Category Archives: Construction projects

Buried Treasure

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I have been doing some other things, so I haven’t made much progress on our front walk. I got back to it on Sunday. I was digging out about 10 feet from the bottom of the front steps when I hit concrete. It was our septic tank.

I knew the tank was somewhere around there, but I thought it was a little further from the steps and the front of the house. Hitting it there means I have to curve the walk around it, since I don’t want the walk to be actually on the septic tank. I suppose an arrow-straight walk looks best, and is easier to lay, but I was going to have to curve it around the base of the slope anyway. This new curve will give the walk a serpentine look, which might look good if I can pull it off.

This is where I left the work on Monday. The walk has to curve around those dead-looking ornamental grasses. I hope I can make the curves smooth.

There are two stakes on the left side of where the walk will go. They mark the corners of the septic tank. At the end of the excavation on the right there is a collection of what looks like rocks. That was the second buried treasure I found.

I was digging along, going pretty well, when I started hitting what I thought were rocks. Most of the native sandstone where I’m digging is soft enough to actually slice through with the shovel. These rocks were not. When I started digging them out I found that they were broken-up pieces of concrete. That’s the material the grader used on our driveway during construction. It’s a lot cheaper than crushed stone, and it’s available a lot closer. It’s also bigger than crushed rock and a lot uglier. The driveway, fortunately covers most of what was there when we first moved in, but there are still deposits here and there. This was one of those deposits. It might have been put there to keep the trades people’s trucks from parking in the mud. It was eventually covered when the front yard was graded.

It is a problem because even when I break up the dirt with a pick, I can’t get the shovel through it because of the pieces of concrete. I have to use a hoe to drag the dirt out, then pick through it to find the rocks and toss them aside.

I would rent a small backhoe for this work if I didn’t have to worry about the septic system leach field. We have already had to have a repair done from when someone parked on the leach field and collapsed the drain lines. So it’s going to be dug by hand.

Well, OK, the septic tank and the crushed concrete were not really treasure, but they were buried.

Sufficient unto the day

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I have been doing a lot of work in our yard, a task so monumental that I it seems like it could never all be done. I worked on the small, bare area right next to our house, and now I have started work on a walk from our front porch steps to the driveway. I have asked myself who I think will ever use it, and then I remember: the cats! Of course.

Anyway, here is what it looks like now.

The walk will be about 70 feet long and four feet wide. We have decided on brick-sized pavers. The process starts with digging out several inches of dirt and leveling the resulting surface. Then I will put sand down over the dirt to provide a surface that can be truly leveled. Then I lay pavers in the selected pattern, which is to be a running bond with a course of soldier pavers on both edges.

You can’t really see the area about 10 feet long directly in front of the steps that I have excavated almost enough. It’s also hard to see how sloped from side to side most of the length of the path is. The depth of the excavation should be between three and four inches, at least, but in our case, there is so much variation in the level of this area from side to side that it will require a lot more digging. The ten-foot section resulted in four wheelbarrow loads of dirt. Once I get to part of the path next to the maiden grass (the wispy grass that looks dead but isn’t, quite), I will have to put in a low retaining wall, which will require more digging.

This first part, the digging, is going to be a challenge. The path base really needs to be close to level from side to side. It’s going to be a lot of digging through dirt that was only recently sandstone, and still remembers its past quite well. Once it has been dug up, it will have to be hauled somewhere else in the yard.

And then, leveling with sand, and then, laying pavers.

I have never laid pavers, and I’m not sure how well that’s going to go. Right now I have to dig. I will worry about pavers when the time comes.

Post stuffing

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Leah and I had a modest Thanksgiving dinner at home on Thursday, with turkey and store-bought dressing and gravy. It sounds sad, but it’s just me and Leah here, so it’s kind of hard for us to justify the effort to make a real spread.

Then on Friday we drove up to Chattanooga to have real Thanksgiving dinner with my brother Henry and his wife Terry. Her son and daughter-in-law came along with their two small kids. My brother’s son Thomas came as well.

I don’t have pictures of the dinner. Terry started cooking Wednesday and was still at it when we got there around 1 pm. The pictures would have been great, but not nearly as great as the food. If you have frozen dressing and canned gravy in the absence of anything to compare it to, you can almost convince yourself that it’s just about as good as home-made. And then when you have the real thing, you realize that no, it’s not.

We had turkey, dressing and gravy again, along with green beans with bacon, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, macaroni and cheese and something else I’m sure I’m forgetting. And then a carrot cake for dessert. There was also pumpkin pie with home-made whipped cream but try as I might, I could not force myself to have pie. Curses!

Before we ate my brother showed me his newly finished garage/woodworking shop, all 600-plus square feet of it, almost all of which he did himself. That was after he showed me the sideboard he had made for Terry. My brother does some nice work. I was embarrassed to show him what I had been working on.

This is the stone stove surround I completed on Thursday. It’s real stone cut to regular sizes so it fits together easily. The edging is 12-inch slate tile cut to size. I had originally planned and started building a surround that was somewhat smaller, which is the recessed area you can see here. Leah asked if I thought it would look better if it were a little larger. I agreed, but said the addition had to look like it was done intentionally and wasn’t a mistake. That’s why the side and top borders extend somewhat proud of the original surround. That looks intentional, doesn’t it?

I think it turned out well enough, but it hardly compares to the things my brother does. At least it’s functional.

We came back home Friday night and woke up Saturday morning to a mild, dry cold front passing over.

I missed the peak of the color by about a minute.

Construction slows

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The only progress on our new house this past week was the installation of the power company’s meter on our temporary power supply pole.

David, the man who will do the basement and garage slabs, came up to inspect the site, but can’t do the work for a while. I met him as he was on his way down the mountain and I was on my way up with the dogs. He’s the same one who did the concrete work on our current house. He told me that the foundation forms on our current house were the best he had ever seen. That was gratifying, considering how much work it took for me to build them, but he was probably just being polite.

The week before last was spent mostly preparing for the concrete work. John was hauling more gravel and his helper was grading to make a turnaround at the garage. John offered to let me ride along with him in his truck when he went to pick up more gravel. Of course I accepted.

The view from the cab is commanding. We’re about a block from Broad Street here.

view from the dumptruck

The ride in an empty dumptruck is rough. John does his best to avoid even the smallest bumps in the road, but there’s no way to miss them all. And you feel every one of them.

The gravel we’ve been using is actually crushed concrete. A construction company keeps a stockpile for sale to people like John. Here some is being scooped up for loading in John’s truck. The truck rode better with a load, but it’s still a dumptruck.

loading up

Back at the house, we continued to fill the basement and garage areas.

dumping rock

gravel in the basement

Both will need some work before concrete can be poured. There is probably enough gravel in the basement, but it has to be graded smooth. I’ll have to dig down to soil level at two places to form footings for a post and a load-bearing wall. The garage probably needs more gravel to bring it up to the proper level, but I think there will have to be some discussion between John and David to make sure.

All the work I’ve done this week is on our current house. We’re finishing the bathroom, bedroom and family room in the basement before we sell.

The vanity is installed and plumbed in the basement bathroom, and the light over the vanity is in. I have put in base and shoe moulding where the commode will go. I have the toilet flange in, but need a new wax ring before I can install the commode.

I can’t put the rest of the moulding in the bathroom until I put the door in. I can’t put the door in until I put the flooring in the bedroom and family room. I can’t put the flooring in until I frame out a section of wall that’s bare concrete block in the family room. Once that’s done, I have to stain and polyurethane the windows, trim the windows and two sliding glass doors, and put some pine planks on the laminated beam that crosses the family room ceiling. Leah is staining the doors, door frames, base mouldings and the rest of the lumber I’ll need. I wonder how far we can get in the next week.

 

 

House rules

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First of all, Leah and I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. We hope you can spend it with people you care about, and we hope you get plenty of good food to eat.

(Updated) I’m certainly not an expert in home design, floor planning or house construction, but after looking for my first house in Alabama, building our current house and planning for our next house, I have some opinions. Some are consistent with standard home design, and some are just my personal view, so take them for what they’re worth. The rules are oriented towards designing a house, but I think you should keep them in mind if you’re looking for an existing house

The first rule is to design your house for the next owner. Quirkiness, eccentricity or even just out-of-the-ordinary taste may suit you, but it’s unlikely to be anyone else’s idea of what a house should be. It doesn’t matter if you think the next house will be your last, because it’s impossible to predict what the future holds.

When I was looking for a house outside Huntsville, Al, my real estate agent showed me a house that a retired couple built. It was an earth-sheltered, passive-solar house with a linear floor plan, like an old roadside motel. There was no central heating or air conditioning. Apparently the owners had read too many enthusiast articles about the virtues of earth sheltering and passive solar heating. As great as they may be, neither works particularly well in Alabama. They had installed a window air conditioner through a wall so that it stuck out into the garage, and then cut holes and put fans in the walls to try to pass the cool air or heat from the wood stove from the living room to the bedrooms. It was their own, personal vision, and it was supposed to be their final home, until they decided to move to Florida to be close to family. It was still for sale years later.

Build the house you want, but make sure it suits the needs of other buyers in your area. If every house in your area has a basement, your house needs a basement. If every house has three bedrooms, your house needs three bedrooms. If every house has central air conditioning, your house needs central air conditioning. If every house has an attached garage, your house needs an attached garage. If every potential home buyer is not a kooky hippie, don’t build a house that only kooky hippies will want.

The second rule is an extension of the first: building a workable house plan from scratch requires hard, thoughtful, informed work. The requirements for practicality tend to control floor plan layout, and every single requirement has to be remembered and met in some way. That’s why if you look at many house plans, they start to look alike.

The third rule is that a house design should meet certain standards for appearance and utility. For example, the tops of windows and the tops of doors on a given side of a house should all be at the same level. If you see a house that happens to violate that rule, you will probably think something looks odd even if you aren’t consciously aware of what the problem is. Ignore that rule and the next buyer swill probably feel some level of discomfort when they look at the house, and discomfort doesn’t sell houses.

The next rule is that a house should be designed for its location. (This is actually such an important rule that it should probably be No. 1.) A house on a slope should probably have a basement. If the slope is steep, the house should probably have a linear layout with the short axis aligned with the slope. If it’s in a hot climate, the roof overhang should be deep enough to provide shade for windows and the sides of the house. If it’s in a cold or even moderate climate, windows should be concentrated on the south-facing side. If there’s a view, put some windows so you can see it.

As a result of Robin’s comment, I came back here to add an important rule as a corollary to the preceding rule. In a climate that requires some heating, taking advantage of the sun’s energy just makes sense. There’s something really satisfying about sitting in a sunny room and being nice and warm when it’s freezing and the wind is blowing outside — and the heat never comes on. Even if a house is not specifically designed as a passive solar house, if the site conditions allow it, there should be windows that can gather some of the sun’s heat in the winter. The slope on our new property prevent having the house face due south as I would prefer. Doing so would introduce features that we’re trying to eliminate, like very high eaves. But we’re going to put deep windows on the southeast and southwest sides to get as much sunlight as we can.

The next rule is that every plumbing fixture should be as close as possible to a water heater. Many (most?) house plans I have looked at ignore this rule because it’s just so convenient to scatter bathrooms all around the house. Put the master bath at one end and the guest bath (or kids’ bath) at the other end, with the kitchen somewhere in between. If the floor plan does that, some provision must be made to get hot water to every outlet quickly, or someone ends up waiting too long for hot water. There are ways to get around it, like recirculating pumps and on-demand heaters, but they tend to cost more. The best plans have a plumbing core, with kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room centered close to the water heater.

The next one is tricky. If you want a 1500-square-foot house, and you want rooms that add up to 1500 square feet, you can’t just draw a rectangle that’s 30 feet by 50 feet.Walls have thickness. Exterior walls are at least six inches thick, and interior walls are around five inches thick. You can either have a 1500-square-foot footprint and smaller rooms, or rooms that add up to 1500 square feet and a larger footprint, not both.

I have some personal rules, or at least inclinations. One is that I don’t like halls; they waste space that could otherwise be used for rooms. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to avoid halls, and I haven’t figured out a way to get around using them. Another is that bathroom walls should be sound-proofed or the bathroom should be located so that the walls don’t adjoin living spaces, especially living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens.

There are so many rules that it’s hard to list them. You know some of them, but you might not be aware of them. For example, every time you enter a room, you expect to find a light switch at a certain height and location next to the entry. If there are two exits for a room, like a living room or kitchen, you’re going to expect to be able to turn off lights at each exit so you don’t have to feel your way through a dark room. When you walk into the house and take your coat off, you’re going to look for some place to hang it up. Vacuum cleaners, sheets and towels need storage.

It’s hard to meet all the requirements even if you know about them. Our current house doesn’t meet all of them. For example, we don’t have a plumbing core. The guest bathroom is out in Siberia, so I end up washing my hands with cold water when I use it. I don’t like a plan that makes it look like you live in a garage with a house attached as an afterthought. Our house looks exactly like that; the first thing you see when you pull into the driveway is the garage.

I have tried to keep the rules in mind while designing our next house. The garage in our next house will be hidden at the back. Our next house will have the plumbing fixtures closer to the water heater, although we won’t quite have a plumbing core. I changed the placement of the master bedroom and living room to take advantage of a view that I didn’t realize we would have.

Last night I thought I was finished with all but the details and was in the process of making a model of the house with foamcore boards. And then when I was taking a shower and thinking about this post, I realized that I had violated my first rule. I had planned for a deck on the front of the house that would have no ground access, which had necessitated putting the main entry on the least accessible side of the house. I realized that layout would look ridiculous, if not crazy, to anyone else. And Leah didn’t like it either.

So now we’re going to have access to the ground from the front deck, and a front door that is actually on the front of the house. Once I got to that point, several problems I was working with suddenly disappeared.

It seems that the rules actually have a reason behind them.