Goodbye Stumps

We went to Minneapolis last Wednesday for a wedding. When we arrived back here in Maine we had a new culvert (way cooler than it sounds) for our road. Even more exciting the excavator driver put in a day worth of stump pulling and dirt pushing and made us a quasi house site. It still needs a fair amount of excavation and grading work but it is a huge improvement from the hundred or so stumps that had been there!


As you may or may not be able to tell there is a pretty solid rock in the middle of our proposed house site. It is gigantic piece of ledge... the tip of the ice berg if you will. We are either going to take the simple route and just bury the thing under the house, we need to build up anyway for drainage reasons, or we are considering having someone blow it up! I'm looking into the latter option if for no other reason that it could be awesome. And yes the brush piles have already crept into the scene, I'm burning again this week :P

Halloween 2009

Ok, this isn't really related to building our house but it was pretty fun so here it is. We had a costume-mandatory Halloween party. Lorien and I were Trinity and Neo. Here we are.





Cheers,
Ross

Name change

Greetings from Lorien, here trying my first ever blog posting (yeah, that's right computer friends, laugh away). After spending a year digging around in the "dirt"on our property, we've decided to change our new home's name from the slightly esoteric and lofty-goaled "Sylvan Gardens" to the far more apropos "Stonehaven". The name first came to mind as we were preparing the site for our first garden. Any of you who garden know that one of the first projects is to till the soil and then dig holes to plant the stuff in, usually done with some sort of trowel and a shovel. Ours was done with a big-ass pick axe, along with a giant steel levering bar to move the more...er...hefty rocks. The only advantage is that we didn't really have to dig any holes- we just pried out a rock and stuck the plant in. "Stonehaven"it is!

Progress to Date

It is probably fair to say that the bulk of progress we have made on the house/site since our last post in August is clean up work. We finally finished the gargantuan firewood project which was precipitated by the initial clearing for a house site and open space for a view. Still in the queue from that expedition is the management of the brush/slash piles.

I figured out that I cleared somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 acres of formerly dense albeit young woods. This resulted in somewhere around 50 brush piles the size of sedans. Happily the winter snows last year worked wonders in compressing these piles, if doing nothing to actually remove them. Since August I have run two piles through my small wood chipper (thanks Mom and Dad!) it is very slow going but the mulch was very useful for the perennial gardens we planted this summer. We also had 3 huge piles which were sitting on our proposed house site that we burned a few weeks ago.

The tractor is on long term loan from Lorien's father, it has been very helpful with everything from bringing up firewood to bush hogging trails and pushing brush into a bonfire! Sorry Joel it is a Kubota I suppose beggars can't be choosers.

With the brush piles off of the house site we are hoping to bring in an excavator to do some stump removal and scuff off the site in the next week or two. We are also just beginning the process of collecting stone off out of the woods for the construction of our masonry heater. We need to pick about 200% of the veneer of the heater. This works out to about 500 sqft of surface area made up of 4 inch thick stones. Yep, that will be a lot of stone. Just think, we are considering building part of our barn with stone too... anyone want to come help move stones... anyone?

Winter is coming... again

I have received a number of emails asking for blog updates. It feels like not much has been done on the project since I have posted last, particularly since we know that actual ground breaking for the house won't occur until next May. That being said there have been some nice developments with the project and we have had some great visits from our friends and family. Here are a few pictures from the two most recent visits (Skip and Justine for a weekend of hiking and Sam for an extended weekend of backpacking and homemade ravioli making).




We also found a young porcupine living underneath our bush hog (giant mower towed behind a tractor) but we can't seem to find the pictures of him or our wildly successful effort to transplant him (no seriously we trapped him in a rubbermaid bin and Lorien took him 5 miles away!)

Utilities

We sold our house in MN in May! The sale unfortunately left us shy of being able to begin construction of the house this year. So instead we have put in the road, all 765 feet of it, and laid the underground conduit for the electrical/phone/internet. House models are being updated and we are reaching what we hope is a better house all the time. We still need to meet with the bank to discuss specifics of financing the construction but we are hopeful that we will be able to be laying the foundation next May.

In the meantime I am working with Upright Frameworks doing general construction and weatherization work. It is a lot of fun to start with a leaky poorly insulated old home and within a week measurably improve the house by 50% or more. At the very least I'm improving Maine's existing housing stock while learning how to build my new home better.

Wintertime

It has been quite a while since our last post, Thanksgiving or so according to the record. We've been rehashing plans, improving models and talking to subcontractors. We have also learned a few things about timelines for financing, namely all the credible load sources we've found limit construction loans to 12 months. That being said we have talked to a number of local people who've built their own homes and all seem to think it's quite reasonable to build your own place in a year.

With that in mind we've decided to do a bit of subcontracting. We will sub out the gravel road construction, foundation pouring, timber frame construction, electric service (need to by code) and most plumbing. What does that leave you ask? Well wherever possible I'll be helping subs, helping erect the timber frame and the SIPs. Helping the masons build the masonry heater etc. I've found a great electrician who is more than happy to give me pointers and have me do the work (other than the breaker and bringing service from poles) and he'll look over my shoulder. I'll be doing the tiling, floors, bathrooms etc. I'll be doing the framing for the interior walls and second floor decking and I'll be doing the carpentry in general.

All that being said I am currently up in the air about roofing. The timber frame will form about 2/3rds of the roofing support with the other 1/3 to be traditionally framed with a ridge beam and common rafters. We are then planning on laying a 2" tongue and groove deck to be visible from the interior and laying the roofing SIPs over that. To create a cold roof we will then install 1x3s and a plywood deck over the SIPs and the roof cladding over that. Seems a bit redundant but it also seems to be about the best system we can make. We are intending to do metal roofing, ideally standing seam. The more I read about it and think about it the more I come to the conclusion that trying to install my own standing seam roof on a semi-steep roof may not be the best idea I've ever had. So we may contract that out as well.

So it seems like we ought to come in well under the 1 year mark... hopefully!

I can now make pdfs of our 3D models... unfortunately blogspot won't let me post pdfs! I'll send them on to anyone who'd like to see them.

Cheers