Beams

Sorry for the delay, been slowing down a bit in preparation for winter. I don't do well in cold (under 60 degrees) weather. I have managed to finish building the floor beams.

Each one is made of 9-2x10s glued and nailed together to make 40' beams.

That's all for now. Other priorities will be taking over for a few months so new posts will be rare.

Thanks for reading.

Going Up!

After getting all the holes dug it was time to start building piers. I researched as much on the subject as possible but found nothing overly useful. The few sites I did learn a lot from still didn't quite get me absolutely sure how to proceed. I talked to several people with construction experience and from what I had read and what they told me, I felt ready-ish to start on the concrete part of our build.

The one detail still not clear was how to build/support forms for the piers. I had read many stories in which the builder used the sonotube forms, but they all had holes that they could stick the tube down in and back fill around it to get support. My dirt/rock ground wouldn't even think about doing that. So I had to come up with some type of external support system for mine. This proved to be more difficult than it sounds, as my ground is full of protrusions making leveling complicated.

My piers are loosely 18"x6" thick bases with 12"diameter piers on top. I built 24-18"x18" forms, one for each hole. Then what I came up was using 2 pieces of 2x2 lumber that would span the 18" form width ,screwing these to the tube and then leveling the tube from there. All this while making sure the tube was suspended off the bottom of the hole. I struggled quite a bit with the first couple of piers but I quickly found a pattern and got better.

Since we have no water source yet, I brought in a 55 gallon drum of water to use for the concrete work. We only had to fill it once, and didn't use even half of the second drum worth. Many people tell me I should get a well drilled now and build later, but we plan on using rainwater as our only source of water. More on this in a post some other time.

I mainly work on the house Monday mornings for just a few hours, so for about 2 months, I would get 4 piers done a week. Sometimes I would get 3 done, once I got ambitious and got 6 done, but most times it was 4. We mixed each bag by hand in a wheelbarrow and this got old real quick, but we got through it.

Each pier also got a strap embedded into it which will be what we attach the beam to. I found the ready mad straps to be very expensive and began exploring other options. I found a 24" strap at the hardware store that I could bend to my desired shape easily enough. I made a jig at work out of some scrap lumber and just sat there bending away until I got 24 U shaped "brackets".

Now some progress pictures at varying times.

Here you can see my tube holding method, not pretty but it worked. You can also see my "bracket"

And this would be after they were all done. So glad to be finished with the concrete work. I later removed the large cactus in the corner there. I didn't want to contend with it later while under the house.

That's it for now. Almost ready for beams!
Thanks for reading.

Planning and Breaking ground

After finishing the storage building to a point where things inside were dry and secure, we kind of put the brakes on any type of construction for a year. We had a tentative idea of the house we wanted, or so we thought, and wanted to research the building process completely.

I have read, and continue to read, just about everything I can online about alternative building methods. I am especially intrigued by underground, or earth sheltered homes. I would love to build one someday, it just isn't feasible for us right now. They are expensive to excavate and pretty difficult for a diy job, plus my other half don't like the look of them. Maybe one day I will build a root cellar or something to satisfy my underground desire. After much deliberation, it was decided a conventional stick built house would be best for us. We started with a plan that we loved which was about 2000sf and after looking it over and over we decided we don't need that much room. We ended up with a "final" plan that is 1200sf, easy to build and also easy to add on to in the future if we wanted to.

In the spirit of keeping this build debt free, we also planned each material purchase to coincide with sale days at our local lumber store. Here they give 15% off your entire purchase every holiday. So far this has saved me a lot of money.

So after that year of planning was over and we had the same design in mind for over a month (we changed A LOT), I bought my first load of building materials on Memorial day 2012.

One site which has been very helpful has been the Country Plans forum . There is a wealth of knowledge to be had there. There is also a lot of people who just simply think they know a lot, so research everything until you are sure you have good info.

Now that we were committed to a particular design that everyone agreed on, I started breaking ground. We are build this house on a pier and beam foundation for ease of construction, less disturbance of the soil and also we just like the way it looks more "country".

Some things that must be considered before building any type of foundation are frost depth and soil type. Our frost depth here is listed as 6-10", which is very shallow and the soil type varies from loose gravel to solid rock. the actual site where the house will sit would be classified as solid rock with a loose rock layer on top. I dug 24 piers down to a depth of at least 12", some went as deep as 24", just depending on what I hit.

I then had to set up batter boards, these are what you tie your strings to to make sure everything is square. I also used a water level to make sure they were all level with one another. The land here is the flattest part of the 5 acres, it has 8" of drop from one side to the other with only about 1" difference from front to back.

 

 

 

This picture shows my roughed out holes, I went back and made the sides cleaner and deepened them up a bit.You can also see the batter boards and the string line, trying to keep it all square.

 

Next post we will be pouring concrete!

 

Thanks for reading.



Here we go!

Until I get used to the format and the workings of a blog these posts may not be perfect, but hang in there and we will figure it out together.

As of right now some progress has been made at the homestead over the course of the last year and a half but I will start our "story" from the beginning, and we will get to our current state pretty quick. Then we will be moving a bit slower on the building side of things, but I will try to post at least a couple times per week with something worth reading.

Since this property is 30 miles from our current residence, we decided we needed a place to store building materials out of the weather. I built a 16x24 pole barn then enclosed it to make it more secure. The location we chose for this building turned out to be right behind where we wanted to build the house. In hindsight, we should have built this a little further away but it isn't so close we cant live with it where it is. Eventually I will build a much larger building in a different location and I will probably take this one down and use the materials on other projects.

I somehow have lost all the construction photos but here it is complete.

 

 

Thanks for reading.