and tidy; I'm pretty proud of my work here. The manifold feeding this area is on the middle right. |
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| The three-zone manifold all ready for hookups. |
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| Another shot of the area. You can see the main supply lines running towards the master bathroom on the right-hand side. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/28/2010
Well, I didn't get up to Tanglewood quite as quickly after I completed the apartment as I'd hoped--since Colleen is off visiting her sisters, I've got an amazing number of things to do--but I was able to spend some quality time this past weekend. It was well worth it--the main house zones are done!
This area was a bit trickier than the apartment for a couple of reasons. There are more zones being controlled with this manifold than the apartment--five vs. four--and two of the zones are located a relatively-long distance from the manifold in Tanglewood's living room. Just to make it interesting, the living room is also a couple of steps down from the main house, the PEX has to traverse these steps, and I need to steer clear of the certain-to-be-hot mass of the future masonry heater itself.
On the plus side, at least the manifold is located in the main house utility room. This puts it basically "around the wall" from where the boiler and main supply manifold will go, and so I'm not going to have to worry about very-complicated connection logistics.
All of this required some careful measuring and thought (that's what the 23rd and 24th were all about) before I could get started. The primary driver for all of this were the runs to the living room; since so much linear distance has to be spent on the send/return lines for these areas, I had to incorporate these lines into the main heating plan for the area where they run through rather than snake them around the outer regions as one might normally do. The fireplace mass formed a large block-out area that I had to avoid, but there didn't seem to be any reliable guidelines regarding this kind of distance; Radiant Kurt hadn't run into this in his installs and neither had Builder Dale. I finally elected to give my tubing a one-foot clearance around the fireplace just to be safe.
I got started Friday night and finished up this evening. All things considered, the layout went fairly well, though as I noted earlier I had to make a small compromise by placing the loops at 9" apart rather than my standard 8" in the living room just so I could do this with the standard 300' rolls of PEX. In many ways, this was much better, actually--since the wire mesh is spaced 6" apart I could easily lay in the tubing by alternating between a line of wire and the center of the next square over, then repeat across the room. For a few moments while putting in the living-room tubes, I actually considered altering my plans for the remainder of the house, but ultimately decided against it--the living room (and the kitchen for that matter) will both have the large masonry heater throwing off 30,000 BTUs/hour to provide any supplemental heat during the winter but the further reaches of the house (such as the master bedroom) won't.
Very important to my work in this area was my laying out of partial zones early in the process. Rather than putting in one loop at a time as I'd done for other sections of the house, I instead laid out the send lines for each zone precisely where I wanted them up front; in the case of the living room, running them all the way out to the steps. This helped clarify for me exactly where each run was going to go and exactly where each return was going to come back, and in the end made the cluster of lines converging back on the manifold much simpler to organize and space. I'd even recommend this approach for any larger, more complicated area--it really helped me understand where each loop was going to go and how the send/return lines would complement each other (I didn't want multiple returns with their cooler water side-by-side).
So after a couple long nights with just me, the radio, and a full moon, the main house layout is complete! Next up will be the master bedroom area, which will be the smallest manifold of the entire house--only three zones. I'll swing by ABC Plumbing to pick it and another couple of rolls of PEX up in a day or so with an eye towards the long Independence Day weekend.
Fun, fun, fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Looking from the kitchen into the living room area. Note the red tape marking the footprint of the fireplace footer--this is the fireplace plus a buffer zone around it. |
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| Standing in the same spot looking towards the master bedroom. Note the series of parallel tubes in the center; these are the lines running to/from the living room and fireplace area. |
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| Closeup of the fireplace area. In the foreground the zones run down over the steps; in the background I just spaced them out to the edge instead. |
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| Closeup of the most difficult zone just in front of the fireplace. The straight bits were easy; the zig-zaggy bits were a pain in the anatomy. |
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| The living room itself. Nice, neat, very orderly layout, all on 9" spacing. |
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| Good shot of most of the stuff I had to route around; the penetration in the foreground is the kitchen island supply-and-drain combination, while the stuff in the background on the right are utility-room feeds and returns. |
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| Similar shot looking towards the master bedroom. This zone was relatively simple, since it just went straight out and then wound back to a direct return. |
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| The main area manifold, all neatly tagged and ready for tubing attachments. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/24/2010
That didn't take nearly as long as I was afraid it would. I got a phone call from the folks over at Front Range Winwater yesterday that the packer had arrived, and so today I swung by to pick it up.
It's about what I expected--six feet long, basically a big steel tube with a nut on one end and a rubber gasket on the other. It works by patching the well wiring through the wire harness integrated into the central tube, then inserting it down the well. Once it's at the right depth, you just tighten the nut to expand out the gasket and seal up the well.
One thing I didn't know is that these have to be custom made for each well, since they don't know where the water is on a given installation. In our case, Colleen and I had measured the water level at 7' down the pipe, so we figured a 6' packer would work about right.
Colleen's still out visiting her sisters, and I don't want to try to install this thing by myself, so for now I'll just stash it upstairs at Tanglewood and concentrate on finishing up the radiant-heat layout. Plenty to do already without starting another chore!
Glad this wasn't too hard to get in house, though I wish it had been a bit cheaper ($700--ouch!).
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/22/2010
That didn't take too long!
Of course I was only dealing with four zones in a fairly simple area (the apartment is rectangular with no oddball corners) so other than dodging various floor penetrations, I knew it wouldn't be too difficult. After getting the first two zones done over the weekend, I knew that it wouldn't take me long to finish up the apartment and I was right--this got done with a couple of evenings after work.
If you look at the pics, you'll probably notice that I didn't hook up the loops to the manifold yet, I just tied them where they belong (I also labeled them, though that probably isn't obvious from the pics). My thought is that I will seal up the loops and pressurize them for testing after I get all of the other loops done, since as I recall, it takes a bit of focus to do this properly and I'd rather focus on that in one go.
After I was done, I took the opportunity to finish putting in the wire mesh in the garage. We'd put down the underslab insulation a few days ago, but hadn't bothered with the mesh, since (frankly) it's a pain in the butt to walk across (very easy to catch your feet); but with Colleen heading out of town this weekend to visit with her sisters, it's just me up here anyway.
I've got to run over to ABC Plumbing tomorrow to get some more PEX and another manifold for the next phase (installing the main house area). I'll probably start the next section on Thursday or Friday.
Feels good to get part of this done... there's a lot yet on the horizon, but progress is being made!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The apartment in all its radiant glory! |
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| The apartment manifold. |
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| Closeup of one of the floor drains. I only had to make a minor detour to route around it. |
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| The tubing worked GREAT right here... couldn't have planned it better, frankly. |
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| Closeup of the apartment bathroom area. I had to get a bit creative here. |
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| Wire in the garage. Lots of it, but at least it's all nice and straight. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/22/2010
Well, it took me far longer than it should have, but I've finally selected a contractor to install the solar PV for Tanglewood.
I'd started this process back in April and, really, I've got to say that it's far harder than it needs to be. I guess I can kind of understand why it works the way it does--most folks who want to install solar PV on their house don't really know much about solar proper, and just want an expert to "make it happen".
I on the other hand am an engineer. I know how things work and if I don't, I have a geeky desire to figure it out. This can make me a difficult customer if a company is used to dealing with non-engineering types, and I felt this keenly as part of the whole solar-contractor selection process. It clearly made some of the contractors uncomfortable to get knowledgeable questions from a potential customer.
Overall, I was surprised at how difficult it was to get companies to
even look at the job--I had 9 express interest, but only 6 actually got back to me
on it. Most pledged that they were incredibly busy and I suppose that's reasonable enough, though I should have thought anybody waving a few 10Ks of money around would have at least been worthy of a followup email.
All of the systems estimated between 28 and 32 panels,
depending on their wattage. All of them bid systems that would provide between 6 kW/hour and 6.3 kW/hour. All projected that the PV would provide between 95% and 99.6% (that was kinda precise) of my power needs, with the remainder coming from a propane generator that would be slaved to the system and kick in when needed. All of them estimated between 16 and 24
batteries for energy storage, with one odd exception that came in with 72 (!). Estimates varied on
the number of inverters (one or two) depending on system design and how
much room they put into expansion down the road. They all provided
about two days of autonomy at full power, more like three days if one were to
reduce and conserve in the face of an extended cloudy period. All
allowed for a backup generator of varying size, and all specified 48V
systems. None of them assumed any rebates in their bids, leaving that
mostly up to me to pursue. I had insisted that each bidder break down the overall bid into individual portions, so I could better compare them, and all but one (a sixth bidder I discarded almost immediately) did so.
There were issues with some of the details though. I had specifically asked for AGM batteries to be included in the bids, because I didn't care to go through the water-refill ritual every month--I consider that to be ridiculous for what's supposedly a state-of-the-art technology. All but one of the bids came in with lead-acid storage, however, mostly because of the slightly higher amp-hours capacity of these systems.
Most of the solar panels bid were basically the same, with one supplier not even bothering to list brand or wattage--they'd simply go with "what was most cost-effective" at the time they placed their order. That bothered me a bit.
Only two of the five bidders had had experience with completely off-grid houses such as Tanglewood, and three of the five had experience with ground-mount systems, (which I need due to the relatively poor sun exposure of the house location proper). From this, I would generalize that off-grid systems are still relatively rare for most solar contractors, with most of them being more used to installing supplemental solar on grid-tied houses and the like. This would explain both the overall lack of off-grid experience and the unfamiliarity with ground mounts--you don't normally need those when you're putting panels on a house.
The "grunt work" was something that none of the bidders seemed to do well, and their prices reflected this, and I ended up taking on that part of the project myself. Here I'm talking about the more physical parts of the whole thing--clearing the site of trees, digging the ground-mount holes, trenching out the long run (~400' due to location) from the site to Tanglewood proper. Those portions of most of the bids were ridiculously high, telling me that each contractor probably added 20% to make a profit, then bid it out to another set of subcontractors who would do the actual labor part--at another 20% profit for themselves, of course. That's a poor way to do business in my book, and further reflected on the relative lack of experience in working with off-grid systems.
There were some pretty frustrating aspects. I can't imagine what one company was thinking when they bid 72 2V batteries rather than the more typical 20-ish 24V jobs.
Another company spent a lot of time helping me to revise my electrical loading, but then turned a bit "preachy" regarding off-grid living and clearly felt I was asking for a far larger system than was reasonable. When they did provide a bid, it only met 25% (!) of my projected needs... what the heck were they thinking?!?
And what the heck is it with the poor pace of advancement in field of battery technology anyway? I first started to get interested in this stuff back in the 1970s, and the most significant advancement they've made since then has been to incorporate carrying straps into their batteries?!? I mean, COME ON PEOPLE--I know flying cars are still a stretch, but why in the heck do I still have to store my power in 150-pound lead-acid monstrosities?
Oh well. I could go on, but the choice has (finally) been made. I meet with the contractor in the next couple of days to finish up paperwork, and then he gets his engineers designing up a ground-mount installation and they get started pulling permits.
Gonna get busy soon... and that's the way I like it!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Comments (2)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/20/2010
Been a long time since Colleen and I were last putting in radiant tubing, but it's amazing how fast it all comes back to you.
Colleen couldn't come up today, so after a nice Burger King breakfast (hey, they're on the way!) I got to Tanglewood around 10 or so and got straight to work. Working around without assistance was definitely slower, since I had to unroll the tubing on my own, then work my way down the floor on hands and knees (Odin bless knee pads!) to tie things down. Because the wire mesh is on 6" centers and I was installing on 8" centers, I also had to use a lot of zip ties as I went--I could only use those nifty little clippies on every third run of PEX (since those lined up with the wire mesh). The weather didn't help a lot other--it was nice enough in the morning but quickly got hot and muggy by the time mid-afternoon rolled around, and this slowed me down significantly.
Still, I got two loops done. Working out all of the zone design ahead of time was a great help, since I knew exactly what I was doing, and I only had a few on-the-spot changes to make to accommodate drains and plumbing penetrations. Having learned my lesson from January's festivities, I made sure to give myself plenty of tail on each zone, starting the layout from the manifold itself. I also took care to install the tubing protectors (in our case we used 1" electrical PVC "els"--these help keep the concrete from collapsing the pipe when it's poured) before I started playing out the tubing, and to carefully label each Send/Return pair for each zone. I also made sure to carefully label each valve on the manifold itself--this is something I didn't do until the end of the process last time around, and it was very confusing to follow loops around to find out where they were going at the end of the day when you're cold and tired and just want to go home. You can use just about any labeling system that makes sense to you; in my case I labeled by floor (1), then manifold number (in this case, 1) and zone within the manifold (1 thru 4). For me, this made the apartment loops run from 111 to 114. I used some little circular paper tags to hang on each valve, since they are about an inch in diameter and fairly easy to work with.
The manifold itself is another Icma, this time a four-zone unit I picked up from Radiant Kurt last week. Since this time I can more properly mount the first-floor manifolds on the walls rather than out in the middle of nowhere like I had to do upstairs, I put it on a bit of scrap plywood that is 1/2" thick so it would be properly spaced once we install the drywall down the road. This particular manifold will end up under the apartment-kitchen window behind some cabinets, so for this one I'll probably put in a false wall to protect it from any accidental smackage.
Pics below. I work tomorrow, and Colleen is busy trying to arrange some other tasks (septic and a packer for the well) so I won't be able to do more than a couple of hours in the evening, but every bit helps. I'll need to swing by Walmart and pick up another batch of zip ties too, since I'm likely to run out before I finish the apartment--I still have two bags of the clippies though.
Exhausting, but fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The apartment manifold with the first zone started. The plywood will help it to be properly spaced once we install the drywall. |
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| Two loops so far! Note how I had to jog a bit around the plumbing penetrations, but I managed to keep the bathroom and the closet on their own zone. so they can be run a bit hotter (nice for bathrooms). |
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| The manifold at the end of the day. Lots of tail here for me to trim for proper fit into each valve. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/19/2010
Busy, busy, busy!
Today we got the rest of the insulation down in the garage and the half-dozen irregularly-shaped areas that we'd missed, put down the wire mesh to tie the radiant tubing to, and assembled our various supplies for the radiant-tube installation itself.
The insulation was easy, though time-consuming. The big square bits in the garage were a snap, since the insulation comes in 4' by 8' sheets, but of course the garage isn't a perfect multiple of that. We ended up putting down as many full sheets as we could so as to minimize cutting, then pieced together slimmer bits to fill in the final strip. The garage drains were a bit problematic, since they had to be worked around, and that partially drove our decision to put the cut pieces along this axis since we'd have to do cuts around them anyway. Once we had everything in, we taped the more energetic bits (i.e., they wanted to bounce out every time somebody walked by on the adjacent foam) down with a bit of duct tape and/or sealed them down with an expanding spray foam.
One interesting bit was the extra insulation we ended up with. Builder Dale was pretty certainly that he'd brought pretty much exactly the right amount for us and was mildly surprised to hear that we had about a pallet and a half left over. Turns out that many folks don't bother piecing together the odd runs with leftover bits--they rather tend to cut what they need off full sheets--weird. Rather than have him take them back though, I asked that we simply move them around to the back of the house; we'll use them later for the apron and the ice melt system outside the garages. (This itself is apparently fairly atypical--apparently not too many ice-melt systems are installed with insulation underneath--but I figure that there's no point in fighting the entire planet while trying to keep a bit of ice and snow away.)
After we got the insulation down, we spent some quality time cutting up wire mesh and installing it. This was a Great Pain to do, but well worth the effort to get it done right, and we took care to apply Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #3 from back in January--lay your wire mesh parallel to the walls. We didn't have much of a chance to do this back in January, since the concrete crew threw down the mesh as something of an afterthought, with the result that we had only limited opportunities to fix it while putting down those loops. This time around, Builder Dale just dropped the rolls of wire (damnably heavy they are, too!) and Colleen and I put them down instead, and this made a huge difference. It was simple from a basic "grunt work" point of view--we just had to measure lengths of wire, cut them from the spools, and then put them into place--but of course Real Life made it all a bit more complicated than that. Rather like the underslab insulation, the wires were in rolls that measured 6' wide by 50' long, so we ended up with some overlapping sections as we laid them down (the alternative would have been to apply more extensive trimming with the wire cutters and this wasn't particularly palatable). The wire itself wanted to snag every other length of wire as we were aligning them on the floor, and that took a lot of work to fix. As we worked our way into each roll, we uncovered yet another issue--the inner lengths were wound much more tightly than the outer layers, with the result that they didn't really want to unwind very well or stay unwound once you'd unrolled them. What they really seemed to want to do, more than anything else, was to snap up and catch you in the face while you're turned around--a most annoying feature. It took us quite a bit of time and we liberally used both 2x4s and rebar, but we eventually got the stupid wire to stay flat(ish) for us.
After a brief round of rest and bandages, we took some time to haul up supplies for the next phase. I've been slowly picking up rolls of PEX since April in anticipation of this work beginning, and have enough on hand (five rolls) together with a shiny new Icma manifold to do the apartment. It took us a bit to haul everything up from the trailer, but we got it all done a bit before sundown.
Tomorrow I'll begin laying in the apartment radiant-heat tubing. I expect it to go considerably faster than things did back in January--it's much warmer than it was then, I'm inside rather than exposed to the Great Outdoors, and (hopefully) we're a bit smarter about how to do this than we were then. I reckon we'll see...
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| At this point we've got most of the garage insulation done. You can see some of the yet-to-be-deployed wire mesh there in the main house towards the back. |
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| All done with only a couple of fiddly bits left to flesh out. |
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| The stack of unused insulation. This will get stashed behind the house up by the well until we're ready to do the apron area. |
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Comments (0)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/18/2010
It seems like a long time since we laid out the radiant heat on the second floor, but it was only 5 months ago!
With the underslab plumbing complete and the underslab insulation installed, we can finally begin installing the first floor radiant heat. Having done the second floor already we're now pretty familiar with how all of this works, so it should go fairly quickly if we can just knuckle down on it for a couple of days.
Tanglewood's first floor does present some interesting challenges compared to the simpler second floor. It's a much larger area for one, which complicates the length of the radiant tubing runs that can be managed since our ideal length is 300' per loop. The first floor also has a mix of areas with different needs--the main house is very "leggy" and can't be serviced with a single manifold, and there's a huge fireplace between the kitchen and the living room which will have to be avoided (can't run radiant tubing under that slab or too close to it due to melting concerns). The living room area is also recessed below the main house proper, so we've got to snake the radiant heat tubing through the steps themselves. The apartment is Way Over There at the other end of the house and will need an entirely independent manifold to handle the higher temps I expect my mother to demand (she wants to live the rest of her life at 95 degrees, I think). In between the two are the garages and outside is the ice melt system under the apron, which will need to use a glycol mix rather than water like the inhabited areas, and so they'll need yet another manifold to control them.
All of this drives the first floor to need 4 manifolds rather than the 2 that handle the second floor. This in turn will significantly complicate the overall layout since there are more manifolds to deal with and more tubing to interconnect. The length of the run out to the living room is also a problem, since the supply and return lines have to run a long way through the kitchen area and then avoid the fireplace, eating up valuable length that won't be available in the living room proper.
But hey, I'm an engineer--I just love problems like this! After pondering and fiddling with LoopCAD (upgraded since my earlier post and frankly even better) I finally came up with a layout that would work. I had to alter my constraints slightly from what I was doing upstairs though:
- Upstairs I was able to use 8" spacing on the loops throughout, and I was able to keep that on most of the living areas downstairs.
- The one exception was the living room. In order to meet the needs of the long runs to/from the living room and still keep the number of loops down, I had to bump up to 9" spacing throughout the living room area. This allowed me to use only two loops--my only other alternative would have been to three loops servicing the area with one of them partially in the living room and partially in the kitchen, which I found unpalatable for aesthetic reasons.
- The other concession was to the layouts for the garage and (eventually) the ice melt system under the apron outside the garage. With these two areas so relatively large and open but dedicated to rather irregular use only in the dead of winter I elected to put in these loops with a 12" spacing. There's a lot of feedback from various folks that the 8" spacing I'm using everywhere else is overkill anyway, but my primary thinking here is that I'm not trying to keep the garage area at 80 degrees--I just want it to be 40 degrees so there's no ice and snow buildup on my cars. If the 12" spacing works just as well as the 8" spacing I used elsewhere well, then, I reckon I over-engineered things--not a bad place to be.
We begin putting down the wire mesh tomorrow, and should start putting in tubing this coming weekend. Getting in the radiant heat will be a major milestone by itself, but once this is all done we can schedule the first floor pour--and then things will really kick into high gear.
So enjoy the diagram below--work begins tomorrow!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold the wonder that is the Tanglewood First Floor Radiant Heat Layout! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/17/2010
Now that was an interesting turn of events!
On our way down from clearing out the squirrels' nest from Tanglewood's walls we came around a bend in the clearing (about 1/4 of the way up the canyon) to spot a black bear cub. He looked to be about a year old, big enough to be dangerous, but probably still hanging around his momma if she hadn't chased him away. He in turn saw us and began to run away, but as we continued along the road (slowing to get a better look at him) he lost his nerve and sought refuge in a tree right next to the road!
It was great. There was the cub, sitting in the tree and staring at us while we in turn couldn't believe he was so close and motionless! I began to snap a couple of pics while Colleen kept an eye out for the mother bear, since it's considered to be a Poor Life Choice to get between a mother bear and her cub. Fortunately he never made a sound, even when my flash scared him a little bit to climb higher in the tree--he just kept staring at us, I kept taking pictures, and Colleen kept an eye out for the mother bear.
After about a minute, we were clearly making him more nervous once the shock of our arrival had worn off, and we concluded that we were probably pushing our luck--even though we had seen no sign of a momma and the cub hadn't made any noise at all, sooner or later she was going to come looking for him. Heck, she was probably across the field at the edge of the woods... we just didn't know for sure. Not wanting to potentially anger her, though, we pulled away and left him in the tree. No doubt he watched us until we vanished, then he probably scampered down the tree and ran for his mother.
Neither of us have ever seen a bear that close... it was amazing.
This is a neat canyon!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| My first shot was a bit fuzzy, but wow! |
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| It was very hard to read his face, but I'd say he was more astonished than anything else. |
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| The flash from my second shot scared him a bit, and he began to climb higher into the tree. |
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| He decided that this was a safe enough perch, apparently. |
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| At this point he started to get a bit restless, and we figured he was going to squall, so we left. Wow. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/17/2010
It's amazing how regularly the rains have been coming down recently. It's good to see from a "normal Colorado weather" perspective, near-daily monsoons have put a severe cramp into the list of various things we need to get done before the next pour.
There was a bit of a break in the weather this afternoon, however, and Colleen and I ran up to check on conditions at the site. Once there, we decided that since the squirrel's nest was now unoccupied, we'd take a bit to clean it out. After all we were pretty sure the squirrel had tracked all kinds of leaves and bedding and whatnot into the wall and we couldn't pour with that mess in there, so it had to come out.
I knew that most of the upper block on the wall the squirrel had been living in was hollow (easily determined by thumping the walls) with a narrower passage between the front opening and the back, and so my guess was that it had built its nest towards the back of the wall where the void was larger. We quickly found a five-gallon bucket to use as an impromptu stool (you can't really ever have too many five-gallon buckets!) and went to work, starting with cutting a hole in the far end.
Oddly enough, I did not find anything untoward in this area, so I moved about a foot to the right and cut another hole. This one was more successful, finding the edges of a mass of straw that must have served as part of the squirrel's nest. The next hole, cut just a few inches over, hit the jackpot. I hauled out about a gallon's worth of straw from the hole (probably fetched up a few strands at a time from a bale we'd brought up back before winter for erosion control), though oddly no leaves or fur or anything else I might have expected. As these things go, it was relatively neat and tidy, I guess.
After clearing out what I could by hand, I fired up the shop vac to vacuum out what I could reach, then stuck the camera inside to take a (fairly unexciting) snapshot.
Glad to have this mess out of the way... now if it would just stop raining so much!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| Cutting a second hole after the first one found nothing. I *know* there's a nest in here! |
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| Aha! |
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| It took three holes in total to locate the nest. We'll patch them prior to the next pour. |
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| Look at all the straw I pulled out of that hole! |
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| Getting the rest out with my handy shop vac. |
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| Inside the wall. Not really much to see here, but I'm sure it was very dry and cozy from a squirrel's perspective. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/14/2010
This was lot harder than I thought it was going to be, but there ya go.
About a week ago when the underslab plumbing was inspected the inspector happened to mention that we might want to install something called a "packer" in Tanglewood's excellent well to prevent it from overflowing (which it can do on occasion). While he took pains to stress that this was NOT a requirement and that it would have nothing whatsoever to do with any inspection he would be conducting, he would recommend these devices from time to time when he ran across folks with equally admirable wells.
Finding this was a bit tougher than we'd thought it would be, though. Colleen and I asked around various plumbing and well-supply shops locally and found that most of them had no idea what we were talking about. Colleen eventually stumbled across a couple that knew what a packer was, but who wouldn't sell one to her--they only sold to people who installed wells, not to homeowners trying to "finish off" an installation.
Colleen was then referred to a local company called Front Range Winwater. These guys knew exactly what a packer was, though they'd never installed one along the Front Range, but were more than happy to sell us one (which was really the important thing). We eagerly agreed, and so today we placed an order for this puppy. Should be here in a couple of weeks.
Good job Colleen! Looking forward to getting this and taking care of this artesian-well problem once and for all.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/14/2010
That didn't take long. Poor squirrels.
A couple of days ago, Colleen spotted baby squirrels making their first explorations of the world from the lair their momma had built in one of Tanglewood's walls. It was a nice ending to the problem of having squirrels in the walls, since we'd been afraid that we were going to have to chase them out with sticks and brooms. When we saw the babies starting to figure out how to run amuck, we figured it would only be a matter of a couple of days before they were completely gone and we could clear out the nest neatly and cleanly.
Colleen ran up to the site today to see how much rain we'd been getting since Saturday, (answer: a lot) since this was putting a cramp on our finishing the underslab insulation work. Upon getting out of her truck she was greeted with our friendly neighborhood vixen... running up to the truck with a baby squirrel in her mouth...
Well, I guess that's why squirrels have lots of babies. Very much a "Circle of Life" moment indeed.
At least we know the nest is empty...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/12/2010
Today was what one could reasonably called "a busy day".
Two fairly big and one small-but-still-important thing happened today. Perhaps of most importance was the installation of Tanglewood's basic gutters along the roofline. We'd been wanting to get these into place before the summer monsoons begin (we're due) so as to control the water somewhat and push it away from the house as much as possible. We'd picked out a nice dark-gray color that matched the recent fascia install from some samples Builder Dale had provided a few days ago.
Turns out that gutters for most houses these days aren't put together from the 10-foot to 12-foot lengths you see at Home Depot. Nowadays in order to avoid leaks, they're extruded in one long continuous piece, using a roll of aluminum that's fed into a specialized metal shaping machine called (naturally enough) an extruder. The crew brought all of this up early this morning (yes, on a Saturday) on the back of a large flatbed, which seemed oversized for our job to me. They set to work quickly walking around the house to inspect the fascia and double-check the measurements in the blueprints, then proceeded to crank out lengths of gutter custom-made for each roof edge. Each length was seamless and (where appropriate) had an end molded into the gutter as needed. It was a relatively quick process (though noisy as heck), with a couple of guys carrying each finished piece of gutter to the appropriate house side as they rolled off the truck. When they dropped them at the right location they took a few moments to cut drain holes in the ends.
After this was all done they had to install them, and that took a bit longer. Two and sometimes three ladders were set up and some of the crew lifted the gutters up to a couple of other guys partway up the ladders, who then coordinated their climbs holding the gutter under one arm and the ladder with the other. As one might expect, this was slow-going since they were a couple of floors up in most places and that's not particularly a place you want to fall from, but once they reached the top they were able to set the gutters on little shelves on each ladder so they had a moment to get their tools ready and whatnot. After that, it was a fairly straightforward matter to attach the gutters, using some large screws that mounted into the fascia itself.
Once all of the straight edges were attached, they then went back up with gutter drops and little bits of gutter they called "kickouts". This machine didn't do "corners" very well and those would have been weak spots with joints in them anyway, so instead where one gutter might join another it was slightly offset to allow for the installation of a "drop"--basically a very short bit of drainpipe--to drain the upper gutter into the lower one. Tanglewood's rather usual roofline made this fairly easy, fortunately. Where there will eventually be drains from the gutters down to the ground (where they'll be buried and conduct water safely away from the house) they installed temporary bits of drain three or four feet long called "kickouts" which basically just serve to push the water away from the house. Once we're near the end of construction (probably after the exterior finish is done) they'll come back and more properly install the underground system, but these kickouts should serve for the short term.
They were done right about noon, and the timing was nearly perfect as another truck pulled up just as they were wrapping up and let us start the Other Big Thing of the day. This guy had big pallets of rigid-foam insulation intended for installation under the slab of the first floor.
The story here is fairly interesting (well to me anyway, but I'm geeky that way). There are several sites around the Web that praise the installation of insulation under the slab of new houses and intuitively their reasoning makes sense. After all one insulates walls to keep heat in and cold out (or vice versa in the summertime), and since a first-floor (or basement) slab is resting on the ground, you find yourself in a battle against the Earth itself to heat and cool your abode. Odds are that the Earth is a wee bit bigger than your house, so that's a fight you're going to lose to one extent or another, so putting a nice bit of insulation between your house and the planet makes sense if you're anywhere that has wide temperature variations.
Here's where (I didn't know this) things seem to get a bit quasi-religious. It appears that the pro-insulation camp falls into two broad categories, those who prefer to use rigid-foam insulation and those that prefer to use more flexible, foil-backed bubble-wrap styles. Both are pretty neat and have their advantages (rigid foam is fast to put down and generally has a higher R-value per inch, whereas the wrap styles are easier to shape around odd corners and ground penetrations like drains); and disadvantages (rigid foam can break if you aren't careful walking across it; wrap tends to have lower R-values and you can pop the bubbles if you're not careful). I pondered both and generally wasn't sure which way I wanted to go...
... until Builder Dale checked the county code, where the decision was made for us. County regional building codes required that insulation that was "at least" R-8 be installed under all living areas, and as it turned out the supplier that Builder Dale uses had the wrap in R-6 and the rigid in R-10. Different counties have different codes, but those are our guidelines, and so the choice was made--rigid foam for the win!
(Let the record show I was leaning towards this anyway, but never mind that.)
So the truck showed up to drop off these big pallets of blue-foam boards, measuring 4' by 8'. Installing it was almost faster than getting it off of the pallets, since you can just start on one edge and lay them down side by side, and that got done fairly quickly. Once the easy parts were done, we had to begin cutting the oddball shapes and whatnot to go around corners and drains and the like, and we ran out of daylight before we got all that done. We'll also hold off on doing the garage just yet so we don't have to risk breaking insulation by walking across it as we do all the other work. Still we ought to be able to finish up in the next couple of days, and then we can lay down wire mesh and look down the road towards starting to install the first-floor radiant-heat loops.
Towards the end of the day, I peeled off from the insulation work to finish up the removal of wood from under the wall. This was a job I'd only partially finished when I was working on it a few days ago and I didn't want to try to do major digging while the rigid foam was in danger of getting whacked by a shovel. I got one picture early in the process, but honestly forgot to take any others, being too busy digging--still, this was an important thing to finally get done, and I was glad I took the time.
Pics and movies for all of this juicy fun below. We're making good progress now--time to review my radiant-heat installation notes from January and get ready for the next big push!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| I think DOW makes dang near everything... for example, this underslab insulation. |
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| Closeup of the handy R-value chart on the board. I assume they print this on a variety of thicknesses that they make. |
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| The first piece of insulation goes into the master bathroom. It looks so lonely out there by itself. |
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| A little bit later. There's a LOT of the stuff in here now. |
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| Insulation awaiting installation in the apartment garage. You can see one of the garage drains coming out in the foreground. |
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| The living room is all nice and blue now. |
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| Once we got to the odd corners in the master bathroom, we had to get more creative. |
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| Working on the apartment. |
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| We put down plywood, rebar, and 2x4s wherever the insulation was subject to getting blown around by the wind. |
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| And ladders. Ladders work pretty well too. |
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| The kitchen area is almost done. |
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| The fully-insulated apartment footprint. This was pretty easy, since it's basically rectangular. |
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| Organizing the gutter-making equipment. |
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| Lifting the roll of aluminum onto the extruder. |
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| Lengths of gutter awaiting installation. |
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| An errant 2x4 under the edge of the garage wall. This puppy was a good two feet long; I had to do a LOT of digging to get it out. |
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Videos
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/9/2010
Folks may recall our combined amusement-and-horror when we discovered that a squirrel had elected to take up residence inside a gap in our ICF a couple of weeks back. While intellectually I admired the squirrel's wise choice in nesting locations (best spot in the canyon without question) I really couldn't have them living in there, and knew that eventually we'd have to do something to chase them out.
Today while Colleen was at the site she was startled to see two baby squirrels pop their heads out of the hole and begin trying to explore the world! They clearly have only just begun to try to leave the nest, as they don't know very much about climbing yet, and spent much of their time striving mightily to r-e-a-c-h down the wall without losing a grip on the safety of the nest itself.
The pictures are great, but the video is really cute. Of course we've got to do something about these little buggers and I'm afraid that time is fast approaching, but at least they look like they're thinking about leaving the nest soon, so maybe it won't be as traumatic as it might have been a couple of weeks back.
So... they're dang cute little rats, all things considered.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| A baby squirrel sticks its head out of the hole while Collen lurks nearby. |
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| And now there are two! |
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| The babies take a good long look at Colleen.... |
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| ...and then they begin to try to climb down the wall! |
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| "Must. Keep. Toe. In. Nest!" |
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| "Wow! Look how far I can stretch!" |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/9/2010
Arrgg!
I had thought that I'd gotten all of the bits of wood shoring and whatnot out of the foundation a couple of nights ago, but as it turns out there was more of it than I thought.
When I began to dig out the wood that I knew was under an area between the garage and the main house (this spot will be located under the stairs and was left open so I could run radiant heat out to the garage and the concrete apron). I quickly discovered it was worse than I'd thought. Where I had been able to spot a single piece of plywood shoring up the bottom of the ICF forms (where they crossed the dirt floor) I found two more 2x4s that must have been alongside the footers.
Sigh.
I didn't have time to dig everything out tonight, so I just got the plywood bit out. It's a good size too; we'll probably use it as a scab for the window wells as we get those ready for the next pour. The 2x4s I found are deeper than I can move without doing a lot of digging, so that's something best reserved for a weekend day.
Grumble grumble grumble...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| Looking at the gap from the garage side, you can't really see anything..... |
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| ...but as you can see on the house side this chuck-o-wood was wedged in there just WAITING to attract bugs. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/7/2010
The main task Colleen had today was to work with the country inspector when he came up to sign off on the recently completed underslab plumbing work. It all went pretty much as expected, and the plumbing passed with flying colors, but two things cropped up that will need some attention.
The first is easy. After noting that we'd trenched down to a good level to install the new pitless adapter for the well below frost line (the existing one we put in years ago is only about 6" from the top of the casing; it was just so we could water plants and stuff) Colleen and the inspector got to talking about the main water line from the well to the house. Noting that we'd be tying the new pitless run to the main water line, the inspector made one of those "I can't tell you what to do here, but this is the kind of thing I'm looking for" remarks--and naturally Colleen took careful note of what he was saying. Turns out that while there are a wide variety of fittings to connect pipe between the well and the main house there's only one particular kind that this inspector "likes to see"--apparently he's seen lots of kinds over the years and this particular type or brand seems to be more reliable. That's easy enough; we'll look around and get that one... it's important to keep the inspector happy!
The second issue is more complex and a bit of a conundrum. Tanglewood has an excellent well that's some 200 feet down, but which usually has water at around 7' from the surface. The well's capacity is an astonishing 42 gallons per minute, virtually unheard of in this area of the Front Range and far away the best in the canyon. Sometimes the well can even become artesian--and that is apparently a bit of a problem.
It seems that while artesian or "flowing" wells in Colorado are not per se illegal as they are in some states, they are strongly discouraged as a waste of natural resources. This is understandable enough, particularly if you have a well that overflows all the time--it's just wasting aquifer resources and depleting the water table for everybody else. In our case, Tanglewood's well is from an underground stream rather than an aquifer (much better water, by the way) and only overflows irregularly, but the point is the same--it's not good to waste resources if it can be avoided.
We'd known about this back when we first designed Tanglewood, intending to have a wellhouse that was going to incorporate an overflow drain for just this type of occasion. Our assumption was that there just wasn't much we could really do about this anyway so we'd manage it as best we could.
The inspector mentioned that there are inserts called "packers" or "spoolers" that can help prevent this, however. Basically big corks that are installed down inside the well at just above the normal water line, these puppies are heavily used in some areas of Colorado (such as the San Luis Valley) where wells overflow nearly continuously due to pressure and depth of the local aquifer. We're going to have to do some research on these and see who might have one, but I like the idea of preventing the overflow in the first place, so we're going to see what we can find. Again it's not a necessary thing and we won't fail any inspections or whatnot because of it; but now that I know there's a potential solution I want to investigate it.
So all in all a very good day, though (of course) now we've added something else to the never-ending List of Things to Do...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/7/2010
Today's activities worked out fairly evenly. Colleen went up during the day to handle the plumbing inspection, tidy up the window wells, select out rebar for bending and placement within them, and generally accomplish some clean-up and smoothing of the excavation work. A very busy day. She came down in the late afternoon and met me on my way up to do what I could do with the few hours of remaining sunlight.
I focused on two things that had needed to be done for a long time--putting wheels on our trusty generator, and cleaning up some of the mess left over by the concrete guys.
The generator had been bothering me for literally years, so I tackled that first. The Generac 4000EXL is a fine little generator, very capable and quite tough--it has nearly universally excellent reviews. It's an excellent tool--except for one annoying "feature" or should I say, lack of a feature.
It only has rear tires!
There are no front tires. Instead, there's this weird metal leg that helps to keep the generator level, but which supplies absolutely no side-to-side stability. Worse yet, if you're trying to move the generator, you have to lift it up by the front (there's a fitting for a handle) and then keep it up lest that silly leg catch something on the ground. When you're moving the generator around a hillside partway through a long hard day of work, you will catch that leg on Every Little Thing that sticks up out of the ground--roots, rocks, pine cones; makes no difference.
It's an extremely annoying situation.
Fortunately Colleen had found a set of tires a couple of weeks back that seemed to be about the right size, and I had decided to try to upgrade the generator. It took some doing, but I eventually located a bit of rebar to serve as an axle, and with a bit more work I was able to attach it via a pair of brackets. It was awesome to finally have tires on the generator that actually worked! No more stupid metal leg to catch things every chance it got!
The leg went into the scrap metal pile destined for the recycling trailer.
After that, I got to work on cleaning up some of the mess the concrete folks left behind. Turns out that back when they were pouring the footers and the first-floor walls they sometimes used plywood or 2x4s to shore up things. Apparently cleaning these things up wasn't considered part of their job, though, and the infill guys didn't bother either. As a result, there were bits of pieces of wood under my walls and alongside my footers throughout my house.
I didn't fancy the idea of termite-attracting wood sitting there on the ground, so I set about to dig them out.
It was quite a bit of work. Most of the 2x4s had been installed when the footers were still just shells, so they were in a couple of feet of hard-packed gravel and Red Canyon Breeze infill. Colleen thought I was crazy for spending time on them, but I was insistent; I wasn't about to leave wood sitting around like that to bring in wood-munching bugs. By nightfall, I'd gotten out all of the odd bits of lumber I could find except for one piece near the eventual garage-manifold location--I'll get that one later when I go to work on the first-floor radiant-heat tubing.
Lesson Learned: Never trust the contractors to properly clean up after themselves. They're focused on getting their job done, and once it's done they don't really care about how hard they've made it for the next guy or doing much more beyond gathering up their tools in a timely fashion. You've got to watch them like a hawk or they'll just "forget" to do all kinds of stuff.
All in all, a good evening's work.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold my four-wheeled generator! |
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| The wheels aren't perfectly aligned (the front axle is a bit shorter) but it's good enough. |
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| A 2x4 stuck in the ground between the apartment and the garage. This particular piece went down about two feet. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/7/2010
In between bouts of working on the window wells and tidying up the site, but before I got there, Colleen took a bit of refreshment around mid-afternoon. She was very surprised to see the fox vixen come up for a visit and basically "camp out" near her.
These pictures are amazing. The vixen wasn't the slightest bit afraid of Colleen and proved this by settling down onto a handy rock about 6' away from Colleen as she sat eating. She didn't particularly press Colleen for any food--it seemed rather she simply wanted some companionship. Our guess is that she's gotten very comfortable around us and was a bit tired of having fox kits chew on her, so when she heard the truck come up the road the trotted over to "get away" in a known safe environment.
She stayed like this for about 15 minutes or so, allowing Collen to get some superb shots.
Wow. Just wow.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| This is the vixen when she first came up. She plopped right down on this rock without seemingly a care in the world. |
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| Closeup of the vixen. She seems very calm. |
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| Colleen moved slightly closer; the vixen didn't even seem to notice. |
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| NOW she notices... |
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| "Back off monkey..." |
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| Colleen backed off, and the vixen's eyes get droopier again. |
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| A final shot after Colleen backed away. Amazing. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/4/2010
One thing I haven't noted much is my nifty Stealth Cam.
Colleen got me this as a birthday gift a few months ago, and it's pretty cool. Designed for scouting out potential hunting sites and trails, it's also handy for watching over your construction site. There are several models, some of which can take infrared pictures in the dark; they're pretty much all motion activated and feature the capability of downloading data to a PC (either directly from a data card or via a transfer cable).
A couple of months ago I set up the Stealth Cam in a handy location near the campsite (below the house) on the theory that animals were more likely to come by there since that's usually where we toss popcorn or stuff for the fox. For the most part, this has been a bust--I've gotten lots of pictures of trees and a couple of blurs that I think were squirrels, but generally there wasn't too much of interest outside of Colleen or I putting out treats for the Little Ones.
Until today, that is. I was initially annoyed that there were only five shots on the Stealth cam when I went to download pictures, but it proved to be worth it. Four of the shots were the standard "mysterious shot of the forest and it's not obvious what set off the camera at all", but the fifth shot was a gorgeous picture of a buck posing on a boulder! You can just see his antlers beginning to come in; he looks like he's fairly young, too.
Great shot below... enjoy!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| I don't think this would have been much better if he'd actually posed. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/4/2010
The other thing that got done today was the meeting of a major milestone when the plumbers completed the underslab work!
Things basically went as expected and are plumbed in a standard fashion. Red 1" PEX was used for hot water runs and blue 1" PEX was used for cold water runs. We've got hot water installed everywhere there are internal fixtures, even if I don't plan on using hot water at that location (for example, the planter in front of the downstairs picture window) since it's easier to have it and not need it than the other way around. One nice touch is a recirculation system (white pipe in the pictures) that will tie into a system designed to keep hot water at the various outlets; given Tanglewood's "leggy" nature this seemed to be a good idea and I'm glad that the plumbers thought of it.
They also put in various drains throughout the house. There are four drains in the garage that T-together into a single line that will daylight out the front of the parking area, and there are miscellaneous safety drains for both overflows and propane (county requirement). This was all large 3" PVC pipe that they simply welded together and/or cut as they went. A slight slope was installed on all of the drains since they're gravity-fed.
As they finished up, the plumbers ran the main supply line to the outside of the house towards the well, but oddly enough under El Paso County code they're prohibited from running more than three feet beyond the footprint. Connecting a well is considered to be something either the homeowner or a well engineer can do; most in-house plumbers aren't licensed to perform the job for reasons that don't seem entirely clear to me. Since we're very much of a DIY bent, Colleen took good notes as the plumbers explained what needed doing and we should have no problems getting the hookup done down the road, since all we need is a splice fitting tied to another run of PEX connecting to the (yet to be moved) pitless adapter. Should be straightforward enough.
Not much to see picture wise since, basically, everything is buried, but here's one of the main house area.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| Standing in the kitchen looking towards the master bathroom. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/3/2010
The other thing that happened today while the underslab plumbing and window-well construction was going on was the trenching of the main water line from the well.
As noted a long time ago, Tanglewood is blessed with an excellent well (around 200 feet deep) that has excellent pressure. Water normally sits anywhere from 4' to 8' down from the top of the pipe, which puts it around 3' to 7' from the surface. Frost line at this altitude is around 48" below the surface, so we've got to put the new pitless adapter at least that deep. To this end then, Collen asked the excavators (who were getting ready to pack up their equipment now that they are done with the work behind the house) to trench out a run between the well and the house, so we could lay the main water line and well-pump wiring in.
It worked out pretty well, all things considered. The excavator was able to make pretty quick work of the area, putting in a trench that was about 7' deep from well to house. They kept it slightly shallower near the house (around 5') so in the event of rain, we wouldn't get flooding inside the house proper. Now that things are dug out, we'll clean up the well casing itself and drill a new hole for the pitless adapter. The water is sitting at about 7' down from the top of the pipe, so we'll put the new pitless around 6' down. This will give us a large buffer from the frost line and still be slightly above the level of where the water line will enter the house. (It's a good idea to have the water flow downhill from the well if at all possible, since you don't want to force your well pump to always be pushing water uphill if you can avoid it--every inch is a huge loss of water pressure.)
Colleen got some good pictures of the whole thing in between bouts with the window wells and answering questions of the plumbers. Enjoy.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| The hill before the trenching begins. Note my well just right of center--it's critical that he NOT hit it at all! |
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| Trenching begins. He started by the house, since he won't be able to get there after the trench starts getting some depth. |
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| Trenching continues. He's VERY CLOSE to my well, but it's not in any real danger. |
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| You can see the outlines of the trench now. |
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| More trenching. |
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| Parked behind the well, the excavator uses his reach to continue the work. |
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| It's probably a good thing I wasn't there to see this--I would have freaked somewhere in here. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/3/2010
Colleen took the opportunity in between bouts of window-well construction to snap a shot of the "squirrel hole" where apparently a nest of the things have moved in.
Really they've been quite clever to have selected this spot. Compared to a tree it's warm, dry, high off the ground, safe from predators and will likely last for a million squirrel generations (incidentally, according to this site squirrels live around 5 or 6 years, so that's a good handful of millennia).
This area is left over from the pour way back in February when they were a bit short on concrete. This will get fixed with the next pour (after we get the squirrels cleared out, of course).
Smart squirrels, but we've got to get them out of there.
They don't tell you about animals moving into the walls in those construction books...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| The squirrel lair as seen from the apartment side of gap. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/3/2010
In the couple of days since we first pondered this conundrum, Colleen built these window wells.
They are awesome. She did goodly. They are frick'in huge!
THESE are the window wells that Tanglewood was meant to have.
Didn't she do good?
There's still a bit of work to be done as these are really just the shells created by stacking and forming the ICF blocks. The wells don't have the reinforcing rebar installed yet, since that's going to involve a lot of bending and tying. Since the wells are cobbled together with mostly partial ICF blocks they need to have a lot of patches (or "scabs") before we pour so they don't spring a leak. Additionally, we'll need to apply a hammer-drill to attach some of the rebar into the main house so the window wells will be tied into the mass rather than float. This rebar won't have to go in very far--perhaps 6"--but it's an important step that will help avoid settling and cracking of the wells down the road. Once they're all done we'll mortar in some rocks to give them a nice, natural look that will fit Tanglewood perfectly.
But that's for the future. For now, just admire her handiwork.
Dang she did good!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| The window well outside the apartment bathroom. You can see Colleen putting a couple of finishing touches on the large window well in the background. |
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| The large window well outside the apartment living room. This puppy is HUGE! We'll probably put a couple of terraces in here so flowers can be planted in here. |
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| The window well outside the apartment kitchen. The curve is a nice touch, I think. |
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| Different view of the large window well. Note the number of patches (plywood) we put on it, as well as the supporting rebar. |
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| The large window well as seen from inside the apartment. Ignore the miscellaneous tools along the windowsill; building a house is messy work. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/2/2010
While the plumbers were busy digging up the nice flat floor that the excavators had backfilled and packed solid just a couple of weeks ago to install the underslab water lines, Colleen spent her day doing some quality work starting to build the ICF window wells.
(Lest anybody wonder why the heck I let Colleen do all this work rather than getting my own butt out there, let me hasten to defend myself by noting that I was hard at work today earning money for this fondly-named Woodcock's Folly. So there.)
I noted a couple of days ago that we'd decided to build the window wells out of leftover ICF blocks, since we were going to have such a hard time finding more-conventional frames, and as soon as I saw these pictures I was very glad we had. These wells "feel" right for the size of the house, proportionally-sized but not feeling cramped at all. Of course, she's not done as of these pictures, (she had some shovel work to do first since the Bobcat just wasn't safe working that close to the back wall) but she's not that far off, either. After the wells get built, we'll need to strengthen them with some rebar in anticipation of the eventual pour, and then later after they're poured we'll come around and cement in a covering of local stones to make them look more natural.
It's an awesome start though--did I mention just how danged talented this woman is? :)
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| Partial window well around the apartment bathroom window. There was more digging to do here than anywhere else, due to the relatively low roof. |
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| Looking down the back of the house. The large window well is in the foreground (with the lovely Colleen) and the kitchen window well can be seen in the distance. Note the pile of partial ICF blocks scattered about. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/2/2010
That was certainly fast!
With the completion of the roofing work, Builder Dale's next item on the schedule was to get the the underslab plumbing started. Colleen and I plan to install radiant-heat tubing throughout the first floor just as we did with the upper floor back in January, but of course before that's done, there's some plumbing to be put under what will eventually be a slab of concrete. To that end, the plumbers came up today to get started on the trenching and installation of the underslab piping.
Tanglewood faces a couple of challenges from a plumbing perspective that complicate matters (of course). As noted before in other posts it's a very "leggy" house, and that means that lots of places that use water (for example, the master bedroom) are a long, long distance (relatively speaking) from the utility room (where one might put a pressure tank) or the well (where the water comes from). Area-specific manifolds will control the flow to sections of the house, with 1" heavy gauge PEX water tubing for the main water lines both to and from each area.
A tricky bit will be handling hot water at the farther faucets in the house. Given the length of the house, conventional piping will result in some long waits for properly-heated water at some of the outlets, and that will just lead to wastage of both water and propane in heating water that ends up sitting in a pipe and gradually cooling off. I'd thought about installing some of the "tankless hot water" systems that are very popular with many houses, but given the off-grid nature of Tanglewood, I was reluctant to dedicate what would be a not-inconsiderable amount of propane (for gas systems) or electricity (for electric ones) to this task. A better way to go seems to be to use a recirculating pump that would work to keep hot water readily available at the farther faucets in the house. While this will be an additional energy draw, most recirc pumps are relatively small draw (around 60 watts/hour), which if it runs every other hour will only demand around 720 watts/day. I can probably add a timer of some kind to the system to mitigate the pumping overnight and potentially cut the usage down more, to perhaps 500 watts/day or so.
We'll also have to get the main water line brought in from the well, and that in turn means that we'll have to move the pitless adapter from its current location to below frost line. Before we do that we want to double-check things with the inspector to make sure there aren't any "gotcha" factors in all of this--Tanglewood has an excellent well and we don't want to mess it up!
By the end of the day, the plumbers had gotten a lot done on the trenching and pipe installation, and they're pretty sure they'll be done in another day or so, weather permitting. Colleen reports that it's moving very fast and she wouldn't be at all surprised to see it done so quickly.
Dang this is all exciting!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Looking down towards the master bathroom. Those trenches are deep, but of course they need to be for protection. |
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| A better angle if a slightly fuzzier shot. You can see the main water line (the white PVC) in the bottom of the trench; the red and blue PEX are protected within it. |
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| A closeup of the trench branches. The box and pipe to the left are part of the kitchen island. |
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| Looking at the large cluster of pipes going into the main utility room. The large pipe at the far end (by the person) is for a propane overflow drain. |
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| Piping in the apartment. The kitchen is in the back, with the utility room in the foreground. |
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| Another shot at the apartment, this time looking towards the apartment bathroom (where the cluster of pipes are). |
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| Another look down the long axis of the house. The cluster of pipes on the left are for the large planter that will be built inside the picture window there. |
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| The propane drains join together and exit the house here, under the patio door on the master-bedroom branch. |
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| The main water line coming in from the well. The well itself is almost directly outside that center window, perhaps 20 feet from the house. |
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| The main water line coming out of the house. You can see the well in the lower right of the picture. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 6/1/2010
The Short Version:
We've run into a problem with the apartment window wells, but we have a solution.
The Longer Version:
The problem stems to way, waay back when we were making our final positioning of Tanglewood on the lot. We had originally had the house a bit too far "forward" on the flat spot, and our opinion in walking around and looking at things was that it felt like it was "perched" on the hillside. After a bit of pondering and fiddling with plans, we realized that if we rotated the house on the hillside a bit (around 5 degrees) it suddenly felt like it fit properly.
An unforeseen consequence of this, however, didn't become apparent until we began building. The blueprints and overhead lot diagram we were working from didn't have the hill behind the house very clearly defined, with the result that when we rotated the house we ended up pushing the entire back of the house deeper into the hillside. This had the unexpected side effect of putting the apartment windows considerably deeper into the hillside, and now we required window wells for code reasons (and just to make the windows both look better and actually be useful). There aren't many other windows along the back and (fortunately) they won't require window wells, though they will be relatively low to the ground when viewed from the outside.
Okay, so now that we've just about completed excavation along the back, the crew began digging out the window-well openings for the apartment while Colleen and Builder Dale started looking around for somebody to provide the window-well enclosures themselves. That's where we ran into a problem.
The "classic" window well enclosure is an aluminum, steel, or high-density plastic semi-circle kinda like this or this. Older versions are usually just corrugated metal, while the newer ones often will have a ladder or some steps built into them for egress (usually in the event of fire). On fancier houses they're often a bit larger and made of railroad ties or landscaping timbers to allow for a terraced effect while still providing emergency steps of some kind.
The problem we ran into was that Tanglewood's windows are, frankly, larger than the local supplier usually handles. The smaller window (off the apartment bathroom) is a standard size, but the next largest window (off the apartment kitchen) would require a special order to get the right-sized enclosure. And the largest window, the one outside the apartment living room--they flat didn't carry anything of that size.
After pondering options, Colleen and the erstwhile supplier came to the same conclusion--we'd be better off building the window-well enclosures ourselves. With a ton of partial ICF blocks lying around from the main construction effort they seemed a natural route to go, and the supplier (though he admitted he wasn't going to make any money on the deal) readily agreed. We chatted with Builder Dale, and he concurred this seemed the best way to go as well and authorized us to pull blocks out of the stockpile that was still on site (most of these blocks had been set aside for eventual use by the crew in finishing the walls at either end of the garage).
Tomorrow Colleen goes up finish the dig-out of the wells (there's only so much the Bobcat can do that close to the house) and start piecing together the wells themselves. I'll go up after work and pick up where she leaves off, and hopefully we'll have them roughed-in by the weekend.
In the meantime the plumbing crew is scheduled to come up to make an inspection and then get started on the underslab main runs. They'll be putting this stuff in now since it needs to be protected and below frost line; later they'll come back and take care of the detailed runs to each area, toilets, sinks, etc.
Things are moving quickly now... it's exhausting, but fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/27/2010
Wow... that was fast. Once these guys got started, they certainly got the job done quick!
The initial roofing is done. All the tile is on, tacked down, and the initial flashing has been installed.
I'm really fairly happy with these roofing tiles. As I noted in earlier posts, these are a bit thicker than the normal roofing tiles, have a 50-year warranty, and are pretty fire-resistant. The color is good and fits in with the "castle" look fairly well. About the only thing I could have done better would have been to use actual slabs of stone or something, and as one might suspect that's a bit pricey... maybe after the inevitable Powerball win!
There will be some more stuff down the road, of course. We haven't done any roof penetrations yet (this apparently varies by builder, but Builder Dale prefers to put the holes in as needed rather than have plans change after they're cut) and of course once they are, there will be additional flashing and such. The tower hasn't been done at all yet, nor has the waterproofing work on the deck--both of those will involve several layers of sealing and membrane installation. Neither is "classic roofing" work, however, so they'll be done by a different crew specializing in that kind of thing.
Still it's an important milestone... Tanglewood is one step closer to completion!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/26/2010
Today was pretty much a continuation of the work being done yesterday. Excavation and leveling got done around the house (mostly in the back) to sculpt the hillside for water control, and the roofers continued to install tile.
Since Colleen really couldn't do much to help either task, and she'd mostly answered all of the questions already, she spent the day doing miscellaneous chores that hadn't been getting done of late. She covered up a couple of the windows on the master bathroom to protect them from accidental damage during the excavation work, using some of the leftover plywood we have stacked up on the deck. She swept the upstairs (lots of miscellaneous little trash that didn't seem like much, but which filled an impressive two bags when it was all piled together). She organized the leftover BuildBlock that had been stashed on the deck for the future wall-building work between the house and the garage, and then for good measure she stacked up all of the firebrick that had been brought up in November and gradually knocked over by various crews. By the time she was done, the site really was very nicely cleaned up.
Oh yeah, and she got a great short movie of the tile truck doing its lifting thing. Very cool.
On her way out, she snapped a shot of the vixen returning from a successful hunt.
A good day at Tanglewood!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| Protective plywood over the bathroom windows. |
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| A shot of the stump dump, where much of the excavated soil from behind the house has been dumped and compacted. |
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| The tile truck fully extended. Notice that for this delivery he backed in rather than pulled in; that was to help get the tile to the other end of the house. |
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| Shot of the extended truck from inside the house. Note one of the crew walking around out there. |
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| Good shot of the excavation behind the house, taken from the deck. Notice how there are two levels back towards the apartment, but they merge down toward the master bedroom end. |
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| Closeup of the excavation equipment. The big guy is digging the holes; the little one is running dirt down to the stump dump and packing down the terraces. |
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| Block and tarps stacked up on the deck. The ladder goes up to my computer-room tower. |
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| The Bobcat has to be careful at this end since the roof is relatively low. Note the start of the window wells outside the apartment. |
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| Most of the terraces are done now. |
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| The block is nicely stacked again! Yay! |
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| The fox apparently snagged dinner for the evening. |
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| A roofer waits for a new load of shingles. |
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| Excavating behind the house. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/25/2010
Wow. What a day today was!
We had a truck leaking diesel fuel. We had infill. We had trees knocked over. We had excavation. We had roofing. We had another tile delivery. We had torn roofing paper. We had roofing-paper repairs. We had window-well excavations. We had a deer sighting.
Oh yeah, and we had a bird tragedy.
It was a busy, busy day.
The day started with Colleen heading up early to meet the second tile delivery truck. Turned out that they'd already arrived on site just before she did and had parked their truck to scout out the previous delivery and ensure that the driveway was clear for them to back into it. It's actually a good thing she did come up a few minutes later, because she spotted their truck merrily leaking diesel fuel down the road. She hustled up to let the crew know, and they ran down the hill to see what was going on. Turned out that it wasn't obvious what the problem exactly was; Colleen and the crew think that the truck's very full gas tank (they had filled up just before coming up) combined with it being parked kinda crooked caused a siphon effect of some kind. There wasn't a hole or puncture that they could find, so they moved the truck to a flatter spot and stuck a bucket under the tank to catch any further overflow. Fortunately there wasn't any and what had spilled evaporated over the course of the morning.
About the time this all got settled, the excavation guys came driving up the road with their large excavator. While there was already a small Bobcat on the site to handle the infill work that has been going on for the last few days, it was far too small for the work that needed to be done behind the house. The hill back there has to be sculpted and leveled a bit so that we can install retaining walls for erosion control, and to do that the excavators needed a much larger machine. They couldn't use the machine already on site because it was wheeled, and in order to move around safely they needed a tracked machine with the kind of torque and overdrive that only a good set of tracks can provide.
Once they got their equipment on site, they went over the plan of action with Colleen. There were three trees that needed to be taken down so the excavator could get up the hill, and they wanted to confirm precisely which trees were to be cut. The idea is that they'll use the excavator to push the trees over in a safe manner (it would suck mightily to have a tree fall over on the house at this point) and then I'll turn them into firewood later--in the near term there are more important things to get done first. They also had to avoid damaging some of the stuff already scattered around the site--Tanglewood's windows being fragile and in the dig area, with Tanglewood's well being probably the most critical "can't touch this" item. Lastly they had to cover the foundation drain that Colleen and I had put into place a few days back (the small Bobcat would be used for this, to avoid crushing the pipe) now that Engineer John has signed off on the work. As one might expect, there was a lot of walking and talking with Colleen as they went over the entire area before getting to work on sculpting the hillside.
They also had several questions about the window-well excavations that needed doing. While we didn't plan on this originally, Tanglewood turns out to need three fairly large window wells along the apartment windows where it's buried into the hillside. This was a side effect of our "rotating" the house two years ago (yea gods! has it been that long?!?) during planning before construction began. While I'm not a huge fan of window wells (they catch leaves and junk and have to be tended to occasionally) it was more important to get Tanglewood "positioned" correctly on the lot. It was a good choice overall; one of the compromises one runs into when building.
This was all good because the roofing crew had discovered yesterday that some of the roofing paper they'd put on had been heavily damaged by the wind in the intervening weeks, and so there was a lot of repair work that needed doing before they could continue their tile installation. Colleen got some shots of the mess as they called her over to point them out, and she spotted a patch they'd missed (it's easy to overlook) between the computer-room roof and the living-room roof.
There was a lot of this kind of thing all day long, with each crew having questions or Colleen picking up trash when she had some time when she wasn't answering questions. Then we had a bit of a tragedy happen, sadly enough. Late in the afternoon she was upstairs tidying things up when suddenly there was a fairly loud "thump" from downstairs and all of the talking suddenly stopped. She came down the ladder to find a couple of the crew looking at something on the ground outside the large downstairs window. Stepping through the (still not filled) patio-door opening, she found what they were looking at--a small bird, mud-colored, lying dead on the ground. Turns out that he (presumably it's a he for reasons that will be explained momentarily) had flown into the window, breaking his neck in the process. Poor thing.
(After the fact Colleen was able to identify the bird. He's a pointy house wren; they're apparently very common, and the males are very aggressive, dive-bombing other males anytime they're perceived to be in their territory. Undoubtedly he spotted his reflection in the large window and attacked the "intruder", smacking into the window at full speed.)
At the end of the day after crews put up their stuff and packed away their tools, Colleen headed back into town only to spot a mule-deer doe in the field about a mile in. This was a bit unusual since we don't normally see deer in the canyon this time of year; there are easier places for them to find food and the elk/bear/mountain lions tend to scare them out. She didn't care too much for Colleen's presence either, trotting briskly away across the field while checking to see if she was being chased. Colleen thought it was pretty neat.
A very busy day, with too much happening for me to do it all justice here. The initial major excavation got done, the window wells got scooped out, and the foundation drain got properly covered and smoothed. Enjoy the pictures and the movies; they tell a far better tale of how the day went.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The leaky tile truck. The bucket didn't catch much, unfortunately. |
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| The larger excavation machine comes trundling up the road. |
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| The excavator guy heads up the driveway to see where he's going to work. |
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| Roofing-paper damage on the back of the apartment. |
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| Some of the paper blew down into the foundation drain. |
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| Big and little excavators working together behind the house. |
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| Nice shot of one of the roofing-tile bundles. |
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| They're made in the USA, at least. |
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| There are only 16 shingles in a bundle... dang, these things are heavy! |
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| Good shot of the Bobcat creeping around the corner of the apartment. |
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| The Bobcat keeps filling in the foundation drain area. |
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| One of the excavator guys takes a momentary break. |
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| Long shot of the large excavator after he's cleared off the first part of the hill. You can see the still-damaged apartment roof behind him. |
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| The excavator works his way down the back of the house. |
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| Looking down the hill towards the windows. If you look carefully you can see that the ground there has been cut down more; this is for the window wells. |
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| Looking at the large apartment window well from the inside. |
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| A doe meandering across the field. |
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| Poor birdy... |
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| The large excavator sits amid its destruction at the end of its day. |
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| Closeup of the initial excavation section. |
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| Looking down the back of the house at the excavation work. Note the damaged tree--Steve Not Happy. |
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| Looking up the hill at the end of the day. Not bad. |
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| Look! We can park here! |
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Videos
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/24/2010
After a couple of sunny days since the foundation drains were completed and filled in, the road slowly dried out enough to allow the roofing folks to begin installing roofing tile today!
The truck itself had actually come up with its first big bundle of tile on Friday but couldn't get up the driveway (still a tiny bit too muddy), so the crew left it over the weekend. This wasn't too much of a problem, though they did commit one nearly unpardonable sin--they blocked in my Gator!!! After some work I was able to get it out with basically superficial damage (that turn signal was loose anyway...) and used it to help tidy up some of the mess over the weekend.
The crew wanted to get an early start today after so many unexpected delays (the weather of late has been wet and squally, causing delay in bringing up the heavy tile trucks) so Colleen met them at 7:00 AM to get started. Things went fairly well, though there was a bit of doubt for a moment about getting the truck up the driveway--turned out that the driver didn't give it enough power at first and had to make a second try before he got up to the house!
That truck is really interesting too. Turns out that the bed of the truck is a big lifting platform. Roofing folks nowadays (at least on larger jobs like this one) don't actually haul bundles of tile up by ladder or even with a big conveyor-belt contraption as I've seen on some TV shows; instead the whole top of the truck lifts up into the air on big scissor jacks to deliver the tile on a large, stable platform right at roof level! It's all very cool as you can see in a couple of the pics below and made me wish we had similar functionality on Blackie. I forget how many tons the truck is rated for, but it's quite a bit, apparently, and more if they deploy additional "legs" to steady the lifting platform (two stories is apparently about as high as they can go without putting out the bracing).
One might wonder from the picture why that big truck is carrying only a couple of bundles of tiles. Turns out that these tiles are very, very, very heavy; much more so than the normal tiles one finds at a big-box store. They're from a company called Malarkey (hmmmmm) and are in their Legacy line. They're thicker than the standard tile, are laced with asbestos fiber, and have the same fire rating as a steel roof at something like one third the cost. They have a 50-year warranty, and the only big choice we had was figuring out what colors we wanted. This load of two bundles is only about a third of the tile Tanglewood needs, but it was a full load for the truck (in fact my understanding is that they technically ran it slightly over its rated weight for that altitude, but I won't tell if you won't). Two more trips are going to be needed over the next few days (strike while the road is dry!) to get everything the crew will need to the roof.
Once the tiles were offloaded, the big truck left and the crew (they brought about a half-dozen folks) got to work unpacking and nailing and generally turning the roof from a wasteland of tar paper and felt into an actual, you know, roof. They couldn't stay the entire day, since it got too windy around mid-afternoon to safely work up there, but they made good progress and everybody is happy.
Late in the day as she was packing up, Colleen spotted a smoke monster that apparently was thinking about attacking, but she scared it off...
More tomorrow (except hopefully the smoke monster)!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| The tile truck is on the left (where it was parked over the weekend). The dump truck is carrying a load of infill for the work to be done on the inside of the house. |
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| The truck is parked in front of the house and the crew consult on the next move. |
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| Farther shot of the truck and crew getting ready to lift the tile to the roof. This guy was headed to get some ladders so they could climb up and be ready for the bundles. |
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| The truck lifts the tiles to the rooftop. Dang, that's cool! |
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| Closeup of the truck lift. Note the crewman on the lift helping make sure they don't lift straight into the eaves (that would Be Bad). |
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| Measuring and figuring out what to do. The lift provides a ready and simple deck where the crew can consult without struggling to avoid falling off, too. |
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| A view from the backside of Tanglewood; the crew is working on the roof over one of the guest bedrooms. That's a tall ladder. |
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| Smoke monster looming over Tanglewood. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/20/2010
Colleen had a couple of days here of late. Me, I just went to work and earned money for this monstrosity! :)
In between bouts of rain and gravel-truck scheduling, Colleen and one of the excavation guys (who couldn't do the digging work but could at least haul gravel) got the foundation drains in, got water-and-ice shield installed on the adjacent parts of the house, and got the foundation drains properly covered in gravel for drainage. All in all, a goodly couple of days. The only real downside, of course, is that the next phase of the excavation work didn't get done.
First, the good parts. After Colleen and I worked on getting the foundation drain properly socked and trenches dug around the outside to lay it in properly a few days ago, she was able to finish up the last bit (a run from the apartment area to daylight out the edge of the driveway). To do this, she had to tie in the existing drain we'd already laid in with the extra length of pipe I'd picked up a few days back; but that was no big problem, (since it was already socked)--the real issue was that she was stuck digging out the trench all by herself! She's tough though, and I guess it wasn't too hard, since she didn't say too much about it.
The next thing was to get the drains all covered with gravel. Rules for this vary from place to place, apparently, but in this county, they want the pipe buried with 6" of 3/4-inch washed gravel (i.e., pricey) sloped away from the building. There aren't any particular rules for how far one has to extend this slope, but given the size of the drain pipe (4") and the natural inclination of the gravel, you end up with an edge about a foot wide all the way around the house where the drain is. This gravel combined with the drain pipe and the (eventual) backfill provides an easy path for any water that might percolate through the ground to move quickly and efficiently away from the house rather than find some way under its foundation. The sock on the pipe keeps sand and silt and fine dirt from dribbling into the pipe and plugging up the whole works.
This was a lot of work, since we really can't get the Gator back there right now, but fortunately Colleen had some help from one of the excavator guys who drove up to see if things were dry enough yet for them to finish up their infill work (they weren't). Together they filled five-gallon buckets with gravel from the pile Builder Dale had brought up way back in October and then hauled them around to dump against the pipe. Since the gravel pile was about halfway down the driveway and the foundation drain was on the back side of Tanglewood, this translated into a lot of uphill walking carrying heavy loads (one of the Lessons Learned if you'll recall). This was easily the hardest and most exhausting part of the whole job, and Colleen tells me she rested for a good hour and enjoyed a leisurely lunch when she got this done--can't say as I blame her! Good work, Colleen!
The final thing done was to put on the water/ice shielding. This is an amazingly thick and tough adhesive product called Guardian Armor Ice & Water Shield. I'm sure there are lots of brands, of course, but this is what Builder Dale brought up for us to install--he uses it on all his jobs and trusts it a great deal. Colleen put most of it on by herself, though it probably would have been easier if she'd had help -- unfortunately, the excavator guy had pretty much had all the fun he could stand with the gravel hauling and had left at that point. The ice/water shield basically comes in a big roll that you cut to length (in our case, it needed to run some 24" up the side of the wall), peel off the adhesive backing, and then stick it onto the wall. Colleen reports that it has a very sticky, almost tar-like backing, but it's not so bad that you couldn't fix a misplaced piece if you had to--early on she had several mistakes, but after she got her "rhythm" she did pretty well. She did run out about 2/3 of the way through the task, though, and had to make a quick run down to Home Depot to pick up another roll--it's fairly expensive (as all of these odd building-supply things seem to be) but Builder Dale is going to reimburse her, so that's good. We'll have to put more on around the rest of the house later in the construction process, but we had to get this installed now, since this area is going to be backfilled and sculpted for water control soon.
You can see various pictures of everything below. The next step here is for Engineer John to sign off on everything before the excavators can begin to cover it up, but given the still-muddy conditions that might be a couple of days yet. They'll likely be able to get the infill work done before the weekend though, so at least we have that to look forward to.
Good job, Colleen!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Gravel covering the foundation drain along the apartment end of the house. The well is just up the hill to the right. |
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| Looking down the back of the house. This was the "long" bit of the trench and it took a LOT of gravel to cover everything properly. |
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| Ice-and-water shield installed along the apartment exterior. |
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| Looking down the back of the house. Very neat and tidy now, ain't it? |
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| Closeup of the ice-and-water shield installed. That's the apartment window there on the upper right. |
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| Another look down the back side of the house. |
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| Closeup of this same area. Note the 2x4 "scab" that didn't get removed from the concrete pour work a couple of months ago. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/18/2010
There just might be sunlight at the end of these clouds!
The weather has been fairly wet the last few days, though it's gradually getting drier and the sun is peeking out more. Colleen and the roofing folks ran up today to check on the road and see if the roofing guys can start bringing up tile. The tile we've picked out is extremely heavy (50-year, asbestos-threaded, double thickness.... pretty neat stuff) and so their trucks needs the same kind of good roads as the concrete trucks would need.
They have indeed decided that work should be able to resume tomorrow, and Colleen has notified both the gravel company and the excavator guys as well.
We'll see how it goes!
Steve in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/16/2010
One of the things that we've long had our eye on for Tanglewood is the front door.
Years ago (literally) Colleen and I spotted a what we thought was a really nifty front door over at Lowe's. It was a Pella door, made of solid rough-hewn wood and part of their Old World European collection. It is covered with large iron bolts and has a big iron speakeasy grille, which we thought was a great touch. We kept an eye on it and knew that once we started building it would be the perfect touch for Tanglewood.
Of course now that we're ready for it, Lowe's apparently no longer carries it!
Grrrrr.
We found a couple of doors that are similar, of course--it appears as if Pella and at least one competitor still sell the same general style without actually having that particular type (the rough-hewn wood, which we feel is more "castle-ish"). I took a couple of snapshots and we sent them to Builder Dale, who is farming it out to his various door contractors to see if they can find something similar and/or for less cash. If we can't have the rough-hewn wood (which will be our first choice if it can be found) then we might have to settle for something a bit more "finished", but I have my fingers crossed that the various contractors might find something. We'll see.
An annoying situation to be sure. We should have picked up that door when we first saw it...
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Closeup of the Pella door. |
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| A competing door from a company called Escon. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/16/2010
Well, that's a bit of a kick in the head.
It's good that we got the foundation drain, infill and some roofing stuff done earlier this week, as things turned a bit moist after Thursday--it's been too messy for anybody to get stuff done since then. The crew didn't do anything at all on Friday, and the weekend was too misty/cold/foggy for us to do any work outside clearing trees or whatnot. The gravel yard didn't even make the delivery of the extra 15 tons of infill we'd ordered, since the road was too sloppy for them to safely drive up.
And so we didn't. That's the way it works in the springtime sometimes. Instead, I spent the weekend divided between doing chores around Wyrdhaven, using LoopCad to lay out the radiant tubing for the first floor (it's the tool I used with the second floor tubing back in January), and down-selecting the various solar PV bids I've received so far (five bids) to a couple of finalists. I also figured out that I have a couple of questions for Radiant Kurt regarding the manifold placement, so I'll have to run by ABC Plumbing next week to have a chat with him.
Sometimes you just can't do anything outdoors, so you just shift gears to something inside. It seems there's always something that needs doing, and that list doesn't look like it's going to get any shorter in the near future...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/14/2010
Not really as useful as bats in the belfry either, come to think of it.
Colleen had noticed during yesterday's work that she thought she heard something scrabbling around in the rafters. Thinking it might be woodpeckers again, she searched the house as she went about doing her various things, but she never found anything, and finally she chalked it up to residual noise from the infill work or possibly squirrels running across the roof.
Today though, when she ran up to check on how the infill work was going (well) she spotted a squirrel dashing up into the unfinished wall between the apartment and the garage! That wasn't a good thing. When she mentioned it to the infill crew, they said that they'd seen a squirrel running up and down the wall into the void for the last couple of days. They hadn't thought much of it though and hadn't thought to mention it.
Obviously this is Not A Good Thing. We can't have squirrels living in the walls--they'll drag leaves and junk up into there and we can't have that in the wall when we get around to pouring. Colleen is going to try to chase it out (it looks like there's only the one) in the next day or so, and then we'll seal up the hole so they can't get back in there.
Silly squirrels...
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/13/2010
Well, the good news is that the gravel trucks got up to the site and dropped off the additional 30 tons of Red Canyon Breeze Structural Fill as expected. It took them a couple of hours since there were two trips involved, but at least the driver was now familiar with the run. The excavator crew with the Bobcat got to work quickly and spent the bulk of the day distributing fill and tamping it down with a motorized (and loud) piece of equipment they call a "jumping jack".
Colleen spent the day continuing to clean up and helping as needed with the gravel work. She also began to walk around and writing some precautionary instructions on the various walls around the house, both upstairs and downstairs. We're concerned that once the concrete is all poured, that the framing crew will forget that there is radiant heating in the floors and try to nail the walls to the concrete rather than glue them. They're supposed to glue them down, of course, and Builder Dale assures me that he will make sure they will be briefed, re-briefed, and triple-briefed on the matter before they get anywhere near the house--but accidents happen. We want to make it very, very clear that if nails are driven into the floor they've got a big, BIG mess on their hands--and they get to buy me a new floor.
Naturally, nobody wants that to happen. So besides the briefings and the talking and the contract stuff Colleen thought it would be a good idea to leave helpful reminder messages on the walls, in both Spanish and English (since we don't know anything about the framing crews yet). All of us agreed that this was a goodly idea and should help avoid any dispute whatsoever if somebody tries the "I didn't know" argument down the road.
Colleen got some great shots of the work being done, as well as a short movie of the jumping jack the crew is using to pack down the gravel nice and tight.
By the end of the day, the apartment, the living room and much of the garage areas were done, filled and packed into place. They look much better than they did just a couple of weeks ago when there were dried ruts in the mud. They didn't get done, but they made good progress, and the plan is to try to finish up tomorrow if weather permits (there's a front moving in and in fact it left a trace of snow at the site overnight).
Very cool to see this all coming together!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The gravel piles nicely distributed along the driveway. |
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| The jumping jack does an excellent job of tamping down the gravel. |
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| Some light snow fell overnight, apparently.... |
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| ...and it looks like more is coming in! |
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| The apartment fill, complete and tamped down. |
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| The Bobcat working on the garage area. |
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| The radiant heat warning in Spanish... |
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| ...and again in English. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/13/2010
At the last minute today, Colleen and the excavators decided that they still don't have enough gravel! We've had about 60 tons delivered so far, but the dirt within the house is packing down much better than expected, and they think they're going to run out with another days' activities.
The girls at the gravel yard know us now on a first-name basis... :)
Fun, fun, fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/12/2010
Looks like we got the additional gravel ordered just a bit too late for them to get delivery done today.
Oh, well. There was enough up there for them to get in a good day's work, though they ran out of fuel and had to stop a bit early. They'll pick it up again tomorrow when the additional gravel delivery.
Fun fun fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/11/2010
Oddly enough, the fog that moved in today seemed to attract some of the local wildlife.
Several hummingbirds apparently swooped in to avail themselves of the feeder we'd put up a couple of weeks back when the weather finally became "mostly not cold", and they didn't seem to be at all annoyed by Colleen snapping shots of them as they fed.
Imagine her surprise when she turned around to see the vixen lounging just within range of the fire Colleen had lit! Apparently she found it to be quite acceptable, and wasn't particularly bothered at all by Colleen standing just a few feet away. Amazing.
Love the wildlife in this canyon!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| A hummingbird swoops in to snack at the feeder. |
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| And another does the same. |
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| The vixen seems quite comfortable with her surroundings. |
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| Thought she spotted something to eat, apparently. |
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Comments (2)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/11/2010
Well now, looks like the 35 tons wasn't enough.
This is not entirely surprising and is more 'good news' than 'bad news', though it'll cost me some more $$$. Turns out that the clay inside the house is compacting extremely well under the tender mercies of the Bobcat. It's forming a very nice, tight 'shell' as it compacts down and that in turn will serve to help keep water and bugs out from under the house while also helping to 'seal' the underside very nicely.
The downside, though, is that the existing dirt won't go as far as the excavators had thought, and so they're using more gravel than they thought they would. They should run out sometime tomorrow morning...
...which is why we stopped by the gravel yard and ordered another couple of truckloads. Another 30 tons of Red Canyon Breeze Structural Fill should be on its way tomorrow morning! At least the driver knows the way now, though I think he's wary of the road--there's not a lot of room for a huge gravel truck to pull over if he meets traffic coming the other way.
Ah well--as Colleen says, that's the price of living in the view!
Otherwise things went as expected. It was a foggy day, which kept the dust down a bit (odd to be talking about dusty roads less than a week after everything was a muddy mess). The gravel truck showed up right on time with his first load (Colleen got a really good movie of the gravel dump itself) and the excavation/fill guys got straight to work with their boon smoothing and packing it down inside the house. The plan at this point is to work the inside digging and smoothing, pack in the requisite gravel (however much that actually ends up being), and then to dig trenches for the septic, underslab electrical, etc. as needed. Colleen spent her time answering questions of the fill guys, directing the gravel trucks when they arrived, and burning some of the scrap wood we generated when we cut up the bad trusses.
The crew who will be doing the tile installation work also showed up around noon to look over the paper job the previous crew had done and scope out a plan of attack for later in the week (weather permitting). Turns out they weren't entirely pleased--they spotted several places that they thought were shoddy and generally didn't have good things to say about where the various toe-boards and whatnot had been left (there apparently aren't anywhere near enough of them). One flap of paper had blown loose in the higher winds we've had recently, and they took some time to climb up and tack down a new bit to finish it off properly. They used green-headed nails rather than the red-headed ones that the papering crew had used, so their fixes stand out fairly vividly. Of course it'll all be covered by tile when the time comes.
The fog moved in heavily mid-afternoon (just before the second gravel truck arrived) and Colleen got a gorgeous shot of Tanglewood in the fog. Of course it didn't affect the fill crew at all, since they were inside.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The patch heavily outlined in green nails was just patched/repaired by the roofing guy climbing down that ladder. |
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| The first gravel truck arrives! |
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| Trying to back up the driveway to dump the gravel... |
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| ...but the driveway is still a bit too soft. Wow. |
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| Dumping the first load a bit farther down the hill. The Bobcat will just have to get some "outside air". |
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| Fog's rolling in... |
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| Colleen kept the fires going all day, working down the scrap wood pile. |
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| Wow... that fog got thick! |
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| The second truck arrives! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/10/2010
Today didn't see too much accomplished, but tomorrow should see a bunch of things getting done.
Some might recall a couple of months back when I had an epiphany regarding an accidental outside parking spot and my subsequent desire to preserve it. Both Colleen and Builder Dale were equally delighted with the discovery and the decision to keep the spot, but it would mean that when the time came to do the infill within the house we'd have to buy gravel rather than use this pile of excavated dirt (as was the original plan).
That time has come. Tomorrow two trucks are slated to bring up ~35 tons of Red Canyon Breeze Structural Fill, a small gravel that should work well as a house infill. It packs tightly and has a mix of clay and decomposed gravel in it, that form a dense "layer" once tamped down, that should do an excellent job of keeping heat in and cold out. Builder Dale considers it superior to using the excavated dirt, since it has no organics in it and won't have any expansion/contraction side effects one sometimes gets with fill dirt. The price is good and we have a good relationship with the gravel yard supplying us (not to mention that they're the closest ones to Tanglewood), and so it all works out well.
Additionally two pieces of excavation equipment should also join the party. One, a small Bobcat, will run around inside the house to spread and compact the previously mentioned infill. The other is a large CAT backhoe, which will focus on leveling down the back-yard area, sculpting a retaining wall area along the garage-to-apartment end of the house, and backfilling the drainage ditch Colleen and I worked on over the weekend.
One bit of bad news though--we'd originally intended to use a smaller Bobcat-like piece of equipment for this backfill work, but Builder Dale has changed his mind over the course of witnessing the soils' reaction to winter and decided that a Bobcat can't provide enough power to adequately compact the backfill. When I'd worked on clearing trees back before construction began it was with the aim of providing sufficient room for a Bobcat to get behind the house--but now that we've got to use a bigger piece of equipment, three more trees need to come down to give it room to get in there and work.
Dang.
Fortunately it's not as annoying as it could be. We had some doubts about these trees anyway, since they're near the edge of where the back-yard area is going to be lowered, so there's good reason to believe their roots would be weakened, and I had originally planned on bringing them down last summer only to have that decision voided by (what we thought then was final) the Bobcat decision. Two of them are small-to-medium sized, with the other being a bit larger; but there are lots of trees right there and thinning them out a bit probably will help more than hurt. I had some concern over them falling onto the house now that it's there, but the plan is for the larger excavation machinery to "push" them over uphill, and then we'll immediately cut them up for addition to the firewood pile--falling the wrong way shouldn't be a danger (please Odin let these not be Famous Last Words!). And where they are won't affect the scenery or the shading profile in the area at all.
In between making all of these arrangements, Colleen got the larger gravel shucked around and poured over the drainage pipe we installed so it would be nicely packed in a nice, water-movement-assisting layer. She used most of the gravel pile that had been lurking by the driveway for most of the winter too, so it was good to see it finally get where it belonged.
Tomorrow should be an exciting day!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/9/2010
Methinks I've run into another lesson of "just because this is the price the contractor offers, doesn't mean it actually costs that much".
Yesterday as Colleen and I wrestled with putting sock on the foundation drainpipe, we had wondered why this stuff didn't come that way, since it was a tedious and repetitive process perfectly suited to machinery in a big pipe-making factory somewhere. Builder Dale had asked the same question as he was picking up the stuff from his supplier, who assured him that while drainpipe was available "pre-socked" that the price was literally over 5 times as much as if we were to DIY it. We grumbled a bit at the annoying aspect of the process, but, pleased that we were saving some cash, got two pipes fully socked and ready to go. With dark falling, we elected to leave the pipe inside the house and put it out today or Monday.
This morning Colleen reluctantly told me that she'd checked the numbers and that we didn't have quite enough drainpipe to do the job. I should have actually known that of course--Tanglewood's footprint is much larger than the 200' of pipe we spent quality time with yesterday, even if we're only considering the "back" part of the house that needs the foundation drain. Knowing that I had a couple of things I needed to do at work (yes, on Mother's Day) she offered to run up and put in the new stretch of pipe if I'd go out and get it. I agreed (heck, it honestly was the least I could do!) and so I headed over to the local Home Depot to pick up another roll and another sock.
(As an aside: I know that many here don't like Home Depot much. I think the kindest name I've seen it referred to here is the B.O.R.G. -- the Big Orange Retail Giant. On the other hand, they've very likely to have what you're looking for, if you need it on a last minute basis, and this was a perfect example of just such a need. As long as the price wasn't absolutely insane, it was worth getting supplies here rather than waiting for Builder Dale to be able to bring them up a day or two later.)
So off I go to the local Home Depot and track down the drainpipe, figuring the sock would be near it. It was, but as I was starting to pull down the roll from the shelf, I noticed that they already had some sitting there at the end of the shelf that was already socked. More to the point, the price of the already socked pipe was exactly the same as the price of the unsocked pipe plus a roll of sock.
That's right--no difference whatsoever in the total price, with somebody else having done all that annoying work. Hmmm.
No "Five times the cost". No hours lost in carefully getting sock onto the pipe. Just a simple decision over whether or not to save ourselves a bunch of work.
Now to be fair I don't actually know what prices Builder Dale's supplier was quoting. I don't know if his price was $5 vs. $25 (in which case, they were literally if not usefully correct) or $25 vs $125 (in which case there was definitely room to consider the DIY route). But still--the base price at Home Depot is a compelling bit of evidence that possibly Builder Dale might want to consider some of the things his supplier is telling him.
Builder Dale will have to have a chance to chat with him about that little tidbit down the road. In the meantime, I didn't give it a bit of thought--just took of a snapshot of the various prices, had the un-torn socked pipe brought down from the high shelf (the one in arm's reach had some tears in the sock, a hazard of it coming pre-socked I'd guess). Then brought it home and surprised the heck out of Colleen.
Pipe's all installed and awaiting a nice layer of gravel now.
Totally cool.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/8/2010
Words can't express how annoyed I was a couple of weeks back when I went to fire up my beloved Gator for a new season of work, only to discover that he had a flat tire. Grrrrrr...
Earlier this week, I got in my replacement tires from the local John Deere dealer and today before we got started on the footer-drain excavation I got them snugly installed on my Gator. It was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be, not so much because of the tires (those went on easily) but because it was a bit tricky to get the snowplow blade off! Not to mention the fact that it's just a smidge too awkward and heavy for one person (me, anyway) to handle easily--I really should have had Colleen's help, but she was at the house getting things ready for us to begin the digging.
Yay! The Gator lives!!!!!!!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/8/2010
One of the things on the list of "we can do this and save a bit of cash" things we worked out way back at the start of this adventure was for Colleen and I to install the footer/foundation drain.
Not that this would actually be all that much, of course, but every little bit helps. The footer/foundation drain (however you prefer to call it) is basically more or less what it sounds like, a drainpipe that runs along the footer to catch any water that might trickle down from the ground level and route it away from your footers safe and sound. The idea is that rain happens, of course, but since your footers are (ought to be, anyway, depending on your construction codes) below frost line, they typically won't actually see water unless you're really experiencing a deluge. If you do get water trickling down to the footer level, the drainpipe will catch the water and whisk it away to some nicely-distanced location a ways from your house. No muss, no fuss, and you shouldn't have any problems with water infiltration or potential frost under the footers.
Here in El Paso County, you're required to install a 4" corrugated and slit pipe below frost line. Further, the top of the pipe can extend no further than 3" above the top of the footer, and you want to have a slope to convey the water away from the house to daylight (or a more extensive drainage system downhill). You're not required to have a full drain system around the entire footer, just the "uphill" side of your design, which for Tanglewood is basically the back side that's partially buried into the hillside.
Back when Tanglewood was first excavated Builder Dale thought ahead a bit and did his best to trench past the footers themselves so that we wouldn't have much digging to do at this point in the project, and while this was definitely helpful, there were some decidedly mixed blessings. The good news was that most of the area behind the house only needed a bit of digging to smooth out bumps and get the trench wide enough for the pipe. The bad news, though, is that much of that area is rather difficult to work in! The wall is very close to the hillside in many areas, with the result that some of the areas where we had to trench were extremely narrow. Just to add to the fun, the areas most piled high with dirt were of course where much of that same dirt had slid down into the trench over the winter, so not only was it harder to work in these spots, there was also more work to do! Just to make things more annoying, Colleen had actually tried to get this done back before winter in late November, but the day after Builder Dale brought up the rolls of pipe, the weather turned nasty and it never got dry or warm enough for her to work on it until today.
There was another problem which had prevented Colleen from working on this herself until I was able to assist this weekend, that being the relative "isolation" of the back side of the house. Just imagine if you were working down in one of those narrow trenches with the dirt piled high behind you and suddenly it caved in, pinning you against the back wall. It probably wouldn't kill you, but you'd be stuck on the back side of a gigaton house in a narrow trench where nobody would hear you yelling even if they pulled into the driveway. Not a good scenario, but one which played heavily in Colleen's dreams over the last couple of days--so she decided to just wait until she had some help. (Smart girl.)
So today we took advantage of our good weather to dig up the trench and get the drains installed in anticipated of backfill work next week (weather permitting, of course). She worked at one end of the house with me working at the other, and the gravel and dirt that we dug out got dumped into two piles at one end of the house or the other. There were some surprises of course--lots of nails and junk that the workers (both concrete and truss) had thrown over the side of the house (gotta let Builder Dale know about that) and bits of foam and 2x4s were buried throughout the run. Our biggest surprise was when Colleen pulled out a bit of foam to find an inch or so of ice and snow*! Wow. Overall though, it was a pleasant enough day, with good, satisfying work that left us with a clear sense of accomplishment by the time we were done. Seeing that nice, level trench when we were all done was well worth it!
The exhausting part came not so much from the digging, though, as it did after we were done. Builder Dale had brought up 200' of corrugated pipe and 200' of sock to cover it back in November. The sock is a mesh fabric that encases the pipe (rather like a sausage) so that dirt can't infiltrate into the pipe and plug it up.
This is where things got a bit funky, though. The supplier had pipe that already had the sock installed, but his price was (I'm not making this up) over 5 times the price of the bare stuff. Now I don't know if his price was $1/foot vs. $5/foot (arguably worth it anyway) or $25 vs. $125, but Builder Dale thought the difference was significant enough that he knew we'd rather do it ourselves.
I agree he made the right decision, but it was much harder to do this than we thought it would be. The first pipe took us 2 1/2 hours to sock completely, and we were both exhausted by the time we were done. The sock is barely big enough to fit over the pipe, since a snug fit is desired before you bury this thing, and that in turn make it difficult to roll onto the pipe. We had to do it in stages, pushing the sock onto the pipe and then pulling it down towards the uncovered end, over and over and over again. By the time we were done, the sun was going down, I'd torn my leather jacket in two places and had cut both my hands (corrugated pipe can be amazingly sharp if you grab it wrong), and Colleen was alternately putting on her gloves to keep her fingers warm and tearing them off 30 seconds later to get a better grip on the sock. The pipe seemed like it would never end--and when it did we still had one more to go! Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
Fortunately we'd learned from our mistakes the first time around (and we weren't quite as slow as we were--cold is a great motivator I guess) and so we got the second pipe done in only about an hour. Still, by the time we were done, it was well onto dark and we didn't have time to put the pipe into the trenches because it just wouldn't have been safe, so we left it all lying there for tomorrow.
Exhausting work, but given the price differences, it was well worth it.
Steven in Colorado Springs
* The ICF is so well insulated and the hillside protecting Tanglewood provides so much
protection that there was still ice and snow up against the footer
weeks after the foam had dropped down to cover it up--absolutely amazing. I think this was a very good choice for the construction!
Photos
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| The trench along the master bathroom. |
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| Looking down the back along the master bedroom to the utility room in the distance (at the bend). It was tricky to work in here, and this was the area Colleen was most worried about. |
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| Looking along the back of the garage towards the apartment. You can see one of the rolls of corrugated pipe still stashed back here from the start of winter. |
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| Looking along the back of the apartment. This area was easy to work in. The area to the right is going to be brought down about 5' in the second phase of exacavation. |
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| Along the front of the apartment. Again, lots of room here to make the trenching work. |
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| The first drainpipe, roughly half socked. We chose the master bedroom "wing" as our work area--we needed a LOT of room! |
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Comments (0)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/5/2010
Obvious jokes aside...
While she was puttering around this afternoon getting work done, Colleen noticed turkey sign (okay, poop) smack in the middle of our driveway. This is the first tangible sign that we've ever had that the turkeys in the canyon actually come up this high; I've heard them before from the ridge where the anemometer is located, but with the acoustics up there, they could easily have been half a mile away. We've also taken a couple of pictures of turkeys just below the site near the pond (which makes sense, as it's a rich area for them), but there's nothing obvious that would bring them further up the hill away from the wet areas, so we just didn't think they would come up to the house.
Apparently we were wrong though. Neat!
Steven in Colorado Springs
P.S. And no, this isn't particularly a 'building' thing, but it's exciting and so I'm going to document it anyway.
Photos
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| Turkey droppings in the driveway. Looks like practically every type of critter in the canyon has been up here now... wow! |
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Comments (0)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/5/2010
The road up to Tanglewood is mostly dry and passable by large trucks now, and so we're beginning to gear up for the next push of construction. We had the painters up just yesterday to do the fascia around the house, and Colleen and Builder Dale are beginning to try to figure out when the excavators can come up to do their magic.
Today though was another dry, warmer day (low 60s), and Colleen took advantage of it to do a couple of things. The final truck from the truss company came up to collect bits and pieces of lumber, nails, and whatnot that were unused during construction, and these will be credited back to our account in a few days (yay!). They've been wanting to do this for a couple of weeks but of course the weather prohibited them from being able to do this at all.
While they were stacking and sorting, Colleen was busy doing more cleanup. She bagged trash, and she stacked the masonry brick (originally dropped off way back in November but knocked over by one of the concrete trucks back in January). She cut up some of the trusses that the contractors wouldn't take back (nails in them, split wood, etc.) and built piles for us to further sort this coming weekend. She moved discarded pallets over to the main campfire where they will be nailed together was an impromptu wood holder, and she swept the upstairs (lots of dirt has been tracked up there over the winter) as much as possible. She ran a magnetic sweeper over the ground to pick up nails and screws (keep one of these around always!), and everywhere that she found things that had strayed from their original boxes/buckets/piles she picked them up and put them back.
A busy day, lots of things big and little, but all useful. Goodly job, Colleen!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Tanglewood from the bottom of the driveway. The walls will be scrubbed before we put the stone and stucco on, of course. |
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| The pile of masonry bricks got knocked all over the place during the winter. |
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| Some stacking has been done here--she's obviously very proud of the work (those bricks are heavy!). |
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| All of this mess has to be cleaned up and cleared out. Note the truck on the left is nearly full already. |
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| The lumber retrieved by the truss contractors nearly ready to head out. |
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| She's gotten a bunch of trash picked up here, but there's obviously more to do. |
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Comments (0)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/4/2010
A big step today (not sure I could call it a "milestone", but it's close) as the fascia got painted in anticipation of the roofing tile work coming soon.
One of the reasons Colleen and I have spent some time recently figuring out house colors was because we knew that this "first coloring" of the house was coming just as soon as the road dried up enough to permit work to resume. Now that it has, the painting crew was anxious to get a look at the house, figure out what tools they would need (it's a tall house, after all), and get the initial painting of the fascia done.
The fascia painting at this stage is something I didn't know about, but apparently it's fairly common. Painters (and particularly Builder Dale) like to do the fascia and (ideally) the eaves as early as possible before the roofing tiles are put on, so that there's no chance of accidentally slopping paint onto the tiles themselves. In our case, they've also got to be careful of the windows, since they usually don't go in quite as early as they did on this project. Fortunately the relatively deep eaves and height of the fascia worked in their favor here, since they had to use longer and clumsier tools (paint rollers on a stick) and thus were a bit more careful about losing control of them. It all worked out nicely.
(For what it's worth, though, I'm not sure a dab or two of paint on the tiles will really make much difference since they're a mottled black/brown/green/red color themselves, but that's okay. Better safe than sorry of course, and I appreciate the attention to detail--it will pay dividends later if it carries through.)
And so it was a relatively short day, but an important one. Colleen and Builder Dale supervised the painting and discussed some of the cleanup work that needs to be done to get ready for the next excavation phases (interior, back yard, and slope behind the house) as well as the installation of the foundation drain (our job this weekend). She loaded her little truck with plenty of scrap wood too--we always try to bring down full loads of whatever needs picking up just so as to not waste a perfectly good hauling trip. Of course I've got a bunch of work to get done myself when I can--there are trees that need clearing for the solar PV system and new Gator tires to be installed.
Things are starting to gear up again... yes!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The truck, a trailer, and the trash/stuff that will soon be loaded upon it. Those bags to the right are "normal" litter. |
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| The fascia here hasn't been touched yet; Colleen took this as they were unpacking their tools. |
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| ...and the front of the house after. As you can see, the fascia is a nice, almost flat black. |
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| The front of the house before... |
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| Another shot of the tower side of the living room, showing the paint work there. The eaves will get done once the tiles are on, but before the stucco. |
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Comments (0)
Posted to tanglewood by Steve in Colorado Springs, CO
on 5/3/2010
Colleen ran up briefly today to check that the roads were ready for work to resume. They are indeed, and so tomorrow the first painting crew will be heading up to get some work done. Yay!
On the other hand, she also reported that the woodpeckers we discovered yesterday are still winging around the upstairs. Even worse, they've drilled a couple more holes in my gables (apparently one wasn't enough) and haven't been as picky about where they relieve themselves as one might hope. Rats with wings is what they are.
This. Cannot. Stand.
Tomorrow when the painters head up, Colleen will also be taking up some noisemakers to try to scare them off, and we've got a couple of those "moving owls" that apparently will work for a little bit before the birds get used to them. Can't have them eating holes in Tanglewood's gables!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Comments (2)
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