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:
- The building was not nearly beefy enough to support the back-fill height if it went up 22 feet.
- 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.
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