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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 3/5/2010
....the truss company is NOT going to be paying for it.
Kinda figured.
Sigh.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 3/3/2010
Today was one of those "good news, bad news" kind of days.
Of course the good news is the "pat on the back" kind of good news, whereas the bad news is more of the "this is probably gonna cost you money" bad news.
Sigh. Never seems to work out the other way, does it?
First the good news. After the aborted run a couple of days ago (things were just too slick and messy) the bank inspector went up today with Builder Dale and Colleen to do his more-or-less monthly inspection. It's been great working with both my bank and this inspector, in no small part because he seems genuinely excited by the Tanglewood project. It's a good sized house and we're located in a truly spectacular area, and he enjoys coming up to see our progress from time to time. This visit went well--the snow has been melting steadily since Monday and while the roads and work area are muddy you can start to see a bit better now how things are going together. He was excited by the progress that's been made so far with the trusses and was of course glad to see that Colleen and I hadn't skipped off to Aruba with the bank's construction money. That all went very well.
Now for the not so good news. While looking at the crew's progress from yesterday Colleen and Builder Dale realized something at nearly the same time--the trusses in the living room are wrong. Just plain wrong. They are supposed to be scissor-trusses since we have an open ceiling towering up in the living room, but instead (as you can see in the snapshots attached below) they are the standard "triangle" shaped trusses.
General chaos ensued once Builder Dale and Colleen noticed this, and there was much consulting of plans. The crew had generically wondered why the trusses were this way but they work on a lot of different houses so they didn't know what the plan was, and the blueprints are definitely mixed in terms of what they say. While they appear to say "open to above" fairly clearly, what they allegedly don't explicitly call out is something like "Here Be Scissor Trusses!". Whether or not that should have been caught by one the half dozen folks who have been looking at the plans, or whether the blueprint should have been more explicit, is apparently a subject of some debate.
There's a meeting tomorrow with the truss crew to figure out what to do--or more precisely where the fault lies. The trusses have to come out and new scissor trusses will have to be built. There's apparently also some confusion over the roofline adjacent to the computer room tower that nobody seems to have noticed in the 142 other reviews of the plans, so that's got to all be worked out too.
I quite honestly am not a happy camper and I'm sorry for my bad mood showing. Experience has shown me that this kind of thing nearly always somehow gets dumped back on the hapless owner, whether or not he had anything to do with it or would have even recognized it if he'd seen it. Taking responsibility for goof-ups like this is not something I've seen much of out of most subcontractors and apparently nobody thought to ask about these trusses at any point in the last couple of months. (Lest one think that every subcontractor is to be mistrusted that's not the case--there have been a couple that stepped up on somewhat lesser mistakes and they're very much on my To Be Admired List). Now I'm afraid I'm going to have to look over every single thing that's done from here on out before somebody runs out and builds a frame that's 2" short or a countertop that's 1' wide just because of a typo on the plans....and that's just going to slow everything down as I become a one-man bottleneck.
Not fun. Not something I want to do. Probably going to be a nasty hit to the discretionary budget.
Don't see a way around it.
Sucky day.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The trusses looking down from the library through the media room and beyond. This is all goodly. Nice work too; those trusses look very fine. |
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| The bad trusses over the living room are in the background. These are supposed to be scissor trusses, but obviously they're not. Nice construction though, gotta give them that. |
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| Another shot of the bad trusses. I'd bang my head against the wall if I thought it would help.... :( |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/27/2010
I continue to be amazed at how rapidly things progress from week to week as I go up to gather weather data!
Last week the concrete crew were wrapping up and packing up while the roofing crew was trying to get some work done in nasty, cold weather that basically shut things down completely. This week though the weather was much nicer (high 30s and mid 40s), with the result being that there are now trusses on the house!
There's still quite a bit of snow up there but the crew made good progress regardless. They've gotten perhaps 1/4 of the house done, though it's towards the "easy" end of the second floor where there's a bend in the roofline but nothing too complicated. The apartment is probably the only other "easy" bit to be done, and then they move into the more complicated "three rooflines come together while working around the computer room tower" bit on the south end--which doesn't promise to be easy at all. (Heck, it wasn't even easy for Colleen to draw so it's got to be harder for these guys to manhandle trusses around to match--I don't even them one bit!) While there are still some trusses lying in the road (bad!) most of them are either on the second floor or staged along what will be the driveway. They've got a strong incentive to get the trusses out of the driveway area since eventually all of that area will be mud as spring moves in and we get warmer days, and working with muddy heavy awkward trusses is harder than working with simply heavy awkward trusses.
The forecast promises nicer weather (even 50s!) and sunny skies so my guess is that they'll make good progress and maybe even start nailing on some of the OSB that's lying around. Yay!
Dang this is exciting!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Long shot of Tanglewood with Colleen standing dramatically in one of the hallway windows. Note the trusses on the northern end--yay! |
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| She thought I was done with shots from down below--heheheheheh! |
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| Closeup of the trusses over the guest bedrooms. |
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| Looking down the road. You can see where the snow's been plowed off to the side, and the melt is responsible for those patches of ground you can see. |
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| Trusses in the middle of the road--bad! Builder Dale will be having a word with the crew. In the background you can see the trailer that the concrete crew guys have been filling with their tools and such. |
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| Another shot of the badly stashed trusses..... |
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| Looking at Tanglewood from the rampart side. No trusses here yet. |
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| Closeup of the front door area. You can see the library at the top there; this has been VERY helpful in lifting trusses to the second floor. |
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| Colleen mans the ramparts! |
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| At least these trusses are out of the road....they plan to move them up on Monday. |
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| Looking at the guest bedroom over the apartment garage. |
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| The crew wisely is using the interior to store some of their materials. Int he distance you can see some of the Buildblock that will (eventually) seal up that big hole into the apartment area. |
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| Great shot of the trusses looking towards the guest bedrooms from the library area. |
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| Closeup of the trusses. The close spacing is both for snow-load and hurricane-roof reasons. Nice workmanship on the trusses too. |
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| Closeup of one of the trusses taken from below. |
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| Looking off into the living room area. Trusses will be going in here next. |
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| Another shot of the trusses from the library area. That black trash bag is covering one of my radiant heat manifolds. |
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| "Don't take a picture of me...."
Trusses stacked up on the second floor awaiting deployment. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/27/2010
Colleen and I ran up today to check out the site, download weather data (I have an 8-day logging capacity at the rate I'm collecting info, which is once every 5 minutes at present), and meet with some folks interested in doing the solar power. The roofing guys were also coming up to do some work since they'd only been able to work in small fits and starts over the last couple of days due to the snow.
Sadly the most important stuff, the roofing, didn't get very far. The road was still extremely slick from the (thankfully) melting snow and they didn't really bring enough people, so all they managed to do was move some of the trusses out of the road (good, but "some" isn't "all"--gotta talk to Builder Dale about that) and then nearly fall off the trusses in the snow (bad). They decided that things were still just too messy/wet/slick for them to realistically work safely, so we met them coming down as we were going in. to their credit at least they had gotten an early start!
After Colleen and I got up there she set to work clearing some snow while I downloaded weather data, walked around, took some snapshots and asked some questions. Right about the time I was done with that the prospective solar installers showed up.
It was an interesting meeting. When I'd worked with a solar group a couple of months ago they mostly just wanted to see my estimated loading and then they kicked me a price estimate a week or so later. These guys were a bit different--we walked around as I described the layout of the house, and then hiked up to where I believe the panels should be ground-mounted. We talked a lot about deploying the panels in this area and then measured the distance back down to Tanglewood (~400 feet) so we could figure in the costs of trenching and running line to the house from the panels and such. Of particularly note was the talk about whether it made sense to bring DC down to the house and inverter it to AC there, or to convert to AC at the panels and bring that down the road instead (we decided on AC for line loss reasons). We then discussed our existing well pump (a Teal 11-stage 120 volt job), which as 120V pumps go is a fairly efficient model (240V pumps are somewhat better overall) and whether or not it should be replaced, ultimately deciding not since it's working fine as is.
Of note was the fact that the company's rep proactively brought an electrician to listen to the whole thing and gather data to put in a bid for doing the electrical work within the house as well. Now, long time readers will know that I've spent a lot of time thinking about the electrical and have always planned on doing it myself, but it never hurts to verbally go over your ideas anyway and who knows? I might get a bid that makes handing it all off worth considering. Either way I was glad he was there, and it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.
I took a couple of pics of the area I plan to place the ground mounts. I have in mind something along the lines of what was featured in Issue #134 of Home Power Magazine, a large system the writer built for his 28-panel at a significant cost savings as compared to having it done "professionally". Of course I've no idea what the company that was looking at the job today will come up with; I'll report here as information flows in.
And that was about it. We left as soon as they did, noting the significant snow melt that had happened during the day and taking hope that this would mean the roofers could get a good week of it on Monday! We'll see.....
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The left hand side of the solar panel area. I plan to clear out this scrub oak and some of the trees to widen the view to the south, but this hill is already pretty well situated. |
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| The right hand side of the area in question. Some more pine trees here have to be cleared, but other than stuff sticking above the ridgeline to the south we should be in pretty good shape. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/26/2010
Well, the "little bit of snow" that we got here in town (maybe an inch) meant a good 6" to 8" of snow at Tanglewood, depending on where you measured it and where the drifts were. All fluffy and white and fairly dry, but a lot more than we got anywhere east.
Wow.
The roofing crew tried to go up but quickly turned around and went back to town. They weren't really chained up for this kind of snow, and of course the house would have been a mess anyway. Colleen went on up to do a quick job of pushing snow off of the second floor, but tomorrow is supposed to actually be a pretty good day temperature wise so we're hoping that the sun and wind will make quick work of the fluffy white mess.
Crew is supposed to come up tomorrow (Saturday), but there's another front moving in tonight so that's problematic. We'll see.
Look at the bright side though--springtime is one day closer! Yay!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/25/2010
Today started okay but quickly turned nasty. The crew had planned on coming up later in the day, but by the time they got going things were starting to turn nasty and so after some consultation with Colleen and Builder Dale they canceled.
The danger of building in winter.
Did I mention you should never ever ever build in the winter?
Never. Ever. You get nothing but heartache and unplanned snowplow expenses, punctuated with a couple of days of amazing progress.
But hey...that's life "in the view", I reckon.
We'll see how tomorrow works. Snow has a 50% chance of clearing out of the way.
Sure will be fun to live up here though!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/24/2010
With yesterday's relatively good weather and Colleen's excellent job of clearing the snow off the second floor the roofing crew were finally able to get back to work today. The weather was overall very nice (sunny, low 40's) and lent itself well to the otherwise relatively heavy work of moving trusses around.
Tanglewood's trusses were somewhat problematic for a long time during the planning and initial bidding phase. We had gradually evolved them over time as the roofline solidified, with the last major change coming from Colleen when she applied an artist's eye (rather than an engineer's eye) to the problem and greatly simplified the layout. We then got various bids, but when we decided a while back to go with Builder Dale he had his own preferred suppliers and so they did the bidding as well, ultimately getting the task. They've been working on the trusses since around October to get them ready for when we were finally done with the second floor pour, and so began hauling trusses up to the site a week or so ago.
Of course so far the trusses have all been unloaded and left down on the ground--they either didn't have enough manpower to work on lifting them up to the second floor, or ran out of daylight, or weather was moving in, or there was a combination of all three. That meant today was the first real day for the roofing guys to get the trusses stacked near where they could actually use them.
This was all a lot easier said than done, as you might expect. They've decided not to bring up a crane, in part for cost reasons and in part because it would be problematic getting it to the site in the first place. They opted instead to haul each truss up over the dropoff from the second floor library to the living room, the same place Colleen and I have been shoveling snow off the second floor for the last couple of weeks to create the Living Room Iceberg. Colleen even spread a bit of gravel around the library area to help them avoid any slippery bits of ice she might have missed, and that appears to have helped quite a bit. The Iceberg even gave them a natural slope that helped them push/pull/lever each truss onto the second floor; Colleen got some excellent movies of this whole process and from the looks of things they did a pretty dang good job. (As useful as it was of course I fully expect the Living Room Iceberg to be in somebody's way sooner rather than later, but until then I'm going to ignore it and hope that Spring comes early this year!) I believe the longest truss is 32 feet long, and the heaviest ones
(which basically go where the roof changes pitch or slope) consist of 3
sets of 2x4s rather than just one. They all look very heavily constructed, which makes sense as they're required (county code and my personal preference anyway) to handle very heavy snow loads and 100mph wind gusts. I was a bit surprised that they built and brought them up in one piece though, rather than building sections and then assembling them on site--I'd just assumed that they would be too long and heavy to work with this way, but apparently they're used to this kind of thing. Very nice.
Late in the day another (final, I think) load of trusses was arriving as Colleen was headed out. This was the same driver as the guy who took the wrong turn a few days ago, and while he wasn't lost this time they were definitely behind schedule--I believe the crew had been expecting him around noon. After a bit of chat about the status of things he headed on up while she headed on down; the remaining roofing crew should help him get the rest of the trusses unloaded.
So that was the bulk of the day, more or less. Colleen continued to clean up and put things away (the remaining Buildblock all has to be moved either downstairs or out onto the deck where it will be out of the way) while the crew dragged trusses onto the second floor and stacked them at one end of the building or the other depending on their coding. There's a bit of sill work yet to be done but they'll probably do that tomorrow ahead of the next bout of weather (never build in winter!) due on Thursday. Pics and movies of the whole thing can be found below.
Dang this is exciting!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| An Abert's squirrel was checking out the commotion in "his" woods. |
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| The sill work here isn't done yet, but it won't take them long. |
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| Levering up one of the trusses. This is one of the heavier ones that spans a roofline transition. |
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| Getting ready to push it down to the other end of the building. |
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| That same truss a few seconds later as they slide it to a temporary storage location. |
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| Working it into position. They'll end up leaning it on the far wall until they're ready to put it up. |
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| Trying to find a safe way to let go..... |
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| Snow stacked on the ramparts. |
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| Good shot looking along the outside of the ramparts....you can see a couple of the drains pretty well here. Colleen had to lean out a bit to get this one. |
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| An unusual "reverse" look along the outside towards the living room in the distance. |
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| The crew working another truss through the front door to eventually be levered up to the library. |
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| One pile of trusses safe and sound at the south end of the house. |
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| Another pile of trusses at the north end. Notice the flamethrower/propane bottle in the foreground; Colleen got that to help with some of the stubborn ice patches. |
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Videos
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| Hauling a truss onto the second floor. Fortunately this was the heaviest one. |
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| Colleen meets the truss truck as she heads back into town. This is (of course!) one of the nastiest turns on the road. |
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| He has to work it a bit but he gets around the turn without any real problem. Turns like this were why I was afraid the trusses might have to be brought up in sections! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/23/2010
Wow.
After the past few days of snow...and more snow on top of that... we knew that there wasn't going to be any construction work at Tanglewood until we had a couple of days of shoveling and melting past us. Today Colleen and some hired help (thanks Dan!) ran up to assess the snowfall and shovel off the second floor again (something we've become all too familiar with since the LiteDeck was poured a few weeks back).
What she found was a winter wonderland.
The sunlight was brilliant and the air temps were pleasant enough if you were moving around. Getting an early start since she didn't quite know what to expect, as soon as Colleen started up the canyon (Blackie had been thoughtfully chained up a couple of days ago) she was presented with fantastical sights. The snow drenched everything in white icing, and the canyon was so bright that she had to put on her sunglasses whenever she emerged from under the trees into sunlight.
Picking her way up the canyon--there had been traffic from a couple of the folks who live up there but about half of the road was unmarked and very slick--she was particularly delighted with how Tanglewood looked in the snow. She said later that it looked like the "Fairy Queen's Palace" (though personally I prefer "Winter King") and judging from the pics she's not far wrong. It was amazing how the stark, bright white of the ICFs blended in with the thick white snow, and the alternating shadows and sunlight leant an almost camouflage look to Tanglewood's ramparts (we have crenelations now so I can call them ramparts right?). You can see for yourself in the pictures below; I think these are some of the prettiest pictures of the canyon either of us has ever been able to capture.
She estimates that we got about 6" of snow down below in the lower part of the canyon, perhaps 8" up above. She and Dan spent about 4 hours shoveling and sweeping the snow off of the second floor in anticipation of the roofing crew being able to get down to business later this week (good weather is predicted for the next couple of days).
Amazing canyon....it will be an honor and a privilege to live there!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| This tree (which we've show before with some wild turkeys under it) is at the mouth of the canyon. It looks magnificent, don't you think? |
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| A shot of the road and canyon wall about a half mile in. Wow. |
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| Neat shot of sunlight topping the snowy trees along the road. |
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| Magnificent shot looking from the road towards the southern rim about halfway up to Tanglewood. |
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| Notice the leaning tree towards the middle bottom right. We've been watching this one closely all winter; it's probably going to fall over one of these days and block the road. |
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| Closer view of the tree in question. I think the only thing holding it up right now are its branches intertwined with the tree just to the right. |
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| The Winter King's Palace! |
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| Trusses piled up in the driveway don't detract from how pretty this all is, does it? Look at the way those trees glow! |
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| Closeup of the patio door/living room area from the road. |
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| The Ramparts of Tanglewood. |
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| Good shot of the mountain to the north through one of the living room window holes. |
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| Dan hiking back and forth on the second floor, sweeping snow. |
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| Closeup of Dan apparently doing all the work. Note the pile of "leftover" Buildblock in the background; most of that will go to finish up the openings on either end of the garage downstairs. |
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| Simply magnificent. |
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| They did a pretty good job, I'd say. Note there's some more Buildblock down at that end of the house too. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/20/2010
Ick. What a miserable batch of weather we've gotten today!
We knew that there was a bit of a front moving in overnight, but everybody still thought that we'd be able to get some more roofing work done and the crew had agreed to come up today to make up for the lack of progress yesterday. What we didn't count on was the "nastiness" factor of what did move in.
Normally we get some snow, or maybe some cold, or maybe cold and snow combined. You can usually work around those if the sun is out, so long as the wind stays low or non-existent. Today however we didn't have that--we had icy cold rain/snow that drizzled steadily throughout the lower part of the canyon, sticking to your windshield and glasses and making navigation of the road an exercise in slippery driving.
Colleen and I got to the canyon mid-morning, mostly to follow up the crew and because I needed to download weather data anyway. We knew that the crew had gone up because the truck from yesterday was gone, but the weather had us questioning the wisdom (and ability) to get any real work done. As it was we had to put snowchains back on Blackie again; he'd been running without chains since the second pour was completed since we were taking loads of recyclables into town as part of the site cleanup but today the road was just too slick to continue that particular practice.
About halfway up the canyon the drizzle/rain/snow stopped (which was nice) but the temperature dropped about 5 degrees, the fog got thicker and lower, and the humidity went up a bunch--it was amazing how you could feel the difference over just a few yards of road. We got to the site with no real problem, only to find two truckloads of the roofing guys getting ready to head out. They'd taken the flatbed of trusses up and unloaded them, and they promptly fell over on the icy surface. The whole area was just too slick and messy to realistically get any work done, and the cold (made worse by the humidity) was just penetratingly nasty--I was getting cold toes and fingers just during the introductions!
We talked a bit about where we were and what the plan was for next week. This site is a bit unusual in that it's difficult to get to the back side of the house, and so the roofing crew has a problem in figuring out how to get the trusses onto the roof. The general thought is to either walk the trusses through the front door opening and pull them up over the libary/great room drop (where we'd been dumping all the snow, of course) or to bring up a crane t lift them up over the garage area. They'll make a decision once they try the manual method a couple of times and see if that's going to work or not.
Of course it was decided to call things off for today. As we were talking the fog dropped lower and I'm pretty sure it got colder too....it was just an icky, nasty, cold day.
I am very much looking forward to (once Tanglewood is all built-oh that happy, happy day!) sitting inside by a roaring fire, drinking hot chocolate and watching squirrels shiver on the branches outside the library. It will be goodly.
So after I got my weather data downloaded we packed it in, took a few pictures, I and headed back down to town. I couldn't climb up onto the second floor as the concrete folks took their ladder and the roofing guys haven't deployed theirs yet due to the aborted day. Nothing much really got done today other than another load of trusses getting up to the site (I think this was the las set, but I'm not sure). That's the way it works when you build in winter (I think I've mentioned that you should never ever ever ever ever ever ever do that, right?), I reckon.
Fun in a frozen kind of way.....
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| My anemometer is somewhere over there on the other side of that fog, not that you can tell from this pic. Gorgeous view though, isn't it? |
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| Long shot of Tanglewood in the foggy snow. |
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| Another shot showing the driveway, the front door and the pile o' trusses. |
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| Another shot taken after I'd downloaded weather data. Note that the fog is both lower and thicker now.... |
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| ...and there's a lot less visibility looking over at my anemometer than there was before. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/19/2010
Today wasn't a very long or productive one at the site, unfortunately. The roofing guys didn't make it up at all, instead parking a truck with some more trusses on it down below late in the afternoon. Not sure what the cause of all this was, but because it wasn't planned this way Builder Dale had a bit of chat with them and they agreed to come up tomorrow (Saturday) to get some stuff done, weather permitting (there's another front moving in--oh boy!).
So beyond getting a couple of the house and of the weather moving in, Colleen didn't spend much time up there either. The concrete crew is nearly done gathering up their tools and supplies, and have stacked most of them on or under the big trailer they brought up there back at the beginning of their work in December. My guess is that they'll get things tied down as best they can, and then wait for a semi-decent weather day to take the trailer back out. There's a bit more concrete and stacking work to be done later in the schedule, but for the most part their part of this mess is done. :)
Enjoy the pics.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| My anemometer way up high on its frosty, frozen ridge. The clouds were low but there wasn't really any fog. |
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| The stack of trusses dropped off by that wayward truck yesterday. |
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| The load of trusses parked down below awaiting delivery on Saturday. I probably would have put it in a less visible spot myself. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/18/2010
With the relatively good weather from yesterday continuing the roofing guys were able to get some good work done, though a couple of "oops"marred the overall success.
First the good stuff. The bulk of the crew went up bright and early this morning. A couple of them continued unstacking their tools and materials while the others worked around the tops of the walls to attach insulation and sill plates for the roof. Some of the trusses that were taken up yesterday had to be moved since another truck of supplies was expected in mid-afternoon, and of course there were still a couple of guys up from the concrete/stacking crew as well who were continuing to pack up their stuff from the last couple of months. The guys working on the roof were able to complete nearly all of the sill work (apparently they love working with ICFs since the tops are flat and the walls are straight) and then they helped the other group unpack and stack and such while waiting for the new truck of supplies to come up. So things were going well with the completion of a major milestone, and things were under control.
After checking in with the crew Colleen came back down and ran into one of the other canyon residents doing some work to plow out a particularly nasty stream crossing. The ice had built up into some fairly wicked shelves along each side of the creek, and so you bounced a lot when going through it (one of the roofing crew folks had their battery knocked loose by this jolt, though I suspect there was some inappropriate speed involved in the crossing as well). She and our neighbor worked on chopping up and moving out the ice (he has a small work tractor) and they did such a good job that she even snapped a picture of it.
After that interlude is kinda where things went wrong. Colleen spotted the truck carrying some more trusses on its way up the canyon and snapped a shot of it as she was leaving to do some coordination work with Builder Dale, and you can see it below. This was around noon or so, but by mid-afternoon the concrete guys had come down and given her a call that no truck had shown up yet. THAT was unexpected--even if he'd been creeping up the road paralyzed by fear of ice and snow (and neither were that bad after they'd cleared out that one stream crossing) he'd have gotten there by around 2:00. Colleen had seen him heading up the canyon...so where the heck was he?
At Builder Dale's request she went in search of the missing truck and quickly realized from the tracks in the snow what had happened--he'd taken the wrong turn going up the canyon and headed a branch of the road that parallels the northern canyon rim. (This despite multiple signs pointing the way to Tanglewood, plus a plethora of tire tracks in the snow.) By the time Colleen got to him he was slowly backing his rig down the road, having found no place to turn around along the road at all. (I can believe this; I've been up there a couple of times and everyplace there's any wide spot at all there's a big piece of construction equipment or something similar parked there.) He didn't know that he could probably have driven about another mile and found a turnaround spot at the house back there (he was driving through BLM land when he gave up and started backing down the road; the private chunk of land is kinda an inclusion back at the end). I gotta say I'm stunned that he would miss the turn given all the signage, but I'm very impressed that he was able to back a truck of that size down the road--I had to back my Tercel down it a few years back and that wasn't easy! I can't imagine the nerves he must have to back a big flatbed truck like that down the road!
So, by the time Colleen got him onto the right road and he got up to Tanglewood, the day was mostly shot. The crews got the lumber unloaded as dark was falling but didn't try to cut it apart or anything; they're going to give that a shot tomorrow.
Various pics and a movie of the truck successfully backing down to the main road are below. Enjoy!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold the stream crossing after it's been worked over a bit. Much nice, FAR smoother. |
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| Later in the day after Colleen found the wayward truck. He's backing down the last stretch of road here; almost at the turnoff! |
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| Almost there...... |
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| In the middle of all of the truck fun a big hawk flew past Colleen and perched in this tree. He's nearly dead center on a branch of the pine. |
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| The truck is down, the driver is happy, and I'm just plain thankful. Note that he was wise and chained up his dually tires on the back--very good idea. |
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Videos
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/17/2010
With yesterday's pour of the second floor having gone so smoothly we saw no reason to delay getting started on the roof, and so today we decided to get started on the roof.
So this morning the roofing folks began to bring up some of their pieces parts. They brought up a single flatbed for this, bringing up a load of OSB and sill plates for the roof attachment so it's going to take a couple of days to run everything up to the site. Some of the original concrete crew were also up to begin taking down the ICF and V-Buck bracing since these are no longer needed, and they'll shortly be moving on to other jobs--that's the nature of builds like this, the only constants should be myself, Colleen, and Builder Dale.
Things went mostly smoothly though there were a couple of rough spots. The concrete guys had had months to get used to the road and conditions up there, but it was all new to the roofing guys and so their first "working" trip up the road (their boss had been up there a couple of times during earlier phases of construction to check on progress and ask various questions of Builder dale) was fairly slow. Once there they had to unload a bunch of their equipment and supplies, while working around the concrete guys who were basically taking down their stuff and stacking it for eventual haul-out. I suggested that the roofing guys might want to stack up the lumber and such inside the garage area, since that would be out of the snow and relatively dry, and it seems from the pictures that they at least started doing that. The acid test will be when they deliver the trusses I suppose--to me it just doesn't make any sense to leave them outside when you can have them covered up and dry, but we'll see.
Colleen divided her day between taking pictures, answering questions of the new crew, and running a couple of loads of recycles (styrofoam and cardboard this time) into town. She very wisely left several of the larger bits of cardboard from the ICF palettes up there to be spread out for the trusses and roofing lumber, since we don't want them to get into the mud at all--I will be very unreasonable about this should it happen!
And that was basically how today went. A bit colder weather than yesterday and a new crew getting used to the site while an older crew was packing up, but smooth enough.
Enjoy the pics!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The first load of roofing supplies arrives. The ground was still fairly frozen at this point so they didn't really have too much trouble parking here. |
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| Unloaded and ready for use. |
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| A closeup of the area between the garages. You can see some of the sill plates already laid into place. |
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| There used to be a huge pile of 2x4s, ICF parts, and rebar here. |
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| Inside the garage. They've stored many of the parts here; that green roll in the foreground is (I think) the insulation that goes under the sill plates. It kinda looks like sheets of packing foam. |
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| Looking down the master bedroom wing. |
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| The living room and door, with the bracing all removed. They haven't gotten to these ICF bits yet; some of them will probably get used on other jobs. |
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| One person works on laying in the roof sill plates which another works on taking out the V-Buck from the windows. I didn't quite realize I had positioned the window that high, come to think of it.... |
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| The windows over the stairwell. I was scared to death of the library being this "dark hole" so I put in a lot of windows...now I'm mostly wondering how the heck I'll close the curtain on that one on the left.... |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/16/2010
It seems like just yesterday that we achieved our first floor milestone, and now here we are with the second floor successfully poured! Amazing.
The second floor has been mostly stacked for the last couple of days, but we kept having to move the pour due to weather and finalization of some of the bracing. We were worried about the weather for today--we've gotten a fair amount of snowfall in the last couple of days and I was frankly skeptical that we'd had enough sunlight and warmer (mid-40s) weather to melt off enough of it, but as it worked out today was practically perfect pouring weather.
Colleen and Builder Dale got to Tanglewood bright and early to do a final inspection, and some of the crew came up shortly thereafter to double check their bracing and such. This pour was a bit different from the previous ones as to date we've always done "partial" pours--the foundation, and then a couple of feet up the first wall, and then the rest of the first floor wall, etc. This time rather than do 2 or 3 feet at a shot, though, the plan was to pour the entire second floor wall plus the deck crenelations--8 feet of ICF stacked up to about 20' above ground level. Everybody was worried that trying to pour this much in one swell foop might be too much if there were any weak spots or places that needed bracing, so the crew had braced the heck out of everything. It turned out to be a good idea, as there were literally no problems whatsoever with any part of the pou--no leaks, no bulges, no funky settling.
A total of 8 trucks came up today for a grand total of some 64 cubic feet, more or less. We did not have the bit on the second floor LiteDeck that had been missed a couple of weeks back done since that would need to be finished and it didn't make sense to have a finishing crew up just for that. We'll have that part finished (it will probably about a half of a cubic yard) when we have the first floor poured a couple of months from now (that's a guess). The pour went extremely smoothly, starting at about 0900 and finishing just after noon. As the mud was setting up the crew inserted anchor bolts for later attaching of the sill plates for the roof transition, thumped the walls to make sure there were no voids in the concrete, and checked all of the various patches for any leaks. All went well.
Since things went so well and there were no problems to speak of, the plan now is to have the roofing company begin bringing up trusses and whatnot tomorrow--the ICFs will cure quite nicely overnight and while they won't be at full strength for another week or so they'll be more than solid enough to begin tying sill plates and whatnot to. There's another bout of weather predicted to be coming in later this week so we hope to have most if not all of the roofing parts on site before things get messy again.
Fewer pictures this time since (honestly) it went so smoothly. Colleen was able to get a couple of movies of the fun but mostly she was busy helping guide the concrete trucks in and out, since things were moving relatively quickly.
I haven't been up to the site since a couple of days ago and won't be up until this weekend, but it's amazing to think it's come so far so fast. I mean, our first pour was only back in December!!!!
This must be what all house-building is like, when it's going well--and boy is it fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The pump (yellow) arrived just ahead of the first truck. Note the snow covering everything; by the end of the day much of this had melted away. In the distance you can see our work trailer, a couple of sheds, and the picnic/fire ring area. |
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| The crew snaked the concrete hose through the (eventual) front door of the living room. |
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| The deck crenelations await the pour. These are on the uphill side of the deck. Note how they've stubbed out the gaps with pretty much whatever they had handy, mostly wood but sometimes leftover bits of V-buck. |
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| The other half of the deck and crenelations...this is the side most visible from the road to passersby. The pile of ICFs is there mostly to get them out of the way. |
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| Pouring around the north end where the guest bedrooms will be. You can see my main radiant heat manifold carefully protected and covered with a trash bag in the middle there. I was scared to death that they'd hit it. |
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| Working along the area over the garage. Note how much snow has melted off of the concrete since they were back in the far north corner. |
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| A bit later in the morning. Here they're pouring in the crossover area and the wall between the house and the deck. |
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| Long shot of the house with the trucks and concrete pump in the foreground. Note that there's less snow around now. |
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| Finishing up the crenelations along the front. You can see the drains very nicely in this shot; later we'll be dressing them up with dragons or gargoyles or something like that to look appropriately "castle-ish". |
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| A closeup of this work along the front. We went with narrower slits so the crenelations would work better with the spacing of the drains and windows. |
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Videos
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| The crew begin the pour. Notice how that hose is jumping around, and it's all pretty noisy--apparently concrete pumping is very loud! |
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| Short clip of the pour along the front of the house. Note how some of them are thumping the walls to help ensure the mud settles properly. |
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| Pouring along the south walls, together with a very nice 360 degree pan-around of the entire upstairs. Good job Colleen! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/15/2010 8:28:35 PM
Or at least that's what we hope will happen.
Turns out the designated pumper truck is slated to be up in Aspen on Wednesday, so they're going to try to do the pour tomorrow. We have some doubts about this plan--it won't give us two days of snowmelt to help clear the roads--but we've done some sanding (mostly this has been Colleen's work--she's awesome) and maybe the roads will be good enough.
We'll see. If not we'll ahve to fall back, either by getting a different pumper truck or by moving the pour date until after the next storm (Thursday/Friday).
We'll see.......
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/14/2010 8:59:55 PM
Sigh.
Well, the hoped-for "dusting of snow" completely skipped us here in town--in favor, apparently, of settling right smack dab over Tanglewood.
I was hopeful this morning when I got up and saw sunshine, thinking that maybe we'd dodged a bullet and would be able to proceed with the pour of the second floor ICF tomorrow (Monday). Things rapidly went downhill though when I drove to the site--about halfway there I found myself entering foggy conditions, and then the snow started. And kept coming. All the way up the canyon.
I'd guess we got between 3 and 4 inches of snow last night, and it continued to fall the whole time I was up there. My original intent had been to load up Blackie with recycles (cardboard mostly) and stack the bits of ICF over to one side for another trip, but I ended up spending the entire afternoon shoveling snow off top floor again (just like yesterday, but this time it was just me!). The snow continued though at slightly lesser rates the entire time I worked, so while I didn't realistically get it all I at least cut down what has to be shoveled/melt off tomorrow a bit.
Sigh. All that work yesterday seems wasted. I know it's not really--the snow today would have just been that much deeper--but good grief!
I was finally able to get some recycles loaded up shortly before nightfall and ran them down to the recycling center. It was the only snow-covered cardboard in the bins! ;)
No pics as I didn't think I'd need to take any since yesterday. That'll learn me!
We also get to spend money (again) to have the road plowed (again) so that the concrete company can (again) try to come up (again) on the new pour day (Wednesday this time). I've lost more money to this unexpected ongoing expense than any other single item so far.
Don't. Ever. Build. In. The. Winter.
Or in Latin: Winterus buildus mistakus dontus.
Bring me some of that global warming!!!!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/13/2010 9:47:29 PM
Well, after some minor soul-searching we realized that we hadn't really made enough progress during yesterday's round of shoveling snow, so Colleen and I decided to head up again today to focus on trying to finish clearing off the second floor rather than sanding the roads. As it happened we were able to get a lot of both done.
We got a bit of a late start and didn't really hit the house until noon, but we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of work that the crew finished up yesterday afternoon combined with the melting that had happened overnight. I'm not sure we actually got below freezing last night, or if we did it wasn't by very much (I didn't even think to check the weather station), so the heat the concrete had soaked up during the day kept working its magic on the snow and ice nearly all night long. There was a lot less snow and ice than there had been yesterday, and we set about to work over the more stubborn knots of ice that had (mostly) been protected from direct sunlight by water-laden cardboard (leftovers from the ICF palettes). In place of the ice and snow was a bunch of water, which pooled wherever there were any variances in the level of the concrete (though I was pleased to note that there was nothing obvious--good job concrete guys!).
It took us nearly all afternoon but with a bunch of chipping, sweeping of water (we have a nylon pushbroom up there that's just for things like this) and shoveling we got the second floor pretty much cleared off. By the end of the day there were still some snowy spots (mostly where sunlight wasn't hitting the floor at all) and some ice near where the bracing was glued to the floor (we didn't want to chip it away in case we were to accidentally knock loose a brace), but most of the floor was merely damp-to-wet and there were several dry spots. I figure one more good day of sunlight and warmer temps and nearly all of the snow up there will be gone....
Unfortunately we might not get that. The weather reports for tonight aren't as bad as they were yesterday, but they're still calling for "snow showers and colder temps". We'll run up tomorrow to pull together some recyclables and see if we got anything serious, though if it truly is just "snow showers" we should be okay. if not, the Monday concrete pour will probably have to be delayed until Tuesday or Wednesday. We have our fingers crossed though, and appropriate pleas have been made to various guardians of the forest. I guess we'll see!
On the way out we had a bit of a bonus moment, in that we were mildly amazed at the amount of melting that had occurred since we drove in just a few hours before. We decided to take advantage of this by throwing down some gravel and sand on most of the stream crossings (where ice was thickest) and on a couple of the more shaded parts of the road that often keep their snow and ice longer than most. Our thinking was that if the snow misses us, then the dark gravel will help to melt the snow and ice that much more quickly, while if we do get some "snow showers" and they aren't too thick then at least there will be some "grit" under the powder.
Not much chance to do any research or plans today regarding various features. Still need to pick out a circular stair and finish designing the radiant tubing layout for the first floor. We're probably getting close to the point where I can start thinking about some of the inside DIY stuff too, like putting in the central vac tubing and starting to plan out the electrical (which is going to be a real bear!). And of course there's the whole solar energy-and-hot-water thing to work through.....
Now I'm tired again! But hey it's all fun anyway......
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| A shot of the living room. The smaller windows underneath have already been installed, but we won't be putting in the big ones until the roof is nearly done (they are going to be VERY heavy). |
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| Behold the (mostly) cleared second floor, looking towards the guest bedrooms. A good breeze for a couple of hours should dry this right out. |
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| The deck. You can see parts of the crenelations where the protective tarps have blown up. We didn't do a whole lot of snow clearing here since there are already drains to handle the water. |
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| Standing on the walkways looking over the library towards the living room. |
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| Standing in the same spot looking towards the guest bedrooms. Some dry spots here. |
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| Longer view of the upstairs from the walkway above one of the guest bathrooms. You can see Colleen way off in the distance looking at the tarps. |
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| As I walked around the scaffolding I realized I'd never taken a shot from this angle before--so I did. |
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| On the way back down we stopped to chop some ice and sand the road, and I spotted this little pool of greenery in the creek. What an amazing canyon this is! |
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| Another pool along the creek filled with plants and (most likely) hibernating fishies. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/12/2010
Nah, I can't think of any way to really finish that--shoveling snow sucks.
With the concrete pour moved to Monday (assuming the weather cooperates* for once!) Colleen and I headed to the site to tidy it up a bit and clear the second floor of the snowfall we received a couple of days ago. Until I got up there I didn't really have a good feel for just how much snow that was--I had noted in Tuesday's post that I thought the lower canyon had received around 6" of snow, but clearly Tanglewood's area had been blessed with more like 8 or 9"....yowza!
We began to scoop and shovel but quickly realized that we were facing two big obstacles. The first was the floor itself--it was littered with ICF forms, leftover cardboard and strapping from the palettes, tools, screws, nuts, bolts, cans of foam, bits of wood--basically anything that the crew had dropped when they were done working with it over the past couple of weeks. Clearing all of this out of the way took quite a bit of time, and many of the flimsier items (such as the now water-soaked cardboard from the palettes) were frozen to the concrete. We did what we could and let the sunlight work on the rest, and that eventually did the trick--by the time we were done we'd gotten the whole floor remarkably cleared of debris with only a few bits of cardboard still stuck to the floor.
The second problem was more troublesome. Since we're getting ready to pour concrete the crew wisely and properly installed bracing in all of the windows--leaving us now way to dispose of the snow. Throwing it up over 8' of wall wasn't really an option either and of course there aren't any drains in this thing--it's the second floor after all, not a basement! We finally decided to push the snow off of the edge of the library into the living room area, since we're done working in that area for the time being anyway and it was about our only option--the only other thing might have been to push it all onto the deck and then throw it over the side there, but that would have been a lot more work.
So the snow on the second floor got shoveled off the side where it will no doubt turn into the Living Room Iceberg in a couple of days. Most likely in a month or so I'll have to revisit this decision when somebody complains that they can't work around all the ice in the living room area, but we'll deal with that if/when it happens. Maybe we'll get lucky and receive a few days of warmer, drier weather (especially dry air--this will cause the stuff to sublimate quickly if there's a bit of wind along with it).
So we got a lot of work done and some good exercise, if nothing else. Walking around the house started to give us a good feel for how it was all going to "work" too, at least upstairs. There were two of the crew up there to finish up the last little bit of stacking, install some bracing in anticipation of the Monday pour, and help out a bit with some of the snow work. We also had the snowplow guys up again to finish some of the areas they'd done on Tuesday.
We had to bail out a bit early to get another load of sand for tomorrow's work (we plan to work on the ice on the creek crossings and put down gravel and sand where things are a bit slick). I walked around and got a bunch of pictures of the house (probably the last ones I'll get before we pour the second floor) and downloaded some more weather data.
Getting closer!
Steven in Colorado Springs
* We've got our fingers crossed that the "light snow" currently predicted for Sunday evening misses us completely, because if it does come in we'll probably have to kick the pour to Tuesday or Wednesday.
Photos
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| Over the garages. The crew are starting to put on tarps to protect the walls from any snow. Note the huge pile of cardboard and styrofoam on the ground--that's from our cleanup work. |
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| More of the huge pile of (eventual) recycles. We hope to reduce this mess a notch or two tomorrow. |
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| Looking from the kitchen area into the living room. You can see some of the snow we dumped there. The supports on either side of the picture are temporary, and will go away once the stairs are built. |
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| Looking from the kitchen area down towards the master bathroom (at the far end). |
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| Looking through the garage towards the apartment at the far end. That ground is frozen rock hard right now; there's no sunlight hitting it anymore and the air isn't all that warm. |
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| Upstairs looking down towards the guest rooms. Note the height of the walls (8') and how nicely cleared out it (mostly) is. We have hopes that the sunlight will knock down whatever snow doesn't get shoveled out. |
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| Looking from the library off to the living room. |
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| Looking from the library towards the deck. Note the wall that now delineates the house from the deck; that wasn't there just a couple of days ago. |
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| Looking out (what will be) the patio door from inside to the deck. Lots of bracing here. |
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| Shot of the deck with the walls and crenelations (those lumps under the tarps) now at the right height. |
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| Another shot of the deck, showing the drains we installed this afternoon. |
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| Closeup of one of the drains. The foam will help glue it into place; it's not intended to be waterproofing (that comes later). |
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| Standing at the edge of the deck looking back towards the house. Note all of the block on top of the walls to ward off any snow. |
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| Looking down the hillside part of the deck. if you look carefully along the bottom you can see where Colleen marked the gaps for the crenelations. This was pretty important to avoid mistakes. |
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| Looking down the other side of the deck ramparts. |
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| Closeup of the 4" walls forming the transition. Not much different than the 8" stuff really, just thinner. |
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| Standing next to the manifold looking into the library area. We couldn't quite get that cardboard off of the floor this time around. |
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| Looking down the long run towards the north end of the house. Lots of bracing along here--blowouts would be BAD. |
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| I thought this was a nice shot of all the covering they did of the walls. |
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| The big mountain above Tanglewood. Very nice, clear day. |
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| Closeup of the big mountain above Tanglewood. |
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| The block-out for the future stairwell. |
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| I think this little bit is just crying out for an arcade machine, don't you? |
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| Another look at the bracing and walls on the uphill side of the floor. There will be some nice woodland views out this way. |
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| Far shot of the house as I was on my way to download weather data. |
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| Closeup of the living room area. Note sure when they plan to install those windows; they're the largest and heaviest ones though so I'm sure it will need to be carefully coordinated. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/10/2010
Well now--today was an interesting one.
Late last night Colleen got a call from Builder Dale that the crew needed a some more palettes of ICFs...they didn't quite have enough straight 8" forms to finish the last couple of rows of the second floor. This was unexpected as they'd been fairly careful to keep an accurate count ever since the first time this happened, but apparently not quite careful enough....
So Colleen spent her day shuttling palettes of ICF up to the site while the crew stacked what they had, mostly the 4" stuff for the two end walls. These were relatively simple once the crew got a good rhythm going since they're basically just straight walls without too many openings--six small glass block windows at the north end and a large patio door at the southern end (letting out onto the rooftop deck). when she got up there they helped her unload, she answered a couple of questions, and then back down for another load she went.
After she was done with that she went to meet with Builder Dale down in Pueblo to go over some ideas for rooftop deck. As one might expect (especially if you've had any experience with houses have flat roofs), you generally can't just slab out the roof and call it good. There are county codes to consider for drainage (in our case the county wants 5" of slope across the deck), and sealing against water infiltration, and all manner of related stuff. Fortunately Builder Dale is well versed in dealing with this type of thing since it's common when building a southwestern style house (which usually have flat roofs), and so met with Colleen to discuss some options with her.
We had already decided to punch in three drains (6" in size) at the
lower end of the slope to get the water off the roof as quickly as
possible, and while this meets the minimum county requirements given our rainfall (and snowfall!) Builder Dale wanted to do more. In this case he introduced Colleen to the concept of the "cricket"--a V-shaped funnel of sorts that is positioned in front of each drain and sloped to help channel water off of the deck and through the drain. A slope is imparted so that there are ridges between each cricket, thus hastening any water towards its eventual exit--which is good, because the less time it's on your roof the less chance it has to do damage.
Once these are installed the whole thing will be covered with a waterproof membrane that will be run up the sides of the deck to the bottom of the crenelations, helping to ensure as waterproof a barrier as possible. Where the membrane hits the drains we'll stub them partway into the pipe and swab them in with a healthy glob of tar to waterproof that interface too, much as one tars around vent pipes and such in your roof. This approach should be good for many decades of service--at least as long as a typical roof and probably longer since we intend to build a deck on top of this whole mess (which will help to shelter it from direct exposure to the elements).
This all led to a basic discussion of the deck banisters and another county requirement. Turns out that their going in assumption is that all people are idiots (not all that hard to prove through a casual study of winter driving habits, I might add), and they view the crenelations as practically begging folks to climb up and dance on them until they slip and fall to their bloody broken deaths. To help prevent appearances on the local TV stations, therefore, we need to put up banisters to block off easy access to the crenelations (much as one does with stairs).
They don't really care what kind we put up but of course we do. Having gone to all the trouble to put in these cool castle-looking crenelations and ramparts the last thing we wanted was to put big rails between them to keep some dimwit from hurling his body into the potentilla bushes. That would look ugly and detract from the "soaring castle rampart" look we are going for. If we weren't going to have a deck up there we wouldn't have a problem--southwestern style houses don't have this requirement because the roof isn't a typically accessible area, but in our case it's intended for outdoor living/entertaining and hence the design necessity.
Fortunately Builder Dale had a good idea--we could use steel cables to provide the necessary barriers, much as they are often done with the "modern style" stairwells and such. Not only would these be weatherproof (galvanized steel most likely), but from any distance they would be invisible to anybody looking up at the crenelations--very nice. We eagerly agreed that this was a good way to go and would work well with the intended design for the deck (it's to be a bit more "modern" anyway), and so we began hunting around for cable options and whatnot.
Turns out that most places really really like their cables for applications like this! They aren't available at most of the "big box" stores like Lowes or Home Depot, but online prices seem to vary from expensive to outrageous. After some hunting though Colleen located a possible source over at a place called Cable Railings; they look like they're new to the field but their prices look to be good enough for serious consideration. We'll have to go ahead and get some things in the next few days--with the concrete pour aimed for Monday (it moved since the crew ran out of block) we'll have to get the eyebolts and such locally, but that's not a big deal.
So there we go. No pics today because Colleen just wasn't up there much.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/9/2010
Well, today broke cold but sunny, but a quick survey of the canyon revealed that we got a BUNCH of snow.
So we didn't do any building, but we did call in some snowplow work. This is one of the drawbacks to building in the winter (Listen to me: Do. Not. Ever. Build. In. The. Winter.), particularly if you're off the main road a bit (or in our case five miles back from the main road). Various subcontractors need to get access to your site, and most of them don't have a clue how to drive in ice and snow--so they want you, lucky homeowner, to deal with it for them or they're not coming. In our case the crew is actually pretty good at handling the snow, but since we still have hopes to do a concrete pour on Friday (moved from Thursday due to the storm) we want to get the road cleaned up before the concrete trucks come. That means ideally catching the road while the fall is still fresh and not yet packed down by vehicles traveling over it, since that tends to make tire-shaped icebergs all along the way.
The guy who does our concrete pumping also has a snowplow business on the side, and we've recently become good customers of his (go figure). Colleen gave him a call and he spent about three quality hours up there this afternoon, and then later in the evening I ran up to sand as many of the stream crossings as I could before nightfall (I got the first 7, at least). I estimate that we got around 6" of snow in the lower part of the canyon. I didn't even get up to Tanglewood itself because I was so busy with the road work, but it's reasonable to assume it got more--just how much more we'll see tomorrow I guess. By the end of the day I was feeling pretty good about the road in general and felt like the bit I'd been on had been plowed and sanded fairly well, so with warmer weather and sunny skies predicted for the next few days things are looking pretty good.
Not the most fun stuff but Things You Just Gotta Do. At least shoveling all that gravel is good exercise!
I was dumb and didn't even think to take any pictures of the snow either....sorry 'bout that.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/8/2010
Still snowing.
No building today.
Definitely time to do some more pondering of spiral stairs and deck railing, I think....
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/7/2010
Today was going to be a "stand down" day anyway since we all have some things to do, and a bit of weather was known to be moving in, and there's something called "Superbowl Sunday" that's been on the news recently to boot.
Turns out that our "bit of weather" turned into "a goodly snowfall"!
In town it's been foggy and cold with spitting snow, but at the mouth of the canyon it's the first two with steady snowfall as the kicker.
Probably won't be able to start up again tomorrow....and we were tentatively hoping for a Thursday pour too!
Ah well....it's the price of building in the winter, I guess! Plenty of planning work to get done anyway.....
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/6/2010
As I've noted a couple of times before, it's astonishing to see what a difference a nice flat surface can make when it comes to making progress.
Colleen and I ran up today to download weather data and so I could get a first hand look at the progress that I'd only seen pictures of. Amazing. The primary walls are nearly complete and the crew is busy putting in the endcap walls over the apartment and at the edge near the deck. Final window bucking is being installed and (I presume) the windows for the upstairs will either be ordered or have been ordered. (Of course they won't be installed until after the pour is done--if you install them before the pour you run an excellent chance of blowing them out if concrete should shift.)
Those endcap walls deserve some discussion. All of the walls are 8" Buildblock ICFs, which (when you add in the styrofoam) makes for a 13" thick wall. For these endcap walls we had to go with a thinner form, primarily due to weight--there's nothing under those walls that would easily support all of the weight (I wanted to avoid having any load-bearing walls inside the house) and so to match the weight with the LiteDeck Engineer John specified that these walls needed to be 4" forms rather than their larger cousin. These are going to be just fine--slightly less thermal mass since there's less concrete, but they still have the heavy styrofoam making their overall width 9". Both front areas that aren't "lived in" per se, so I don't think there will be any issues there--in fact I doubt anybody will know unless I tell them.
Builder Dale had to spend some time with the crew going over how to tie the 4" forms into the 8" forms though. While some companies make adapter pieces for this type of circumstance most don't, and so you have to kinda "splice" a joint to overlap the 4" form into the 8" form. Once it's all done it's foamed in, and then rebar is put down into each joint to tie the forms together once the concrete is poured. The only real difference between the two sections is that the joins along the deck are "inside" joins (the 4" wall T's into the 8" wall) while the one on the apartment end are "outside" joins (the 8" wall transitions to the 4" wall at corner). Of the two the outside joins are the hardest to get right, in part because they're not as accessible--you have to get up on a ladder to foam up the outside properly and it's easy to miss something and get a blowout. With the inside joins you can stand on either side of the "T" and foam away.
Lots of good pictures follow. We have weather moving in early next week, so the crew may not be able to get back to work until Tuesday or so...we'll see.
This is so exciting!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The deck. Note the couple of ICF partial forms over on the end; Colleen and I are beginning to explore how to form the crenelations. |
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| Standing in the crossover area looking towards the library. Lots of forms stacked up here, but they should be close to using them all up soon. |
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| Looking from the library towards the guest bedrooms at the north end. Starting to really look like a house, isn't it? |
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| Standing in the library looking more or less towards the stairwell (which you can't see). To the right is the dropoff into the living room. |
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| A better shot looking at the living room dropoff. There will be a nice banister here, of course. |
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| Looking down from the second floor into the living room, (mostly) ignoring Colleen's "don't fall off" clucking.... |
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| Kinda looking over the stairwell (bottom foreground) towards the guest bedrooms. |
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| The stairwell! Or where it's gonna be anyway. Note the thickness of the floor--I sure like the LiteDeck even if it *is* horribly expensive. |
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| Another shot looking across the media room to the guest bedrooms. Fewer blocks stacked up here since most of them are on the walls now. |
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| Nice shot of a 4" form stacked atop an 8" form (center left). The entire back wall (with those small windows) is 4"; the join is at the corner with the plywood shoring. |
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| Closeup of the two kinds of forms. Buildblock did good here; they're basically identical except for the width. |
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| Looking across the garage to the apartment. That dirt is frozen hard as a rock, by the way--ICFs do as good a job of keeping heat OUT as they do with keeping heat IN, so not much has melted in here. |
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| Good shot of most of the apartment. |
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| Outside view of the apartment end from the well. Note the small staggered windows; these will be glass block windows to bring light into each guest bathroom. The chimney for the apartment fireplace will run up the wall directly between them. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/5/2010
It's truly amazing how much of a difference having a flat, dry surface to work on seems to make.
(Okay yes--having decently sunny weather helps too!)
The house continued to "surge" towards completion today. Colleen basically ran all over the place up there today doing odd jobs, answering questions, and generally doing her part as "owner representative". One minor problem cropped up when there proved to be a discrepancy between the height of the second floor ceiling as shown on the blueprints and what we'd told Builder Dale we were looking for--turns out that there'd been a minor miscalculation that threw the ceiling as recorded off a bit. A quick consultation avoided much unpleasantness, and we were all happy happy.
More pics below....progress seems breakneck after all this time!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Standing on the second floor looking towards the guest bedrooms. The walls are much higher than they were yesterday. |
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| In retrospect I probably didn't need to put this window in, but there ya go. |
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| Standing in one of the guest bedrooms, looking towards the hill. This room will have a nice woodland view; I bet you'll sight deer from here a lot. |
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| Longer view looking down from the guest bedrooms towards the library. The media room will be in the section without any windows (didn't seem to be a good idea here). That's one of my manifolds bundled under the trash bag. |
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| Looking across the library area towards one edge of the living room. This is a popular area for 'staging' blocks since it's more or less in the middle of everything. |
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| The walls on the south end are less done than the walls along the north end. |
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| Working a window at the house transition to the deck (open space with no walls past the worker). |
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| Excellent shot of the house from the well. Compare this to some of the similar shots from only a couple of weeks ago! |
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| Working around the uphill side of the house. It's not evident here but the walls at the end are 4" ICF rather than the 8" we used everywhere else for weight reasons. |
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| Long shot down the back of the house. |
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| The crew finally moved the ladder (which had gone up here) as they got ready to complete this part of the wall. Note the two windows on the second floor center; they'll provide nice views to the library. |
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| Looking from the garage into the kitchen area. No scaffolding! |
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| Back outside, Largo continues to work on finishing out the blocks where the ladder used to be. |
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| Halfway through the day a truck arrived with more blocking for the braces upstairs. As the crew stack higher the need for more bracing increases. |
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| Another shot of the bracing truck. Note that there's not just wooden blocks but some fittings as well; the 2x4s lock down into these. |
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| Just a neat shot..... |
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| Long shot of the in-progress former ladder area. As you can see a window goes *right* *there*..... |
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| As the day ends the crew begin to set ICFs along the wall edges to ward off any rain or snow that might come our way. |
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| For a while the ladder lived in the living room, more or less where the masonry heater will eventually be. |
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| Somewhat fuzzy long shot of the overall progress by the end of the day. Wow. |
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| Working on the walls.... |
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| The glass block window assemblies. There are two of these, which go into the bathrooms of the two guest bedrooms. |
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| Looking out across the deck. |
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| On the way down (where there's more sunlight still) Colleen spotted this flock of turkeys grazing in a field. |
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| Decent sized birds considering that they're wild. |
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| A bit blurrier shot as they'd started to decide Colleen stopping was Not. Cool. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/4/2010
The progress that has been
made this week is astonishing.
Colleen took a bunch of
pics today as the crew was wrapping up and it was quite a surprise
once I got a chance to finally see them. The progress they've made
this week is amazing--Tanglewood has gone from a single floor gangly-looking
thing with a big flat area on top to something that actually looks
like a two-story house in just a handful of days. This is clearly a
testament to how easily ICFs stack once you've got a good rhythm
going, as well as the value of having a good base (the flat LiteDeck)
to work from. I would imagine that being up out of the mud helped a
bunch too.
In fact you can see this
from the pics below. The crew took some time on Monday to stack all
of the newly-delivered palettes of block on top of the LiteDeck
rather than leave them all down below, and it made a huge difference.
You can see them all over the second floor, interlaced with bracing
and 2x4s moved from the first floor up to the second.
The bracing itself is a
bit interesting. For the first floor they could just hammer some
rebar into the ground and use it to support their braces. On the
second floor of course we couldn't have them do that--nails into
concrete laced with radiant heat tubing is a BIG no-no. To make this
work, then, they used the foam that they're using on the ICFs to
"glue" blocks attached to the bracing to the newly poured
concrete itself. Once it sets up it's as firm and solid as any piece
of rebar, and yet it can be "popped" off with the
application of a shovel once all of the stacking is done. Neat
solution.
Enjoy the pictures.
Tanglewood is really taking shape now!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Looking at a window on the second floor from outside and west of the living room. Note the V-Buck is installed for this window but they haven't finished building up around it yet. |
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| Looking down towards the master bathroom. It's a lot easier to see now that there's no scaffolding in the way. Good sunlight coming in that window too! |
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| Another window, this one over the garages. |
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| Standing in the same spot but looking off towards the guest bedrooms. |
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| The apartment garage below and some of the scaffolding and window bracing above. |
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| Standing upstairs looking across to the hillside. Note the block piled up hap-hazardly about the place. |
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| Looking across the LiteDeck towards one of the guest bedrooms. The area of foam in the foreground is covering the bit that they didn't quite have enough concrete for a couple of weeks ago. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 2/2/2010
One of the unexpected side-effects of building in the winter (note: never ever make this mistake!) is that it can get a bit tricky for the Porta Potty company to actually service their product. Particularly if you're 5 miles back on a gravel road....then it becomes problematic.
In our case the service company was having problems getting their trucks up to service their portable johns....the stream crossings (despite all the work Colleen and I have done on them) just were too rough for their trucks to make it up reliably. Of course this was a problem since things were "piling up" as it were, so Colleen had a bit of a chat with them about options.
I think the compromise was a good one. They gave us two more porta pottys (total of three) for the same price as one so that we could move between johns as needed. The plan is that there should be breaks in the weather from time to time such that they can get their truck up to perform servicing. This is a reasonably good compromise--they had several spares sitting around their service yard, they keep a customer happy, and our weather hereabouts is good enough throughout the winter that they shouldn't have any problem getting a truck up when they have several weeks to time it properly. It's a win-win, I think.
So today they gave Colleen a couple of extra johns and she ran them up to the site, then brought a final load (for now) of styrofoam recycles back down.
Should be some more pics from the build proper in a day or so. Colleen was too busy from running up and down to really get many there.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Blackie loaded with another pile of recycles. |
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| Quick shot of the house from the general location of the porta pottys. |
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| Behold the wonder of three porta pottys! |
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| Colleen spotted some turkeys in the field as she was headed down, but you probably can't really see them very well here. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/30/2010
Well, this week didn't turn out to be terribly productive. After a stand-down of around 10 days since we poured the LiteDeck (which forms the floor for the second floor), this week was foggy and cold enough, and the crew were scattered enough, that we didn't get a ton of "new" stuff done. On the other hand a lot of cleaning up got done, a lot of scaffolding got taken down, and a lot of recyclables went off the the recycling center.
Today we ran up to snag another load of recycles (cardboard again), check on the condition of the roads and stream crossings (the warmer weather has helped a bunch), and download some more weather data (okay that part is mostly me). Colleen has actually done a pretty good job of getting just about all of the leftover cardboard there is to get at this point--the only stuff that's not actively attached to palettes of forms or providing footing at the base of a ladder, anyway. There's not much beyond the fiddling little bits of styrofoam that are inevitable when one cuts on the stuff--annoying and we get what we can, but most of it just vanishes into the mud (or sticks to my coat!).
I am pleased to report that the radiant tubing, aired up a few weeks back for the all important First Big Inspection, continues to hold steady pressure several weeks later. There's been some variation due to ambient temperatures--right now the system is showing slightly less pressure than when I aired it up but of course it's colder than it was then--but it's all as expected. Given the site I wouldn't have been overly surprised if a person or a squirrel had done something rude to the manifolds while the LiteDeck has been curing.
I think what really struck me walking around the house is how good Tanglewood is starting to feel. This was only really my second or third chance to see the site without crew working all over it, and so I was able to walk around and really begin to see how things were going together. Tanglewood is starting to feel like a real house at last and that's very exciting--it's amazing how different it feels to walk around on the second floor now! We've literally never been in that particular place before and (I know this sounds weird) it's just astonishing how much the house is feeling more and more like it's "part of the land" now.
I can't explain it very well, but I know I like it. A lot.
I took a couple of snapshots while I was up there but mostly this was just a "search and enjoy" mission. The real work will get started up again in a couple more days again. Until then enjoy.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Looking towards the deck area. |
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| Colleen took a picture of me taking a picture..... |
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| Looking towards the north end of the house. In the foreground will be the media room; in the back are the upstairs bedrooms. That lump in the middle is one of the manifolds. |
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| The blanket blew off this bit next to the 'ran out of mud' area near the front over the garages. The concrete looks like it's cured very nicely. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/28/2010
Things were a bit slow getting going again after our stand down for the past few days since the pour; the weather wasn't snowing but it was only incrementally warmer than a couple of days ago when we got snowed out, and some of the crew were scattered finishing up other jobs.
Still work got done, albiet slowly. The crew got their tools positioned back on the site and then began to dismantle the huge amount of scaffolding that had been installed under the LiteDeck. This took quite some time, as the scaffolding came from three different sources--much of it was Builder Dale's, but he had also borrowed some from two other builders who owed him a favor or two--there was a lot of LiteDeck to support. Of course it didn't all go in perfectly segrated--the crew put supports wherever they needed them--and it came out even more haphazardly. So once the crew began dismantling the scaffolding there was a lot of sorting and stacking into various piles so that the right parts would get back to the right folks. It won't all get done until sometime next week, but it's a start.
Unfortunately Colleen didn't get pictures of any of this. She's lost her camera, at least temporarily, and the couple of shots she tried to take with her cell phone just didn't come out worth anything. I understand that the various piles took up most of the eventual driveway, and the crew was thankful that the temps and clouds overheard were such that there was (mostly) no mud.
So it's frustrating that it's been slow getting started, but cleanup like this is necessary and to be expected. They did a lot of hard work putting in those scaffolds, and at least as much taking them out--glad it wasn't me!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/25/2010
Well, we'd had loose plans that the crew would get back to working on Tanglewood today but that was just Not To Be.
The weather today was fairly nasty, with higher winds, colder temps, and snow spitting from the clouds--just one of the hazards of building in the winter! Rather than try to fight that mess on top of getting things ready for the next phase, Builder Dale decided to regroup with the crew to go over the blueprints and plans for the next phase of the job. Builder Dale has also received the last of the first floor windows (there were a few that came in the first batch that had to go back because they were the wrong size, and others simply hadn't arrived), so they'll all probably spend some quality time unpacking them and making sure they're ready for installation.
The forecast for tomorrow looks a bit better, so we'll make a stab at it again in the morning.
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/23/2010
Since we're still in a stand-down mode while the LiteDeck cures and Builder Dale attends a huge builder's convention in Vegas, there's necessarily not much going on up at Tanglewood just now. This is good since it gives Colleen and I a chance to relax a bit and do some planning for the next couple of tasks.
We've made use of this time to gather up recyclables from the site, bringing down a load of cardboard (mostly from the palettes of ICF block) on Monday and then again today together with a bunch of plastic (wrappers, ties, etc.) and bits of styrofoam. We're very fortunate in that Colorado Springs has a plethora of places to take recycles--cardboard and plastic can go to the regular recycling depot off of Nevada, while the styrofoam is gladly accepted by the company that makes ICF block for several different systems in these parts. It's a good feeling both to clean up the site and to get this stuff back into the resource stream rather than just burning it or throwing it away.
Planning wise I've been pondering a couple of different things:
- Solar PV is in: As it has turned out I've been leaning away from making heavy use of wind power in favor of going with solar PV. There are a bunch of reasons but it boils down to two big ones--wind usually under-performs its estimates while solar usually out-performs them, and it's nearly impossible to see how I'd get equipment, concrete, etc. up onto the ridge where the wind would work best. I'd like to put up a wind turbine some day but right now I need to focus on the most bang for the buck, and in this case that means reconsidering my power supply and relocating it to a site just up the road (with an excellent southern exposure). I've started working with a couple of solar PV companies on estimates for what might be required and what they might want to install it; more on that process as it develops.
- Geothermal is probably out: Related in part to this was my sad discovery regarding just how expensive geothermal (technically ground-sourced heat pumps) are in terms of electricity to run. The numbers are very hard to come by as it seems most GSHP suppliers know this is a huge turnoff to potential customers, but it boils down to the typical pump for a house the size of Tanglewood simply requiring more power than I could reasonably generate or store. Add to this the local solar guys asking why we're not using solar thermal for our hot water and radiant heat needs as a much cheaper way $$$ wise than going with a GSHP, and I've begun to see the light in this area. I am not sure that going solar thermal will be a 100% solution, but if I can get it to supply 70 or 80% of my needs then a propane boiler could easily do the rest on the colder, darker days. The kindly folks at ABC Plumbing are working hard on this.
- Radiant system design for the 1st floor: Something I need to get done in the mid-term timeframe, this will let me order the parts in a more leisurely fashion rather than the more abrupt approach we did the first go-around.
- Picking out a spiral staircase: I haven't done much yet in this area, but I've got to take a gander at the various spiral staircase kits out there and pick one soon. Once the second floor is stacked and poured a new crew will be coming in to build the roof, and I think that they'll be the same ones to be putting up the third floor computer room. It would be nice to be able to get up there without a ladder, yes?
Once we start back up (tentatively scheduled for the 25th) the crew will begin stacking the second floor walls in earnest. There are quite a few windows up there too so that will slow them down somewhat, but being able to work on the nice, flat, dry surface we just poured should make a big difference on the positive side!
Busy busy busy! Is this what house-building is always like? (Don't answer that; I already know.... :)
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/16/2010
With the pour safely out of the way and the entire project standing down for a bit so the LiteDeck can cure nice and safe without incident, there's not much to do on site right now. I thought it might be a good time to pass along some (mostly cute, generally embarrassingly complimentary) things the concrete and build crews remarked on when they thought we couldn't hear:
- "That's the straightest radiant tubing install I've ever seen!" -- Believe this came from one of the concrete crew; he didn't know that as an engineer I don't really know any other way to do it....
- "Man! How many ties did they use on this tubing?!" -- Again from one of the concrete guys; my guess is that most tubing installs don't fasten it down nearly as much as we did....
- "That's a pretty fancy manifold." -- Said of the Icma manifold from Italy, located more or less right smack in the way of the concrete crews. Turns out that most places use the simpler manifolds like the one we put in at the south end of the house, which makes sense for most applications I should think. Either way they did a great job of not hitting either while spreading mud, for which I am most grateful.
- "What a fantastic location....the scenery is amazing!" -- Not sure but I think this came from one of the finishing guys.
- "Why would they build someplace that cell phones don't work?" -- Honestly a reasonable question, I've sometimes asked this myself.
- "Are you sure this stuff (the LiteDeck) really going to hold all this weight?" -- From one of the concrete guys early in the process. Most of them hadn't worked with LiteDeck before and none of them had worked with this much of it, so given that they were dumping several tons of liquid rock onto a bed of free-standing styrofoam it wasn't an entirely unreasonable question.
- "Are you guys going to live up here year round?!?" -- Asked of us a couple of times between pours...most folks don't relish the thought of being quite this far off the beaten path I'm thinking....
Don't get me wrong--this was all good and nobody meant anything mean or whatnot. I just thought it was funny that they'd say things like this to each other (sometimes in Spanish, sometimes not) and think we didn't catch it... :)
Dang this is fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/15/2010
With the LiteDeck poured Builder Dale wants to leave it alone and let it cure in peace and quiet, so we're going to be standing down from serious activity for the next few days. This makes perfect sense--we don't want anybody walking around on the concrete while it's curing, and it's not safe to have the crew work from the outside since they'd be too high up for safety and the ground is just too uneven.
Colleen and I will use this period to gather up some of the trash and recyclables that have accumulated in the rush to get the flooring poured, while checking on the concrete blankets periodically to help keep the flooring warm and happy. I'll also take a few more pics to flesh out the ever-evolving "feel" of the place, which is rapidly moving away from the "clearing in the middle of the woods" feel it had back when we started towards "a home in the woods" today.
Amazing stuff. Nice to take a bit of a break though; I certainly have plenty of paperwork and planning to do anyway!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/14/2010
One thing I didn't really dwell on with the excitement of getting the LiteDeck pour completed was that we now have some windows installed!
Ordered a few weeks back, Builder Dale let us know that the first batch of windows for the first floor had arrived a day or so ago. He hadn't bothered with bringing them to Tanglewood until the crew was nearly done getting ready for the pour as he didn't want anything to slow that process down (the concrete pour date would have been hell to slip if things had gone wrong). With the stack being completed yesterday in preparation for today's pour, Builder Dale had a bunch of the windows brought up for installation.
Now, this is not a 'full' installation at this point--this is just getting the windows into the right openings and tacking them down so they're where they should be and out of the way. Proper installation will happen later once we're done with all of the concrete and working on electrical and the exterior. With this (seems to me, anyway) early installation there is some danger of breakage of course--there's still a lot of awkward and heavy things being moved around Tanglewood and accidentally putting a 2x4 through a piece of glass wouldn't be hard at all. Builder Dale's had good luck with this approach in the past, however, and if it's worked well for him before I'm all for it this time!
A couple of windows weren't in this first batch (they just weren't done yet), and a couple weren't the right size for their ultimate location (we had the same thing happen here at Wyrdhaven a few years back--I guess it's normal). These are all double-paned, but I'll have to dig up the U-Factor and transparency ratings for them and post those here later since that has an impact on the overall heat efficiency of the house. Part of the choice process, however, was to deliberately choose them to be more energy efficient (something I note is very common amongst O-B's!).
So things are moving along nicely--we're tired but happy!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/14/2010
I realized shortly after I posted the blog entry about the LiteDeck pour milestone that I'd utterly forgotten to attach the movies that Colleen had so thoughtfully filmed of the process.
They are attached below. For the most part there's only a little bit of narrative as Colleen describes what's going on, though sometimes in the background you can hear the crew yelling at each other. Most of them are focused on the deck area, which was the first area they poured, but there are a couple of clips from later in the process. (Sometimes that is a bit "earthy", too, so if you're offended by such things and understand Spanish you are forewarned!)
What an amazing process building a house is!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| More of the deck pour--they went slowly on this part until they were confident about the LiteDeck. |
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| A bit later in the process as they're now working the library area. The strips they're inserting are to control thermal expansion and prevent cracking. |
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| Working around the upstairs bedroom areas now. This is the same guy who Colleen got a shot of standing WAY OUT on the end of the living room in the last post. |
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| Water dripping through under the LiteDeck. At this point things aren't "solid" yet; once they are the whole floor will be impermeable. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/14/2010
Today was an exhausting but very gratifying day, as we poured the LiteDeck today. Now all that radiant heat tubing that we've spent the last few days tying down and testing is buried under 3" of
concrete--so boy I hope it works! :)
I stayed out of the way at work today since Colleen didn't need me underfoot while managing a whole bunch of contractors handling the pour. There were four teams in all--the construction crew (Builder Dale's folks) at full strength, a crew to handle the concrete pump, another crew to handle the concrete pour itself, and then the concrete finishing guys. Plus, of course, Builder Dale and Engineer John. In all there were around 20 folks on the site today, probably the most we've ever had up there at one time. It was amazing. A total of 9 trucks (roughly 90 cubic yards) of concrete were brought up today, and it was almost enough (more on this later) to finish the task.
The weather was perfect, with the temps in the mid-40s and clear, sunny skies. The day began with Colleen and the crew heading up to make final preparations, clearing off debris and miscellaneous construction material from atop the house and making sure that the erstwhile driveway and turnaround locations for the trucks were clear and obstacle free. The trucks everybody drove up in were parked far up the road past the house (towards where we hope to install the PV mounts) so that there would be plenty of room for the concrete trucks once they began to arrive. Tools and emergency supplies of foam, plywood, and such were placed around the site just in case of a blowout, and the crew double-checked all of the scaffolding underneath the LiteDeck one last time.
And then the trucks began to arrive! First up was the pumping truck, which positioned itself as far up the driveway as it reasonably could. As the crew got the hose hooked up and in place, the first two concrete trucks arrived right on schedule.
The next few hours were a whirl of trucks arriving and leaving, crews working the concrete hose around the LiteDeck from one end of the house to the other, and the finishing crews running along behind the screed crew to brush down the concrete with a light basic finish. (We don't need anything super fancy here since none of this concrete is going to be exposed--there will be tile and wood across the whole thing--but we didn't want it chunky and rough either.) Colleen got a bunch of pictures and even a few short movies (all attached below) while Builder Dale and Engineer John supervised, gave occasional direction, and just watched. Nobody had much time for lunch since there was so much to do, but everybody was able to grab a quick snack or a drink from time to time so that at least was good (we didn't need anybody fainting from lack of fluids!) There was a minor leak where I accidentally poked the rebar for one of the manifolds through the LiteDeck a week or so ago, but they quickly got it patched with a scrap of plywood with very little concrete loss. They did a fantastic job of steering clear of the manifold mounts, carefully working around them by hand when it came time to pour and later finish those areas--this wasn't the first time they'd worked with radiant heat installations, though my understanding is that this was one of the larger ones they'd been on!
There were basically only two problems that had cropped up by the end of the day:
- The edge of the wall where the ladder accessing the top of the deck was badly damaged by all of the traffic up and down this main access route. Nothing too serious, but it will require some reconstructive surgery and foam to repair.
- We ended up about 1/2 of a cubic yard short of what we needed, with the result that the area right in front of the ladder was only splattered with the thinnest layer of concrete (basically what was left in the hose at the very end). Builder Dale was kicking himself for not being more precise, whereas everybody else was amazed that he had estimated the other 90 cubic yards so well--percentage wise he was only about 1% off.
There were a lot of stories throughout the day, and I'll add some supplemental posts about some of the other things that happened when I get a chance. Until then enjoy the pics and the movies, and rejoice in another milestone reached.
The LiteDeck is poured! Tanglewood's second floor begins soon!
Dang this is fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The LiteDeck awaits the first pour. You can see one of my manifolds carefully covered by a trash bag to the right, with concrete hoses ready and waiting. The scraps of tophat will be used to help control the hoses. |
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| The first concrete truck can be seen in t he back, with the pump truck in the foreground. The black rolls stacked along the ground are the concrete blankets, which we covered everything with after the pour was done. |
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| At this point in the process the deck is mostly poured. You can see my other manifold covered with the clear trash bag; the big loop of tubing hanging out of it is an impromptu loopback connection we made when we realized we had an unused zone. |
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| He *really* shouldn't have been standing there, but it's a cool shot. |
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| A slightly fuzzier shot, showing just how high up he was. |
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| A long shot of the work from below the site, near the trailer. |
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| Another view of the work from down below. You really can't see most of the folks working atop the house from here though. |
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| One of the finishing crew smooths out the pour at the edge of the library section. |
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| Closeup of the manifold area. They got some splatters of concrete on some of the tubing but that will come right off. The 2x4 in the foreground is one of the screed boards (used to level out the pour). |
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| Working on the library section. The dropoff just past them looks down into the living room, and you can see where the main stairs will go to the left. |
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| Slowly things get poured and smoothed. Overall the crew really DID do a good job of not stepping on my tubing too. |
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| Nearly done with the library area.... |
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| A good shot of the finishing work done near the dropoff....they had to be careful here! |
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| The angles made it a bit tough to work in here. |
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| Once the library area was done the pour work moved to the north end of the house. |
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| Working their way towards the center of the house (over the garage). |
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| Windows! |
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| Bracing around the apartment area. |
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| Some of the scaffolding under the LiteDeck. This section is directly under the deck at the south end of the house. |
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| A closeup of one of the window cutouts. This particular window hadn't been installed yet. |
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| A closeup of a pour area before it's been smoothed out and made all pretty. Note that the guy on the right is doing a good job of staying off my tubing! |
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| Builder Dale looks across the job from the hill behind the house. He seems pleased. |
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| By this point they'd realized they didn't quite have enough concrete, so they blocked out the area right in front of the ladder. |
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| A long shot of the house from the road. Some more windows have been installed, and there's a HUGE pile of tarps that need to be put away. |
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| Closeup of the master bedroom windows. |
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| Another shot of the not-quite-finished section. Colleen wisely put some cardboard over the area to help protect the tubing. |
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| Some final finishing work. Note the funky shoes they wear to avoid leaving footprints in the mud. |
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| The concrete blankets get laid down over the new pour to help keep it warm. They are nicely insulated. |
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| Looking across the freshly poured floor to the north. Note the pile of concrete blankets being stacked prior to deployment. |
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| Another shot looking over the apartment garage. Dang that's a nice looking finish! |
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| We didn't quite have enough blankets, so tarps were used across the central section (more or less in my media room). |
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| A better view of the coverings....nice work! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/12/2010
I think the whole experience was scarier for our inspector than for us, honestly....he had to dodge road work in the canyon (we were plowing and clearing ice from the stream crossings in anticipation of our upcoming LiteDeck pour), one of the heavy tractors ran off the road and nearly tipped over, and just for fun the folks building below us were having their tile work finished up so there was a lot of traffic going up and down the canyon.
But we passed! The system was at 60 psi when we first got there in the morning (we knew it would drop a bit due to the cooler temps overnight), and as we puttered around doing more tubing ties and whatnot our inspector surprised us by popping his head over the edge of the building around mid-afternoon. We hadn't even heard him come up due to the cutting being done by the crew as they were finishing raising the walls another block or two all the way around so the concrete could be tied into the flooring.
But hey--things went great, the radiant is ready to go, and the pour is slated for Thursday. Tomorrow the concrete company sends some folks up the canyon to make sure it'll be safe for their trucks (I think we have 9 loads planned--more than I would have expected) but we've been doing enough roadwork that I think it'll be okay.
Very exciting! Our first DIY inspection passed!!!! Happy ferret dance!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/11/2010
YES!
This is the way it's supposed to be.
First thing in the morning I ran up to see Radiant Kurt to get some parts and direction while Colleen took a load of recycles (it's definitely time to do some cleanup around the site) to the recycling center. Kurt quickly looked at the fittings, realized that they'd been mis-welded, and set about to fix them while he and I talked about my other issue with the compression fittings. That took him a bit by surprise--he said that there had been some folks" who had problems with them but for most they worked fine.
After showing him my various cuts and nicks, however, he steered me instead to the crimp-and-barb system I'd seen before, and I gladly bought enough for all the loops plus a couple of spares (in case we bent any or had a bad one--it's not cool to be 10 miles from the nearest store when you find out you've got a bad part!). Because of all the trouble he even tossed in the crimping tool for free.
With that I rendezvoused with the lovely Colleen, grabbed a quick breakfast (Burger King is our friend), and headed to the site. It literally took about 5 minutes to get the fixed fittings attached to the manifolds (yay!), and only about 15 more to get the loops attached to the simple manifold using the crimp-and-barb fittings (yes!).
After that we hauled out the air compressor, hooked it up to the Icma manifold, and held our breath as it began to air up. According to the county inspector's office the system has to hold 65psi (it operates at 15 or so) to pass inspection, and since I didn't but a huge air compressor it was going to take a bit of time. Slowly the pressure began to build--5 psi! 10 psi! 12 psi! and then it dropped back to zero! AAAAHHHHH!
Okay, something had to be hooked up wrong and came loose once the pressure got too high--either that or we had a hole in one of the lines, something we did not want to bear thinking about. I started to air it up again while Colleen listened for leaks at the manifold connections, and quickly she saw that one of the zones had a slight hiss coming off of the return valve. I pulled it off and sure enough the "bullet" was on crooked--the PEx had been trimmed off sloppily (my bad) and as a result part of the "bullet" wasn't properly seated. I quickly trimmed it square, reattached everything, and fired up the compressor again.....
SUCCESS!!!!!!! It ran up (slowly) to 65 psi and stayed right smack dab at that reading when I turned off the compressor.
We then turned our attention to the simpler copper manifold. After all the problems we'd had we wouldn't have been a bit surprised to find multiple leaks, but the only problem we had there was that the pressure gauge hadn't been fully screwed down. Once we did that (spotted it immediately) it also aired up every loop to the requisite 65 psi as if it had always meant to be there, thank you very much!
We're just happy the thing seems done. We puttered around and tied down tubing in a couple of places we'd missed, but after about an hour of the pressures remaining steady we called it a day and headed home. The inspection is tomorrow so I'm taking another day off of work--this is the first inspection that's looking at our work and I want to make sure it goes smoothly.
We've learned a lot, but it will definitely feel good to have this behind us!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/10/2010
After yesterday's annoyances and knowing that we couldn't properly pressurize the lines until tomorrow anyway, Colleen and I figured we could at least finish laying out the rest of the south-end loops and get everything tied into the simple copper manifold. That way once we got the properly sized fill- and gauge-fittings we could air everything up for the inspector (he's slated for Tuesday) and we'd spend the rest of the time putting in last minute tie-downs and adjusting loops a smidge where needed.
Yeah, that plan didn't work out so well.....
The problem was with the copper manifold. Unlike the Icma, which has these wonderful 3-washer "bullet" fittings that "snap" down into the PEx tubing and then screw into the valve, the copper manifold (being simpler) was sent to us with compression fittings, much like with a sprinkler system connection. That didn't bother us until we sat down to start connecting up the lines--and we literally spent the next four hours wrestling with the darn things!
The short version--the compression fittings didn't want to go over the PEx. The longer version--in our four hours of attempts we cut ourselves, stabbed ourselves, bent fittings, lost tempers, and generally got surlier and bloodier as the day went on. When we finally called a halt to this mess we had one single line attached, but neither of us particularly thought it would hold air once we pressure tested it (not that we could yet anyway because of the lack of proper fittings at the moment). This all leads to what I hereby dub as Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #5:
- Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #5: Simple compression fittings suck. They suck bigtime. Never ever ever ever use them. I should have realized this from prior experience but honestly it never even occurred to me when I was going over the "how tos" with Radiant Kurt a couple of days back.
Tomorrow we're headed up to see Radiant Kurt to see what our options are. At this point we're so frustrated that we're either going to find some other way to attach these lines (I think I've seen a crimp-and-barb method), or we're going to rent his time to come up and fix it himself--there's an inspection coming and we're running out of time!
On the third hand (don't tell Colleen I said this!), at least having a deadline sharpens one's focus....
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/9/2010
Wow. The last couple of days have been just, "wow".
We finally got a break on the weather and since I'm still on vacation we hit the tubing work early on the morning of the 8th. The manifolds came in this afternoon (they look fantastic!) but we ran into a couple more of those problems that stopped us cold.
First the successes. Since we need to air up the lines for a pressure test prior to pouring and I didn't have an air compressor (well, I've got a big 220V one in the garage at Wyrdhaven but it's not particularly transportable in any meaningful sense) I got to run over to Harbor Freight and buy myself a new toy! I love this store--for inexpensive (I hate to say cheap) parts which are at excellent prices it's a hard place to beat, and the compressor I wanted was on sale to boot anyway. So that was cool.
We got nearly all of the tubing laid out for the north end of the house and started on the south end. There was some debate early on regarding the rooftop deck and whether or not we wanted to run tubing under it, but we finally decided there wasn't really a good reason to do so since if it was covered in ice and snow you probably wouldn't want to be outside anyway.
Even though we'd decided several days ago that we were only going to work with 300' rolls of PEx from here on out (we were barely able to manage them properly anyway), we'd bought a 1000' roll last week when we first consulted with ABC Plumbing and we still had to figure out what to do with it. After some discussion we decided to cut it into 350' sections so it would be more manageable, then lay it out as designed in the library in 300' runs and trim off the excess once we started to tie everything into the simple manifold. This worked pretty good overall, but we ended up trimming it several times just because otherwise the unused ends just buried the manifold and made it impossible to work around (amazing how this tubing was always in. the. way. when you're trying to get work done!). Still, we got everything but the hallway done before we ran into a problem (more on this later) that stopped us for the night.
Leaving Colleen to work on the library loops for a bit, I wandered over on the north end of the house to hook up the Icma manifold. Let me just say that this was an absolute breeze--I've never had a similar installation go as smoothly or as cleanly. They give you these little "bullets" that have three rings of rubber washers, and which fit down inside the Pex tubing. You know you've got them set when they make a little "snap" sound as you push them in. No "snap", it's not right--look at it again. After that it's a simple matter of sticking them into the valve fitting (squarely) and tightening them up by hand. Couldn't be simpler. I heartily recommend the Icma manifolds and will be using them on the first floor when the time comes.
Unfortunately that's when we ran into a couple of problems. The first was positioning--normally you'd hand the Icma in a wall, but since we were just getting ready to pour the floor there weren't any walls to attach it to yet. After some thought I got a couple of pieces of rebar, stuck them down into the LiteDeck (tying them to the support rebars in each channel), and then tied the Icma to these rods. Not particularly gorgeous but it doesn't really need to be--I just need it to be at approximately the desired height in the (future) wall and out of the way of the concrete. Similarly, the copper manifold is going to be under the walkthrough between the library and the deck and also needed to be positioned up off of the concrete; we solved that by bending a couple of pieces of rebar to match the height of the future floor, putting a piece of scrap plywood on as a platform, and laying the whole thing on that. Those two problems were easy.
The more annoying problem cropped up when I began to get ready to pressurize the north loops. As I attached the air fill valve and pressure gauge to air up the lines for a pressure test, I discovered that they wouldn't fit! There were two problems, one on each manifold:
- The Icma 7-loop manifold would take the fill valve but not the pressure gauge--it wouldn't fit the connection.
- Similarly, when I checked the simple 6-loop copper manifold had the opposite problem--I can hook up the gauge but not a fill
valve.
My guess is that this all probably happened because they were rushed, and just got confused over what parts went where. Very frustrating since I can't pressure test the system, but we've got a few days yet before the inspector needs to come see everything prior to the pour and we should be okay. I'll run the parts over to ABC Monday morning, but in the meantime we can at least finish laying out the loops and have everything ready to go.
So overall annoying but we made good progress in retrospect, and honestly it is kinda fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold the wonder of the 7-zone Icma! The plastic sleeves will help protect the tubing when the concrete is poured. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/6/2010
I finally had a chance to spend some quality time kicking around the basic system design with Radiant Kurt over at ABC Plumbing, in particular how I wanted to handle the zoning and manifolds. While I had identified where they would be located on my initial design, I hadn't yet worked out what kind of manifolds I would want to use--that's where Radiant Kurt came in.
I didn't really realize this, but there are a couple of different kinds of manifolds you can incorporate into your system:
- A simple manifold (usually made of copper) is basically a lot like the one on your sprinkler system. Beyond a gross manual valve control on each loop you have no control over individual loops, driving this manifold instead with either no thermostat or a single thermostat (usually located in the utility room). All of the loops serviced by this manifold will run at the same basic temperature, with the manual valve being used to open up or restrict an area if there's an obvious temperature imbalance once flooring and walls are in place.
- A complex manifold has a far more refined flow control for each loop, with connections for thermostats to drive each loop individually. These thermostats control the flow for each loop, allowing you to have individual areas (rooms, if you have the loops at that level) run at different temperatures. This makes a lot of sense for areas such as bathrooms, for example--most people are bare and wet in the bathroom, and so they like the floor nice and toasty. A bedroom that was that hot, however, would probably be too warm to comfortably sleep in--most folks prefer it a bit cooler.
After some study of the upstairs layout it became apparent to me that these two options would match perfectly. The larger "open" areas (library, walkthrough to the deck, hallway) at the south end of the house could be serviced by a simple manifold, as for the most part these were areas people were walking through, not staying in. The one exception, the library, has a propane fireplace which (if one were feeling chilly for any reason) could be turned on, and shares the masonry heater chimney stack to boot.
The other half of the house at the north end is a series of individual rooms, best serviced by a more complex manifold allowing finer adjustments for each area. This made even more sense for me since I don't really have anybody to actually live in those rooms right now anyway--I put them in on the off chance that I pass away and somebody who follows me has kids or something. I can keep the heat in those areas turned down a bit most of the time and turn it up a week or so before company arrives. For those who may follow, I figure that the kids living in one room won't necessarily want the same temperatures as the kids in the other room anyway, so again having individual controls would be a smart idea.
So, having outlined all of this with Radiant Kurt I placed an order for two manifolds, a simple copper 6-zone one (which they will build, as it happens) and a more high-tech 7-zone one made by a company named Icma. I'd never heard of them but apparently they're very big in Europe, and ABC loves their manifolds. There was a sample one there in the office and as an engineer I have to say I was quite impressed by its construction--stainless steel throughout, with heavy duty threading and zone flow controls built into the top. They were even smart enough to slightly stagger the supply and return valves so you don't have your tubing fighting each other when you route them to each valve--very nice. It kinda looks like this (not exactly, but I couldn't find a good shot of one online and didn't even think to snap a picture of the one at ABC).
The manifolds should arrive in a couple of days, just in time for us to take another crack at getting our tubing layout done. Good weather is predicted and we feel like we've finally got a handle on what we're doing, so both Colleen and I are looking forward to finishing this puppy!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/3/2010
Well, we really should have seen this coming after the last couple of days--snow!
We're pretty much shut down working up there to lay in more radiant tubing for now, so we'll give it a try again in a couple of days.
Sighzor. We were just starting to get a good "rhythm" too! At least I can do some more studying around the web regarding installation of radiant systems--lots to learn out there!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/2/2010
Since we felt like we were stopped short by an unexpected snow just as we were starting to get the hang of things yesterday, Colleen and I made an early start of it today to get up to Tanglewood bright and early to continue laying in the tubing. It turned out that it was good that we did since it snowed on us yet again!
The first half of the day was good though. A bit warmer than yesterday, we picked up where we'd left off (basically half of the first loop) and continued laying it into place. Things went a bit faster than yesterday since we had a better idea what we were doing and had developed a bit of a rhythm, with Colleen fastening down the tubing and me spooling out the roll of PEx a bit ahead of her. This allowed her to focus on straightening and tying in the tubing with some consistency, while I could focus my efforts on untangling the spool of tubing (it's spooled tight enough that it is constantly trying to coil one direction or the other and smack you in the face) and let her know if she was drifting off of the spacing we were trying to maintain (roughly 8"). The layout of the wire mesh helped considerably since it was mostly parallel to the walls, allowing us to put one loop along the wire itself (thus letting us use the simple wire clips we'd gotten) and the other in the void between two wires (we used zip ties for these). We were able to complete the second half of the room in about an hour or so, with some pauses to fetch the knee pads (one of the best inventions ever in the history of Everness) and straighten out some of our work from yesterday. A picture of our progress is below.
As we pondered the next step, it began to snow. Again. Just like yesterday.
Grrr.
We retreated to the trailer for a bit to see if the snowfall would stop, and while there we decided that there was another dirty little secret about radiant tubing that they don't mention:
- Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #3: Your job is immensely simpler if the wire mesh sections you're attaching to is laid out parallel to the walls and each other. As is probably the case with most such jobs, the crew slapped down the wire at nearly the last minute before leaving for the day, with the result that it was slightly crooked--nothing that would make a difference for the concrete pour, but which greatly complicates things when you're trying to lay out your tubing consistently. It is well worth your time to spend a few minutes jiggering the wire around a bit to get it nice and square!
- Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #4: Tying one zip tie is simple and fast. Tying 200 is hell on your fingers. Gloves don't really help because you can't feel the ties well enough to "zip" them properly.
Both of these truths drove Colleen nuts. She often would follow a line of wire as she was snapping in the tubing, only to see when she stepped back that it was lying crooked in the room. Very frustrating. Even worse was having to cut the zip ties she'd painfully tied into place, only to have to tie new ones down again with her increasingly sore fingers. Her fingers were very much rough and dry by the time we were done.
We waited about an hour for the snow to stop but it kept falling steadily, and we finally decided we weren't going to get anything else done today. The temps had dropped a bit as well, and where it was once merely "chilly in the sunlight" it was now "cold and overcast". Sigh.
So, we covered up everything with tarps again and headed back down the canyon. The snow followed us all the way down to the highway, which at least helped to reinforce our decision. We weren't happy that we basically only finished up our first loop and had now spent two days of our layout time, but at least we both felt like we had a good process down and were anxious for sunnier days when we could spend more time on the job.
Fun, but frustrating that we didn't make more progress.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Our work for the day! This is the bedroom over the apartment garage. Again, I wish the tubing was some other color that would make it easier to see, but that's what we got. |
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| A shot of the foggy clouds looking over the area we were working in. You can't see it in this pic, but it's snowing. |
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| A neat view even in the fog. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/2/2010
Whilst (that's a word just not used enough, don't you think?) Colleen and I were taking a short break from finishing our first complete run of tubing earlier today, the local fox vixen dropped by to see what we might have left lying around by way of food. She's a smart little fox, and has learned that People == Food (and People Food is tons better than pinecones any day).
As it happened we hadn't brought anything with us at all, but she apparently found something because she dug something out of the snow near the campfire and gulped it down. Probably something one of the crew left after lunch one day.
She sure is pretty, ain't she?
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The vixen eyes something near the fill dirt pile. |
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| The vixen on the prowl by the campfire ring. |
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| Very nice shot. |
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| The vixen finds something yummy in the snow. |
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| "IS there any more?" |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 1/1/2010
Well now--after yesterday's progress with the installation of the LiteDeck and my tutorial in radiant heat layout, we decided that we were ready to begin laying out the radiant heat system for the second floor today. Things mostly went okay.
As noted before our installation of the tubing on the second floor rather than the first at this stage is a bit unusual, but it's being driven by the LiteDeck flooring between the first and second floors. We had wanted to get the LiteDeck in early for several reasons:
- It'll create a covered area over the first floor, allowing it to dry out, provide a good location to store tools and equipment out of the snow (winter ain't over yet despite our warm snap), and give us a refuge in the event of hail (always possible at this time of year) or rain.
- Once installed the crew will be able to put their ladders on the flooring and work the second floor stack from the inside rather than from the muddy, irregular, messy and unsafe outside around the house.
- We want a good stretch of weather for the LiteDeck pour so it can cure properly, and we've got an excellent forecast for the next two weeks coming up.
Since the LiteDeck had to be poured and we had radiant tubing slated to go into this flooring, then we naturally had to get on that now so the pour could happen on schedule. So today we made several copies of our layout plan, loaded up the spools of PEx into our trusty turck Blackie, and headed up to the site.
As expected for a first day we didn't make a lot of progress, but it was a good day nonetheless. After getting the boxes of PEx and tarps up onto the floor (we want to cover the LiteDeck in the event of snow or rain each night) we began walking around and comparing the layout diagram to what was actually there. The stairs and middle (library) area haven't been installed yet (that will be next week) but things otherwise looked exactly as we'd expected. (I took this as a testament to my excellent model-drawing skills, whereas I think Colleen looked at it more as a tribute to the crew's fine layout work to date--we decided to just go with both.)
We decided to start on the guest room (north) end of the house since the loops here were simpler and the library area didn't exist yet anyway. The manifold here will be in the wall between the media room and the second guest bedroom, so we got out the tape measures and began to figure out exactly where that wall is going to be. Once we had that in place, we used that line as a center line (since that wall is 9" thick for soundproofing reasons), marked the decking along both sides, and the proceeded to go ahead to roughly mark out the walls for the other rooms on that end of the house.
I admit that at first I was far too anal about where these walls were going to be since the LoopCAD diagram I had clearly allocated each loop or pair of loops to a given room, but (eventually) I realized that since I'm heating the entire upstairs it didn't matter so much that a loop hit exactly the edge of a room wall (as they will do by default with LoopCAD). The location of the manifold was important since it was going to be in the wall and we were running all of the loops to and from it (as I pointed out to Colleen it doesn't really matter any more if we're off a couple of inches on the wall's location--this is now ipso facto where it's going to be), but since we were doing everything else all we really needed to do was make sure we were mostly right. If a loop ran a couple of inches into a closet where the diagram showed it stopped neatly 6" away from the wall it wouldn't hurt anything at all.
Let the record show that Colleen had this figured out way, way before I did. Smart lady, she is!
So anyway, once we got the walls outlined and I caught up mentally with Colleen we broke out a box of tubing (I'd bought several 300' lengths and one 1000' length at Radiant Kurt's recommendation) and began to lay out Guest Bedroom #1 (or Circuit 215 on the diagram). This line was the furthest from the manifold and the one I was most worried about, since it was measured very tightly and if there were any measuring or layout issues I was afraid we'd run out of tubing. Once we got started laying in the pipe we quickly discovered a couple of those Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secrets they don't ever tell you on shows like This Old House:
- Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #1: The tubing is stiff. Very stiff. It doesn't bend all nice and purty like in the pictures, or when John is installing tubing under a floor on some home improvement TV show.
- Radiant Heat Dirty Little Secret #2: The loops come to you coiled fairly tightly, so unrolling it is an adventure. When you're trying to play it out nice and straight you end up with it wanting to curve one way, then the other. And it seems to absolutely love "popping" up to smack you in the face. A lot.
It's even less flexible and more prone to popping when it's only in the high 30's and overcast like it was today. Theoretically you should be able to curve 1/2" PEx into a 5" arc if you need to do so, but in reality we were fighting like mad to make our 8" loops fit within 9".
We stopped several times to discuss (and yes, argue) over the more frustrating bits but gradually got the first couple of loops laid out. As we stepped back to look over the progress, it began to snow!
Well dang. That wasn't in the forecast! We quickly scrambled to get the tarps laid out and pushed our loops and tools underneath cover, decided that the weather wasn't like to get any better over the rest of the usable afternoon and that we were both cold anyway, and so we left. We learned a lot though, and I think it'll go faster tomorrow--the forecast is for slightly higher temps (low 40's) and sunshine, which should help a lot.
It's very clear to me already that this is very much a money-saving proposition if you're up to installing the radiant heat yourself. I'm saving a bundle doing this part (though I'm sure I'll make some mistakes along the way) and it's good to "get my hands dirty" on building the house itself.
And dang it's fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Our tubing is a translucent white (unlike the orange I've seen everywhere else) so you can't really see the work we did here. We stopped where the PEx turns into a wild series of coils. |
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| Looking back from the guest bedroom towards the planned manifold location (the PVC els near the center of the picture). You can see our tarps and whatnot scattered about too. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/31/2009
After my excellent meeting earlier today with ABC's radiant heating guy (I'm going to dub him Radiant Kurt), I spent some quality time this evening laying out the loops for the second floor. We've decided that since the weather tomorrow is forecast to be semi-warm (mid 30's; it's amazing what "warm" can be after a couple of weeks of below zero temps!). Radiant Kurt had done some rough calculations to give me basic estimate of the number of loops and the length of each, and my intention was to see if I hit the same general numbers with my own design work.
To this end I went searching on the Internet for tools to help me do this work, and quickly found a nifty bit of software called LoopCAD. (NOTE: They don't pay me and this isn't an ad or anything; I just wanted to pass along what I found to be an excellent and useful tool. If it does sound a bit like an ad--well, that's because I'm excited!)
What a cool, cool piece of software this is! I used v. 1.70; it's available either for purchase or for trial use for something like 30 days, which should be more than enough time for a DIYer. It's trivially easy to use--you provide it with your basic house plan (either loading it in from Autocad or sketching it in yourself) and then you can identify which areas you want to install loops in. Once you've done that, you click on a room, tell the program where the tubing will enter/exit the room, and presto! it generates a layout instantly for you. Very slick and very, very fast. I believe (now that I've seen it in action) that several of the radiant heat shops use the Pro version for their design work (at least their diagrams sure look like they came out of LoopCAD, anyway).
After playing with LoopCAD for a bit I can recommend it completely as a helpful tool for anybody who's installing radiant heat, but there are definitely some caveats you want to be aware of:
- I couldn't get LoopCAD to import my Autocad blueprint at all, so I ended up having to sketch it in myself. It seemed confused by my multipage Autocad document, which had side views and outside views and measurements and all kinds of other stuff in addition to the basic house blueprint, and I decided that it would be simpler for me to just draw in the basic outline myself. If you use this tool you'll want to remember this, and either spend some quality time trimming out a copy of your blueprints to just the basics or do what I did and sketch it yourself.
- LoopCAD is very much "room oriented", rather than "area oriented". I couldn't really find a way to get it to run a loop across multiple rooms, though I could manually adjust what it auto-generated after the fact and it properly calculated the changes in loop length with no problem. It even remembers to adjust the loop length if you end up shifting the entry/exit locations to make things fit better. If you're going to have your radiant heat support just a couple of rooms (perhaps an add-on) what it generates will be perfect; otherwise you'll have some manual editing to do.
- The version I used (v. 1.70) seemed to a problem specifying different wall types and thicknesses. In my case my exterior walls are nearly 14" thick (8" of concrete plus 2 1/2" of foam on each side plus the exterior and the stucco), but LoopCAD seemed to want to make the interior walls the same thickness. I eventually got around this by identifying the interior walls as "boundary only" so they had no thickness, but I still ended up tweaking some loops to fit better. The vendor are aware of this (they have a great forum for posting questions and finding out how to do things) but they don't have a fix out as of this writing.
- LoopCAD really doesn't like "non-square" rooms very much, though it makes a game try to generate loops for them if you tell it too. In my case most of my rooms/areas are basically big rectangles, but the library (in the upper center of the house) was completely baffling for the program--it generated a weird single loop that wandered all over the room and didn't really do a good job of heating anything beyond the center. I had to wipe what it did and lay the whole thing out by hand, which wasn't too hard but was a bit time-consuming.
There were some features that I absolutely loved:
- You can easily change the color of a given loop. This makes it much easier to keep them separate when you've got a lot of loops (as I do) and lets you focus on a given one very easily.
- There are a ton of options for generating the loops, though the defaults are pretty smart. You can have the loops default to a variety of layouts (looped, serpentine, etc.), give it a maximum loop length, specify the distance to maintain between tubing lines and/or the walls, identify how many loops you want in a given room, force the program to equalize multiple loop lengths, etc. Very nice; you can play with it for a long time before you run out of options here.
- LoopCAD will default the "flow" of the water based on where you first identify the entry/exit locations, such that it enters "hot" at one end and leaves "cooler" (after warming up the floor) at the other. The direction is marked with little arrows so you can easily see what it's thinking. Sometimes this is what you want and sometimes it's not, but you can reverse it instantly with a single menu selection. Very slick.
- Similarly, the orientation of the generated loops isn't always what you want for various reasons, which can cause it (on a room with multiple loops) to make things more complicated than they need to be. You can "flip" the orientation with a simple menu selection though, and LoopCAD will automatically bring any other loops in the room into proper alignment automatically. Again, a very slick feature.
- It's very easy to "stub out" things like staircases, bathtubs, etc. so that LoopCAD doesn't to try to put tubes there. In my case all I was worried about was the main staircase, but some folks like to keep tubing away from toilets or walls. This was a very nice feature.
So after spending a long evening (broken only by a micro-waved pizza and a quick celebration of the New Year fireworks off of Pikes Peak) I had a layout plan for the second floor ready to go. I elected after some research to go with 8" spacing on the tubing which is relatively tight--this will be the primary source of heat for Tanglewood and I don't want there to be the slightest sign of a chilly spot. For the record, both Radiant Kurt and Builder Dale thought I could go with a much wider spacing--Radiant Kurt commonly installs at 1' intervals while Builder Dale's experience with his radiant heat system had him thinking I would do just fine at 2'. I pondered both recommendations and perused various radiant heat sites, but finally elected to go with the tighter spacing. My thinking was straightforward enough: it won't cost significantly more, will give me finer control over individual areas, and allows me to over-engineer the whole thing--which, as long-time readers will know, is a big plus for me. So that's what we're going to do.
Tomorrow we'll take this layout with us up to the site and see if it makes any sense.
Dang this stuff is so fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Behold the wonder that is the Tanglewood Second Floor Radiant Heat Layout! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/31/2009
More great weather today let the crew continue the work temporarily stopped when they ran out of bracing, and they made good progress.
Most of today's efforts focused on getting the edge of of the apartment-end LiteDeck finished up and starting on the rooftop deck itself. It's not entirely obvious, but since we're not running the LiteDeck over 100% of the upstairs we've got to form concrete "beams" at the two open ends (between the library over the living room and at the edge over the apartment). This type of construction requires some extra work since there's naturally no wall there, and that means that the crew had to spend some quality time forming the first beam on the current edge. They'll get a chance to do it again once they begin installing the library decking as well.
Things went well today, with much progress being made both in laying in decking and installing bracing underneath. They didn't finish but it's very easy to see how things are going to go together now, and it was good to see the that the "slant" installed a couple of days ago to handle water on the deck come together.
While the crew was doing this, I spent some quality time at a local shop (ABC Plumbing, an excellent store with just practically everything you'll need for plumbing work) working with their radiant heat expert to do the basic design for the upstairs. I've got to have this ready once the crew is done with the LiteDeck, since we'll only have a limited window of time to lay in the radiant heat before. We did some good work with the design (more on that in another post), and when I left I took the first load of PEx tubing (ABC carries the HeatLink brand, one of many available) with me based on our design. It'll probably be a couple of days before I can start with the layout work, but should be enough time to finalize what I need to do and to read up on some of the many (many many many) posts on the Web about radiant heat do's and don'ts. The really exciting thing, of course, is that this will be my first real chance to do something truly "hands on" since clearing the trees a few months back, a nice place to be at the start of the new year.
Dang I love this stuff!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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| The crew ponders over the construction of the beam at the apartment end. |
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| The crew begin to lay in the tophats onto the LiteDeck. |
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| More LiteDeck tophat install work. |
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| Much tophat stacked up at the edge of the house. In the distance you can see the mountain that I would dearly love to put a WiFi relay on, but that's a project for another day/weekend. |
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| Builder Dale makes use of the Cat to lift the tophat bundles into place--much better than hauling them up by hand! |
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| A slightly closer shot of the lifting work. |
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| The crew consult on how to lay in the tophat over the main garage area. |
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| The deck begins to go in. It's amazing what a difference this relatively little bit has already made! |
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| All of this bracing stacked along the walls will eventually be assembled and moved into place under the LiteDeck. |
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| A good shot of the bracing under the apartment end. |
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| A big pile 'o bracing bits. |
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| The first load of radiant heat tubing! |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/30/2009
Another "step back and prep" day today as the crew ran out of bracing for the LiteDeck during yesterday's burst of activity, so while Colleen and Builder Dale worked to get more bracing to the site I walked a couple of friends around the place to give them the nickel tour. While it was slightly sad that we were effectively losing a perfectly good weather day (hey, in the middle of winter any day that's mid-40's is a "good weather day"!), it was perfect weather for showing off the place.
Being able to walk around and show the site to somebody else (as we did with Colleen's folks a week or so ago) is a great way to summarize your thoughts about where things are and to answer perfectly good questions that you might not have given much thought to (such as, "what are you planning to do here?"). I like that and almost always come out of the tour with a couple of notes of things to pass along to Colleen or Builder Dale, depending on what's going on.
The visit itself was fairly uneventful, with my getting up there with Arlen and Anna well before the crew showed up with the additional bracing. It's amazing to see the changes that have occurred in just a few days--there's now a roof in some places (well, effectively) and the house is rapidly evolving so that you can't see "into" it from the hillside anymore. In a week or so we'll be laying out radiant tubing on the top of this LiteDeck if all goes well, and a week or so after that (again, weather depending) we'll be pouring concrete again. Looking back to the beginning, when there was nothing here but a sorta-flat spot with trees scattered about, it's nothing short of breathtaking what changes we've wrought.
After I was done walking Arlen and Anna around we headed back down the canyon where (of course) we ran into Colleen and Builder Dale in Blackie hauling a very heavy load of bracing and tophats. We ended up having to back through the ice-laden creek and pull out of the way for them, since they had the heavy load and (in Colorado) the up-hill vehicle has the right of way anyway. Colleen and I consulted briefly as vehicles were being maneuvered, and then they continued up to the site while we went on down the canyon to get some lunch. It was glorious.
Many pics below, so enjoy. Dang this is fun!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| A shot of Tanglewood from the hill by the well. You can see that all of the LiteDeck for this end is done; the uncovered part is the apartment which has nothing above it. |
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| Another shot of the LiteDeck area. |
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| Closeup of the LiteDeck that comes up to the apartment edge. There will be two bathrooms and part of a closet along this wall. |
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| Nice shot of the LiteDeck looking from the hill out over the apartment garage in the distance. |
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| Same spot, looking towards the living room. The stairs will eventually go right at the top edge of the LiteDeck. |
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| Underneath the LiteDeck, looking from the apartment into the kitchen at the far end. |
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| Closeup of the LiteDeck between the main garage and the apartment garage. Note the 2x6 supports throughout; that's enough to hold it in place but scaffolding will go where I was standing before we dump concrete on it. |
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| Standing in the kitchen looking back towards the apartment. They haven't put in the LiteDeck (for the library on the second floor) yet; some of the largest single pieces will be incorporated here. |
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| Standing in the kitchen looking out towards the master bedroom. This area will be covered with LiteDeck as well. |
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| Arlen looking casual. |
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| Closeup of the end of a piece of LiteDeck. Note the heavy steel beams on each side; these run the length of the piece and provide strength. Rebar goes into the center channel when you get ready to pour. |
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| Another shot of a bit of LiteDeck. |
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| Arlen and Anna in the garage. |
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| A shot of the edge of the LiteDeck, where it stops above the apartment. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/29/2009
After yesterday's excellent start and with middling-good weather today (low 40's) the crew continued with their installation of the LiteDeck today. It's amazing what a difference just a bit of this stuff has made to the "feel" of the house--you're actually inside in some places! Things were fairly straightforward as the crew got more familiar with the product. There were lots of consultations with Builder Dale, and of course the weather slowed things down a bit as well, but there were no real problems.
Colleen did help solve one minor problem though. Back when Architectural Engineer Scott originally designed Tanglewood's deck and tower rooftops they were essentially laid out flat with a series of rubber and plastic membranes, feeding into a rooftop drain that discharged out to the back of the house. It became apparent, however, that dumping water along the back of the house--where we're already going to great lengths to mitigate water coming down the hillside above Tanglewood--might not be the best idea. After some pondering Builder Dale's engineer (bright guy named John; I haven't met him yet but hope to soon) slightly redesigned these two areas so that they would slope towards the front of the house instead. We'll rig the drains to discharge between the crenellations, probably using some kind of neat gargoyles or dragons or something, which should look quite nifty. All of this simplifies the layout and build slightly, removes the need for an internal drain, and adds to the overall effect of the house---definitely a win-win-win situtation.
The slope was a bit of an issue for me though, in that (given the width of the deck area) there needs to be about a 5" difference between the top and bottom of the grade to meet building code requirements. I don't know about you, but I can definitely see a 5" delta over a distance of 18' (Colleen says I'm imagining things), so we kicked around how to conceal this. We realized that once the deck's flat area is done we can come back to install the deck proper on Trex (or something similar) cut to the deck's slope while providing a nice, flat area on top. We'll do something similar (probably) on top of the tower.
After this was explained to the crew they put up the basic edge reinforcements for the LiteDeck accordingly; you can see this in one of the pictures below. Honestly I think it's going to work out pretty well, and it's not terribly obvious (except to somebody as admittedly anal as myself).
Not much else to add at this point. I'm working on the radiant tubing layout in anticipation of possibly starting it next week--yay!
Amazing to see this house actually coming together!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Stacks of the tophats awaiting deployment sitting outside the garage area. |
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| Inside the 3-car garage--there's a roof here now! Wow!!!! |
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| Looking at the shoring towards the master bedroom (below) and deck (above) area. note the extra line of 2x6's; this is to cause the slope needed for proper runoff. |
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| Closeup of some of the supports in the master bathroom area. |
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| After putting in the 2x6 shoring, they started laying in the LiteDeck for the rooftop deck. |
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| A closeup of the LiteDeck installation from below. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/28/2009
Very exciting today as the crew began to install the LiteDeck.
After getting to the site a bit behind schedule (hey, it's hard to
start up again after a nice holiday!) they walked through the
procedure with Builder Dale and got to it.
I didn't know this, but it turns out that not everybody actually
builds with this product, mostly for cost reasons. This is a great
way to go since it adds a huge amount of insulation, strength, and
noise-reduction to the house, but it's also pretty much the more
expensive option. While we were crunching through the budget just
prior to beginning this adventure I was given the option of going
with a more conventional truss-and-plywood flooring system, and while
it was indeed tempting to save those monies I decided to go
with the LiteDeck. Every house I've ever lived in that was
multi-story used “conventional” flooring and trust me—no
matter what you do a conventional truss system will eventually
develop squeaky spots, you'' be able to hear TVs and stuff through
the floor, every small thumping noise sounds like something huge fell
over, etc. That was an unpalatable prospect to be sure.
There's also the security issue to consider. Tanglewood is in the
middle of a nice, deep pine forest and is surrounded by tall (50 to
60 foot) pine trees. Should one of those trees fall over onto the
house, I didn't want the house to be suddenly unlivable. At least now
we'll have the option of shutting off heat to the section with the
tree in it and retreating to the lower, all-concrete level.
So back to the build. This particular crew wasn't too familiar
with building with LiteDeck (I think they might have done one other
application, not quite as large, if I remember correctly) so Builder
Dale spent some time this morning walking through how the product
worked, how to install the rebar in the LiteDeck channels, how the
tophats fit onto each section, etc. Normally most crews attach the
tophats to the main panels with the same foam they use on the ICF,
but because we're building in winter foam isn't a good option so
we're going with a wire nail-like thing instead. My understanding is
that while there are a plethora of specially-made mechanical
attachment options available (LiteDeck themselves make a neat
corkscrew-style thing) most of these are relatively expensive
compared to what they do.
So after the walkthrough they got started laying in the LiteDeck,
and it's amazing what a difference that has made already to the
sections it's in! So far the forms are fitting in exactly
right—a nice, tight fit that's just perfect and shows that they got
the walls nice and straight. While things moved slowly initially the
crew was starting to get more confident with the product towards the
end of the day. They have to be a bit careful right now because they
don't have all of the underfloor bracing in place yet, so while you
can walk on the forms you don't want to stomp on them or
anything, and I would imagine that it's not the most secure-feeling
thing right now anyway. Fortunately they can do most of what they
need from below and that's what they've focused on so far.
Looking down the week we hope to have the LiteDeck done by
Thursday/Friday, though there's a little thing called New Years' that
might slow that down a notch. Builder Dale is still calling in
bracing for the decking, and we'll need that in place (at $100/day,
ouch!) before Colleen and I can start laying in the radiant heat
tubing. I've still got a bit of work to do yet to finalize the
radiant tubing layout (it's amazing how many utterly different
and utterly authoritative opinions there are about this out on
the Intertubes!) yet as well. The tubing might well become a weekend
project (weather permitting).
Seems like there are more chores more often now and that's to be
expected, I guess. Never enough time in the day and the days are
damnably short right now to boot. Still, progress is excellent and
we're having fun and it's all so danged exciting!
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| The interior of the house has been (relatively) cleared out in anticipation of the LiteDeck work. |
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| Lots of bracing and stuff here in the living room. |
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| Let the install begin! The crew began over the garages and worked out from there. |
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| The forms are a bit unwieldy. |
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| Another shot of the install of the first section. |
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| Setting up some basic bracing under the LiteDeck. This will serve until the crew installs the heavier stuff--can't walk on it until then. |
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| A shot of the install from the hill above the house. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/26/2009
As expected we had a nice stand-down with the Christmas holiday
and another storm (about 5”) blowing in over the last couple of
days, so today was our first real opportunity to run up to the site
since the pour. As a bonus Colleen's folks were down from Alaska and
wanted to see the house and I needed to download weather data, so up
we went.
Everything went great. There was more LiteDeck
stacked up inside the house than I'd expected, and the crew had even
been able to bring up one stack of the tophats with the forms as
well. We walked all around, gave Colleen's folks the nickel tour, and
generally had a great time.
A few pics of the build and the stack of LiteDeck are below.
Depending on the weather we could get started stacking this stuff in
next week.
Steven in Colorado Springs
Photos
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| Colleen's folks look around the build. |
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| Lots of LiteDeck! |
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| Yet more LiteDeck! |
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| LiteDeck everywhere! |
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| LiteDeck in various sizes! |
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| A stack of tophats for the LiteDeck. Unlike the LiteDeck (which is cut to the length desired), tophats come in 4' lengths and are in various thicknesses (2", 4", and 6" I think). |
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| The house from near the base of the driveway. |
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| The house from above the site. Once they start installing the Litedeck we'll never have a good "cutout" view quite like this again. |
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Posted to tanglewood by Steven in Colorado Springs, CO
on 12/22/2009
After yesterday's mostly disastrous events I figured that today
could only be better, and for the most part they were. At the lovely
Colleen's request I stayed away from the pour again today, mostly
because she didn't need to have me underfoot if there were any more
problems (I'm a sensitive, loving guy that way). That meant I didn't
catch up on all the news until the end of the day, but as the news
was primarily good thing that was okay.
Colleen reports that the pours overall went quite well, with both
trucks arriving promptly on scene with mud and fully filled water
tanks (in case any on-the-spot thinning was necessary). The pours
themselves went pretty well without too much excitement...
...except for one little thing. As the second pour
got going, working its way around the top of the living room wall,
all was well until suddenly concrete began pouring out of one part of
the wall! Colleen yelled at the crew to stop pumping and they did
pretty quickly (only about a yard was lost); upon inspection they
discovered that they'd forgotten to block up one tiny (maybe 6”)
section of the cut wall properly. The concrete had found this hole
and decided to seek the path of least resistance. They quickly got it
boarded up and continued the pour, after which the crew cleaned up
the inadvertent spill.
The remainder of the day was anti-climatic. As with the previous
pours the crew wanted to avoid disturbing the ICFs when they were
filled with wet cement, so they just did a bit of cleanup and then
focused on the next task.
The last bit of work was waiting down at the mount of the canyon.
Builder Dale had brought up what should be the last load of the LiteDeck
with him (turns out there's a lot in the house—basically the
entire second floor which by my quick estimate is roughly 2400 square
feet) but they'd left it down at the first gate so that they wouldn't
take up any parking space or maneuvering room for the concrete
trucks. Once the pour was done he, Colleen and some of the crew
headed down with Blackie to hook up the trailer and haul it up to the
site. There were no particular problems—a small surprise since
there was by now a fair amount of mud and the roads had gotten
slicker—and once they got to Tanglewood they quickly unloaded and
stacked the forms just ahead of another storm blowing in from the
west.
So the day ended well. Builder Dale reported being pleased with
both the concrete and the responsiveness of the supplier, Colleen was
happy things got done with minimal problems, and everybody was happy
that we had gotten most of the LiteDeck on site. With more snow
moving in and the Christmas holiday upon us we're not sure when we'll
start up again but we're all very satisfied with the State of Things.
Dang this is fun!!!!!!
Steven in Colorado Springs
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