Welcome

 Dear Reader:

Welcome to my construction blog. When I did the House on the Grapevine blog 17 years ago, one of the blog features that really bugged me was it's reverse chronological ordering of posts (most recent first). This prevented the reader from being able to see the project materialize from beginning to end in an intuitive way. It required the reader to paw through the entire blog to find the start. My fix that I'm experimenting with here is to create empty posts for the entire process up front in the correct order, then fill them in with info as it happens (and as I get the time to do it). So you'll note that all posts have the same creation date, which does not reflect the actual work date. 

When I get a post done, I provide a label which shows on right of the home page, starting with a letter that corresponds to the chronological order.

In short, if you scroll down to look at posts that don't have labels they are not complete and will get updated as I get to it.

 Yours,

-Robert 

Design Phase 1: Conceptualization

Date:  Circa 2008 to March 2024

Our original house design did not include a garage, but the need for one has swelled up like a No-See-Um bite on a tender spot. A Tool Hound such as myself can be slow to recognize that every new acquisition is not just a budget outlay but also a commitment to future maintenance, and yes, storage space. Since our original building project I've been working up quite a pile including the tear drop trailer, a 100 gallon air compressor, a Sawstop 3HP table saw,  helical planer, dust collector, a heavy duty vice and stand and a classic 1960s Rockwell Band Saw. And we've added a Subaru EV to the stable on a trial lease without disposing  of either of the old vehicles.  Most of the pile resides in a moldering state on the back porch or in our  lower Tobacco Barn, named for the ability to cure tobacco via wind freely blowing through the spacious gaps in the siding. Its a foretaste, but only a foretaste, of being out of the weather. And did I mention the bicycles crowding my office and bedroom?

The pressure from this fevered state of materialism inspired wishful thinking over many years to complete the phrase "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a space with X" where X includes

• Root cellar for the potatoes,
• EV charger driven from solar panels, 
• Workbench for working on bikes and other mechanical,  surrounded by a
• Well-lit place to hang mechanics and construction tools
• Air  compressor with well organized hose for tire maintenance
• Noise-insulated wood shop space with room to process long stock.
• Dry non-freezing storage space for paint, caulk, etc.
• Accessible storage space for the sundries currently squirreled away inconveniently in our attic.
• Guest quarters with views of the hills, dales and sounds of running water.

Site selection for this multipurpose building was pretty straightforward because our property, although offering 60 acres of plenitude, is very constrained. Steep forested slopes and cascading branches limit access to a narrow strip along our driveway. After years of walking 1/8 mile each way to reach the lower barn every time I need an Allen wrench, I wanted something close at hand to the house.

Our property came with several barns, the closest being a 30 foot x 30 foot two story affair facing southwest on the hillside about 50 feet from the east side of the house. This barn was perched atop piles of stones on a respectably slanted hill. Six horse (or mule) stalls divided the aptly labeled ground floor. The second story was for tobacco drying and did double duty as a hay loft for the stalls beneath. Although the weathered 1x hardwood siding had seen a saw blade, not so the bones of the structure: decently straight sapling logs from three to six inches in diameter.  A resourceful approach for the barn raiser with more trees and time than cash. This edifice was about 12 feet above the level of the driveway, so using it as it was built for a garage was ruled out.

 

 

If you are wondering what those sticks are protruding from the front, that was my mimicking the stick outline of new construction rooflines you may have seen in gated communities, the idea being to give a physical impression of the new building.

So the overall outlines became clear: remove the barn, remove a chunk of the hill to make a flat spot at the level of the driveway, then orient the building and its roof as much to the south as possible to increase solar gain. 

 First Pass Drawings

 A fellow Rotarian is a draftsman so I hired him to do some drawings within a couple weeks of taking retirement from my career as a software engineer in September of 2023.

 

The garage level has three root cellars behind:

 

Shop floor maximizes open space with stairs going to third floor from back entrance double doors. 

 

Top floor is a garret room with sloping ceilings. Double doors on right open onto a deck not shown which egress to the hillside behind. 

After a series of less than fruitful calls and more fruitful coffee shop meetups on changes, then some weeks of calling asking for progress, I received more official looking plans in late November.

  

I had these three pages printed on large format paper and started taking them around to potential vendors for vetting and to try to get on folks' schedules.

 

Design Phase 2: Crash Course in Refinement

Date: January to April 2024  

 Although my personal style, such as it is, has little of what might be called refinement ("uncouth" was the alternative put forward by my freshman dorm roommate), my project work is freighted with the stuff. And working with the draftsman on the first concept was just a little too painful.  For example, need to move and resize the skylight? That's an hour of back and forth.  And refinements were needed. I took the plans shown in my last post to the Truss Guy at Appalachian Truss. Its a cool rural production facility nestled up a hollow off the Toe River in Yancy County.  He went over the plans and did some preliminary truss designs. He assured me that 2' high first floor trusses could span the space with no supports - a clear span garage would be so great! - so poof the support poles in the initial plans are gone. And he pointed out that structurally the stairwell in my plans was problematic for the second floor trusses. Here is the plan:

 

To orient my discussion, and almost corresponding to reality, I'll use "north" to refer to the upwards direction in the drawing and the other compass directions accordingly.

To be reasonably sized and provide a clear-span shop space the trusses need to run the short way - from south to north. But the stairwell cuts across that run for half the floor. Besides needing a beefy structure to support that end of the floor, the link between the east-west exterior walls is broken; that will impact the roof truss design which needs to make up for the weakness below. Truss Guy suggested running the stairs the north-south way so they would be parallel to the trusses which makes a lot of sense. However the stairs are entering a garret, and at the top landing you need to have head room, but the roof angle is coming down as you go south, which constrains how far south the top of the stairs can be. Meanwhile height of the 2nd floor dictates how far the stairs have to climb, and code dictates minimums for step and tread size. All of which means that a straight stairwell will not fit north-south, even if you have steps start right at the lower doorway. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to play around with the options in some design software?

 To my great fortune I brought back a case of Covid 19 from the Blacksburg holiday celebrations. Charla was understandably reluctant to repeat her miserable Covid experience so I self isolated in my corner of the house until I got a clean test. Which was almost 4 weeks of isolation. I took on the task of finding and learning how to use a building design tool. And of course I'm too cheap to pay for those packages used by engineers and architects - I assure you they are not priced for the home user. However I found an open source package called FreeCAD which has a "Bill of Materials" building design module and a bunch of YouTube training videos showing how easy it was to throw together a framing plan for a garden shed and so on. Those demos were like the pot sweeteners on sports gambling sites: payoff just good enough to get me entering a portion of my plans into the app before the sunk cost fallacy kept me there!

 The really good thing about FreeCAD is that it is a 3-D modeling tool. Many of the applications in use for building plans are simply fancy drawing tools that have separate data for each diagram created. For example the Workshop diagram shown above would be a cohesive unit. So to change the location of a door, you'd do it on this diagram, but that would have no effect on the elevation  diagram showing the outside - it would still have the door in its original location. So you have to be very careful to propagate every change you make to all the impacted diagrams. In contrast, a 3-D modeling tool has an object representing the door and when you move it, the relationship with the wall object is updated and propagated to all renderings (e.g. generated diagrams).

 By the end of my confinement I had moved the needle ahead from the initial drawings,  including using a bend in the stairway to resolve the conflict just detailed. This view is called a "section" (as in cross-section) looking from above at a certain height above the floor (that is why the staircase just terminates half way up). Unfortunately it doesn't edit out the irrelevant items such as the root cellar roofs on the north side which will be underground.

  

 You can see above that I've added model data for my various woodworking tools (i.e. band-saw, joiner and planer from the bottom-most up), and done a possible arrangement of them which would allow long boards to be run though without hitting other machines. Inspired by a shop design I saw on YouTube 10 years ago, I added the couple half doors in line with the tools to allow 16' or even 20' stock to be passed through the machines (i.e. to process a 20' board requires double that clear run - one side for feed and the other for excretion). And hey, why not lay out the sub-floor to stagger joints, which can be checked with the truss layout under it.

 One of the areas that didn't get enough thought when we built our house was exactly how the backfill was going to work, so I put that data in too.

 

I was pretty much going hog-wild with the modeling, e.g. how to fit 3 grandchildren into that garret room.

 

 

 However I don't think the unpaid developers who built the FreeCAD tool had "hog-wild" in their requirement specs, because working on it started to get slower and sllooowwwweeeerrrrrr. Then the tool would start to crash. Clearly my model was far larger with many more relations to maintain than anything they tested with.  FreeCAD has an auto-backup mechanism but it was like the good old days back in the late 80's on the floppy-drive PC where one made darn sure to save one's work often and save backups too.  Even those preventative measures made work mighty slow as a Save action would take from 2 to 3 minutes.

All that said, moving my work onto my best computer helped a lot (although it could still peg all eight CPUs while loading and crashing). The tool also includes a TechDraw module that generates diagrams from the model data so it was possible to generate semi-professional looking paper copy.

Second Pass Drawings  

 

 

 

I proudly took these down to the county building code enforcement for an informal review.  The Man said I should get a structural engineer to sign off on the root cellar and back-fill plans which I had all the way up to the north east corner level of the deck (ground level access to the deck would be bueno, and the hill is right there). I think he said that because these things simply aren't done in these parts, for good reason as I was to discover in the months ahead.  

Site Preparation / Barn Demo

Date: May 2024

Regarding the need for structural engineering mentioned in the last post, during the initial concept phase, I had purchased an hour of consultation with a friend of a friend who had recently gone out on his own as a structural engineer. We discussed several issues but the most significant was that he shared how a strong concrete ceiling (for the root cellar) is built by using a corrugated metal deck which serves to support the wet concrete during the pour then stays in place as the ceiling of the root cellar. Its called a "Composite Concrete" floor system and it is what they use in all those skyscrapers.  So naturally when The Man at the county said to get engineering done, I sent my plans to the guy and asked when he might be able to get me an official evaluation. The usual run-around ensued and eventually he told me he was booked and wouldn't be able to help out. 

I did a search on all structural engineers in my area and found a guy who specializes in Madison County jobs - what luck! I sent him my drawings. And he did me a solid at the same time that he told me he wouldn't be any part of this job since he didn't really want to work with ICF design and couldn't certify some unusual aspects of my design. The solid part was that he told me the issues he saw in his analysis:

1. The building was not nearly beefy enough to support the back-fill height if it went up 22 feet.
2. The deck supports went down at 45°  and anchored on the building (see drawing previous post) which in his experience, if you only use wood for the construction, eventually causes the deck to rip away.

So while I lost a prospective engineer, I was able to improve my design to use vertical posts for the deck and add a retaining wall (and bridge to the deck) to reduce the back-fill to only be against the garage level, which is a typical practice in this parts. 

 

 You'll forgive my rendering of the retaining wall, which will be made from big rocks taken from the building excavation, not big blocks as shown there.

 My efforts to recruit the Willis family construction company (recommended by several folks) were largely one-way. Jimmy did say that he could help me out with getting the barn taken down, which meant that he got his crew of Mexican laborers, headed up by Lucas from Guadalajara, to contact me.

I'd had the barn razing (funnily the opposite of barn raising) in mind for quite some time. The first step in this multi-year process was to stop digging (adding anything new to the pile of odds-and-ends stored in the barn). The second was to relocate the water pump that lifts our spring water to the tank up on the ridge which feeds the house. Just as the Covid pandemic was hitting in 2020 I needed to replace the pump, so I figured that was a good time to get it out of the barn.

 

 

 

 

Once I knew the demolition was imminent I cleaned up all the rest of it, including a roll of hay, the  rooftop cargo carrier, riding lawn mower, lumber, a big pile of leaves we'd collected to use as mulch, a church pew, 200 pounds of leftover tiles from our house construction, etc and a big pickup truck load to the dump for what was "filthy and eaten by rats."

So on April 27 Lucas & Co. arrived to take down the barn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on April 28th, our 47th anniversary, the disassembly was complete. 

 

A fun video for the climax:

 

 

 The cleanup in the next few days included pulling all the nails from the siding (to be reused as inside paneling in the shop),  sorting the usable lumber and poles from the scraps, and making another run to the dump.

 

 

 

 

With the barn gone the last step of site preparation was cutting down the trees that were too close to the new building. The first one below was a heart breaker - a really beautiful Dawn Redwood we planted when we first moved here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 With the site prepared it was time to start pestering the Ryan the excavation guy to come over with his trackhoe and skid steer to move some dirt. 

Since the projected bathroom in the upstairs will connect with our current septic tank, we throught  it best to get that tank pumped for the first time since it went into service in 2007. Of course I had to dig around in the yard to find it... I knew where it generally was but its always tough to find things in the ground. At any rate we now have this picture to document its location and the little PEX pipes embedded to indicate where the tank lids are.

 

 

 

Excavation Days

Date: June - July 2024

 Perhaps I'll let the date stamped pictures do the talking on the excavation experience. TIP: I maximize the player, turn up the volume and RIP THE KNOB OFF for a full immersive experience of the YouTube videos below. For images I use the right-click "open image in another tab" when I want to see more detail.

Wednesday June 12, 2024  - Creamy

Thursday June 13, 2024  - Lumpy

 - Resistance!

- And Water (dripping in the grey area)

!

Friday June 14, 2024  - A bit off track

 

My idea of moving the dirt with the truck instead of the skid steer was a bust. Unloaded the truck there before using wrapping a chain around the front axle and using the Trackhoe to extract it.

- Better Definition of the Strong Part

Monday June 17, 2024 - If I had a Hammer...

 

- That Took a Day?

 

Tuesday June 18, 2024 - I'd Hammer it in the Morning, 

 

- I'd Hammer it in the Evening

 

Thursday June 20, 2024 - Let's Wear Out Trackhoe Teeth

 

Thursday June 27, 2024 - That's Some Good Driveway Material Being Produced

 - Break Time! What might be found in an old wood pile

Tuesday July 2, 2024 - Drip Drip Drip Makes Soup

 

Friday July 5, 2024 - Something Tells Me I Can Get By With Less Root Cellar 

  

Tuesday July 9, 2024 -Mud Pies with a Rhythm 

Friday July 12, 2024 - Last Day of Four Week Rock Hammer Rental

And I got nothing to show for it (and no pictures taken neither). However we wrapped up the big Trackhoe work on Wednesday and switched up Ryan onto his "Little Hoe" for some trenching duties covered in the next post. 

Wednesday July 17, 2024 - Spread the Wealth

As they wrapped up, they used the skid steer to distribute the remaining spoils around the property. We put a big pile up the hill on the way to the art studio to use as backfill against the putative building (pushing it down the hill is considerably easier than up).  

 

We found any number of places stash dirt & rocks to improve the gradient. This hillside used to be too steep to mow, much less back a truck down:

 

Note: The pics below taken much  later, hence the weed growth --- uncut because there are still rocks on the surface discouraging running over it with the mower. 

We filled the hole where a barn used to be located:

When I do get around to picking up those surface rocks, I've been using them to make the driveway at the culvert wider so the next dump truck doesn't have to slide in.

Made the driveway wider where the dump truck slid off in 2006:

Old fence line gradient reduced:

And reduced the driveway shoulder embankment gradient to extend what can be cut with riding mower instead of weed wacker.