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.