Foundation poured....

This weekends projects include waterproofing the foundation. I was gonna use a sheet membrane and do this myself, but its difficult to find concrete guys with forms that dont have a brick impression on them. If we used the sheet membrane, we'd have to have parged the entire house foundation to make it smooth. So, I figured - fine, we'll trowel on some liquid rubber membrane. NOPE! no place in town sells anything like that for below grade foundations. I was ready to start calling places from here to Omaha and Minneapolis and just drive to go get it. But, I settled on having a local contractor come out and do it. It wont be as thick as I'd want - I'm having him make two passes, so - its a near-miss almost happy medium of cost/frustration/etc.

Once that is setup, I'll be applying rigid insulation from footing to sill (under slab too - but thats next week). I need to get my basement plumbing septic lift basin in too and the corresponding below slab plumbing to connect to it. I'm just rough plumbing this in, so it wont have to be done later. We dont intend of having to use it. The main septic drain leaves the house in such a way, that everything should be able to be gravity fed out w/o pumps.

Adventures for next week: digging trench for water supply and the flatwork for the garage floor and basement floor. I think we'll just move in when thats done.

Footings!

Well, alright then. So, my passive solar slab idea is now my passive-aggressive 9ft basement. Hole was dug on Tues/Wed and footings are in as of Thurs. Wow! Its moving along. I'm totally thrilled so far with the contractors I've put together thus far.

House footing:

Mudroom:

Garage:

Fury....and then progress resumes

Well. I finished 98% of the frame in early May. I'm not totally finishing the valley rafters until the frame is mostly up - just so i can adjust if the frame is slighty skewed. So, I figured a quick call to the bank, and I'd be up and running to get a line of credit going in days. Wow. Was I wrong. First, needed an appraisal. Appraisals are taking ~30 days - Ouch. So, 3 weeks go by and the appraisal comes in. It just, just barely covers the cost of materials. I mean no room for labor - and certainly no 20% fudge room. So, here we sit. I had designed the house to be passive solar - i was gonna have 1/2 slab and 1/2 basement. The slab would've acted as a battery to hold heat and release it at night and temper large swings in indoor temperature. As soon as I axed that concept and said I'd do a full basement - the money was there, with slight room for some play. But still, the appraisal is basically all based on Vinyl this and vinyl that. Cheapest of the cheap. No extra allowances for higher quality materials or systems. Sure, if we did propane (insane in this climate - unless you want $300/mo heat bills), vinyl windows, vinyl siding, linoleum - we'd be gold. But, I wanted to build a green-ish house and do some cool things like geothermal heat, metal roof. Well, there is room to play - but frustrating as hell.

So, after sitting around dealing with bank related stuff for almost a month - finally things are

under way again. Yesterday Wally dug the foundation hole...Here he is putting on the finishing touches.

Wally surveying his progress from the dirt he's removed so far:

Yup, job well done boys....

The Boys

The boys havent had an appearance here lately..cant have that.

Valley Rafters

Well, the timbers I've been dreading: valley rafters and jack rafters. The compound joinery was a little intimidating at first, present, and past.... but I wanted to know that I could do it. I have two designs for the house - one with valley rafters and jack rafters, and one with a shed dormer in its place - in case I totally f-up the valleys and corresponding jacks.

One thing..how the hell does one cut valley rafters in the right sequence? In hind sight, I'd saw all the major bevel planes, but not cut all the way thru. I had a hell of a time getting the tenons of the valley rafters cut out. Just getting the valley groove and tenon cut has been about 13 hours per - And I'm proabably 2/3 done. I still have some pockets to cut and the ass-ends (traditional term??) to do.



















Then there are the jack rafters:




































Note:
I am soooooooooooooooo sick of the South Dakota wind. We learned how to remove things from eyes last summer at the doctors office. So, the other weekend, I was reclined in the Forestor passenger seat as Leah exctracted sawdust out of my eye - reclining is the key for the excavator to get under your eyelid and retrieve lost items. Good news though. We're almost done with the frame. Finishing up the valleys and then two small girts..and DONE.

Field Trips, Back out at the lot.

Over the last couple of years - Clark, owner - Northern Lights Timberframing, has been a wealth of information for me. I finally met him last winter attending his timber frame saw horse trestle class in Grand Marais, MN (not to mention we hung out alot at the 2008 Easter Timberframing Conference). In late February, we visited Northern Lights Timberframing in Minneapolis. We got a tour of shop, enjoyed a beer of the month, and I (the worlds worst card player) kicked ass in Finnish Uno. I also declared this the South Dakota Timber Framers Conference...but Clark and I are not seeing eye to eye on that one.

the NLTF crew: Patrick, Shaun, Clark, Lefty























Those fellas are particularily proud of their indoor lift, crane, whatever. I do believe its called the Gravitron something or another...I was quite surprised at the speed and how whisper quiet it is while in operation.

Spring has damn near sprung. I'm nearing completion of this and thats around our current house to get it ready to sell eventually so I can devote the next year to the timberframe only. I went out a couple beautiful early spring days and got started on the floor joists. I pulled up to the gravel drive - tested the ground with the front wheels of the Forester -no good, thank god for AWD. I left the rear wheels on the gravel and pulled the car right out. Temps were near 50, and the mud was 8" thick. I tried getting the tractor over to the joist pile - not happening. I have tractor wheel mud ruts almost a foot deep.

So I lifted and walked, one by one, 8 - 6x8x16' timbers over to the saw horses. Not the greatest of ideas - but I had to get moving.

The floor joists have been left unprotected all summer and winter. They have seen some movement. I have some twist I have to deal with. So, I've been using framing squares as winding sticks and squaring up the timbers, then planing them for layout and final sanding.

Metal

Well, I do claim to have the most 'metal' timberframing blog/website.

In May, we'll be seeing a few of our favorite bands: Opeth and Enslaved May 9. Lacuna Coil on May 11.

Opeth:
Progressive and amazing technicians. Micheal Akerfeldt (singer, guitar) is funny as hell live - half the reason we're going is just for the standup.



Opeth live antics:


Enslaved: Norwegian Progressive Metal


Lacuna Coil: Italian Female fronted band...losing their metal edge...Cristina is hot enough that I can forgive them for now.

Spring

This is why I like being in the country - peace and quiet, and watching the wildlife do what they do. I was hoping while working on floor joists I'd catch a flock of geese heading North. I was not dissapointed. Here are some of our feathered friends in action:


Whats funny though, all these assholes were flying South...




















And a view looking towards Netwon Hills:

Sketchup at Work

We've seen it in action using Bremer's TF ruby scripts for timberframing, I've started using it at work to assist in managed WiFi rollouts that I'll be doing. There was a request to see if a couple satellite buildings near our athletic complex could be hit with WiFi access. I took a snippit from Google Earth, imported into Sketchup, made sure it was to scale, then created the horizontal and vertical dispertion angles from the omni-directional access point powerful enough to cover the area and that area alone.

The result: a graphical prediction of where the coverage will be based on the specs of the equipment to be put in. Cool?





















I'll be curious to see if this actually works. By creating a model using the specs of the antenna - my solution using one lightweight access point and powerful omni directional antenna (that can with stand -30 degrees - very important here), this solution will cost $2500. If I were to guess by doing a rudimentary site survey and guessing, I'd have went 3 access points in a mesh network costing upwards of 10k. We'll see...

Kneebraces done, slippers worn.

I've covered the downsides of timberframing off-site - especially lacking a barn/outbuilding to work and store things in. The plus side of working in the basement is being able to work in slippers!

Last weekend, I completed all the kneebraces that will be required for the house and garage. There ended up being 60 something of them. The garage kneebraces will have no embellishment at all. The ones for the house all have curves, chamfers, and 120 grit final sanding. The smallest kneebraces were all hand planed and the curves were all spoke shave(n?) - If only I were crazy enough to hand plane every timber in the house...but I'm not!

In the picture below, I have probably my favorite kneebrace (taken in low light flourescent lighting - the red heart wood, gold sapwood, and blue sap stain are not as bold as it really is.) Anyways, in this pic are: an example of the smallest kneebrace in the house, destroyed basement, and a dog wrapped around 2 dishrags. Leah accused me of throwing away the kitchen sink dish rags - I pleaded innocent, then Wally (he's been opened up before for retrieval of goods) was spotted milling around somewhere - and the pieces of the puzzle were put together.

So...I'm done timberframing for a spell. We're working on getting estimates nailed down. I'm really leaning towards installing geo-thermal - the sticker shock though, wow!. Bids have been $23,400 - $28,000. I may cover all of this stuff later. But, time to make the outstanding repairs on our existing house and get it on the market...

Oh...most importantly. I'd been saving the last bottle of my all time favorite beer for the milestone project of putting the kneebraces behind me. Let me take this time to introduce you to Goose Island Bourbon Stout. At $5 a bottle and 13%ABV - only the scalable and robust need apply. Handily one of the finer points of being alive. Shockingly - I raced to consume it before bed Sunday night. Its a sipper, and I didnt respect it like I should've. I may have to buy more to mourn the celebratory one that went just all wrong.