The first load of panels has arrived

This morning at about 10am the first truckload of panels arrived from Pennsylvania. I must admit it was quite a site to see. This first load brought all 18 of our wall panels, 4 of our roof panels and 7 wall panels for another house we are building for a client.


The panels arrived at the warehouse at full size, 24' long and 8' wide. The wall panels are 6.5" thick and the ceiling panels are 10.25" thick. The ceiling panels weigh nearly a thousand pounds apiece. Interestingly the factory loaded them on the truck without spacers in between the panels which makes it quite a challenge to get forklift forks under them, we did some jimmying with crow bars and scraps of wood and even still it was pretty impressive to watch.

In addition to not having spacers between the panels our fork lift had extended length forks but only standard width of about 4'. So it was quite precarious to move a thousand pound panel that is 6 times as long as your means of moving it. As you can imagine we made sure we lined the fork lift up in the dead center of each panel.

Here is the stack of our wall panels at the end of the day.


Tomorrow we are scheduled to receive the next shipment of panels and will likely begin cutting out the windows and the edges and routering out the splines in the afternoon. Should be exciting!

The Slab is In

The slab finished as planned last Wednesday, it rained today so it looks a little damp. You can see the plumbing stubs for the first floor bathroom, the kitchen and the utility room at the far end of the slab. The lower slab in front is the garage. We will be adding on a little garage pad/ramp into the garage to the left later in the summer.

The enclosed rectangle is our attached greenhouse space, we will be building the concrete block walls for the greenhouse this weekend if the weather holds.

While we have been working on getting the slab prepared, Mike, our timber framer has been cutting the joinery for our timber frame. Here are a couple of pictures of two of the main posts which support our ridge beam. The frame is made out of local eastern hemlock.


As I mentioned above we hope to be building the concrete block walls for the greenhouse this weekend. The SIPs panels are due to arrive tomorrow morning and we will begin cutting wall panels tomorrow afternoon. To give an idea of what working with the panels is like, each wall panel is 6.5" thick, 24' long and 8' wide and weighs about 1000 lbs. We will be moving them around in a warehouse with fork lifts and doing most of the cutting with chainsaws and over-sized circular saws... should be a blast!

Slab

It is Wednesday afternoon... about 5 minutes after I wrote the last entry :) The guys started pouring the concrete this morning at 5am and had every bit of it in place by 10am, pretty unbelievable ... they added 300,000 pounds of concrete in 5 hours!

The garage was poured out of a traditional concrete truck and took about an hour to set down. The house was a bit more difficult to get at due to our narrow front/side yard so they used a pump truck. If you have never seen one of these things I will tell you it is awesome. It is basically a small crane with a concrete tube and an elephant trunk on the end that you can direct the flow with.

As it shows up on the site...It unfolds...


Awesome...

Consider if you will that a typical bag of concrete is 80 pounds. Add in a couple gallons of water and lets call it 100 pounds in 1 wheel barrow... it would have taken 3,000 wheel barrows to do this!



And she may not look like it, but Tesla is much happier that she only had to wait in the car for a couple hours this morning rather than waiting for me to move all those wheel barrows.



Final slab pictures to come in a day or two.

Cheers,
Ross

Foundation Work

This post has been delayed about a week due to Ross being too tired to write it :) Here is Ross in all his tired, dirty, canoe-hatted glory...


It is fair to say that I had a weak grasp on exactly what would be entailed in preparing the site for the foundation to be poured. I'm thinking, ok so... the excavator has already done 3 weeks of work bringing the area up to grade, building a retaining wall and leveling everything to within about a 2 inch tolerance, how much more can there be to do? Well it turns out that the gravel and course rock used to level the site royally sucks to dig in so you have to make a gigantic sand box and build on that. How much sand you ask? Say about 100 cubic yards of the stuff.


Here is David, my Carthage, ME buddy/coworker after helping me pick axe through some gravel.


After I pushed all the sand around with the tractor, rakes and shovels I belatedly realize that I have pushed it out too far and it is unpleasant to take out yards of sand that you have already added. After a week of sand moving we leveled the site off with a Wacker! (Vibrating tamper that is basically the worlds slowest self-propelled lawn mower and about 3 times as heavy). Sadly I didn't take a picture of this thing but believe me when I say it is pretty unremarkable.

With the sand down we broke out our trusty laser transit (Thanks Tom!) and set up some 2x12 forms and leveled 'em off. With the forms in place we put down our insulation, 6 mil polyethylene and some wire mesh.


Another week of work with XPS insulation, mesh, rebar, plastic and radiant floor piping and we were ready to go. Here you can see the radian tubing, mesh and some of the plumber's handiwork with the sub-slab plumbing.



We pour the concrete on Wednesday morning!

Loan approved, utilities on site, and site work done

After much ado we are off and running with our loan in hand! As of a week or so ago we now have electricity on the site, a working well (6+ gpm at a depth of 180') and the major site grading is done.

When all was said and done they brought in more than 1200 cubic yards of fill for the house site... that is 100 full dump trucks at 12 cubic yards per truck.


It was pretty neat watching the well guys drill the well, their 6" bit just chugged through 175' of solid ledge.



This week has been the first week of what feels like actual construction. We began setting the forms for the concrete slab yesterday and got about 2/3rds of the way done. Today we were rained out and hopefully we can finish up the forms tomorrow. If all goes well we should be pouring the concrete in the middle to end of next week! It is very exciting to be moving forward though I must admit it is a bit unnerving to think that after next week things will literally be set in stone.