Surprise success

It looks like our search for a building lot is over, and I’m surprised.

Leah and I have been looking for property to build a house so we can sell our current house, which is too large and requires more maintenance than I’ll be comfortable doing much further into the future (like next month). We had narrowed our choices down to four, and then two pieces of property in this general area. Both of the semifinalists are easy walking distance from our house. The closest property is within sight of our mailbox.

The owners of that property had paid a lot for the lot, at least for this type of rural property in this region, so they were asking a lot, although less than their purchase price. We had intended to use the proceeds from the sale of Leah’s parents’ house for the land purchase, but the proceeds turned out to be less than we hoped. We called our neighbor real estate broker and asked him to give the owners an offer anyway. We had an absolute limit that was nearly 40 percent less than the asking price. After a few days, the owners agreed to sell at that price.

We never expected the owners to take our offer; it was just too low. I had already started doing mental site preparation on the second of the two pieces of property. That property could have been bought for less than we had budgeted, so it was easy to make the mental transition.

Now I’m having to make a second transition, back to the original property we considered. Once it’s ours, we’ll walk the property lines and find the center, where we expect to locate the house. We’ll get our level out and see how much slope there is and whether we’ll have to have a basement. (Leah doesn’t want a basement. I’m neutral.) We’ll figure where a driveway goes. There will be much use of a chainsaw and an axe during this period, along with a 100-foot tape measure, yellow tape, and actual, physical marker pins.

Then we’ll start looking at house plans. Once my mother’s house sells, we’ll start construction. We hope to get a lot done, but the rest will have to wait till we’ve sold our current house. At that point, we should have a driveway, well, septic system and a temporary power drop at the new site, plus perhaps the foundation and some additional work. Once our house sells, we’ll move our travel trailer up to the building site and live there while we finish construction.

Leah is not looking forward to this, and, to be honest, it will be inconvenient. To say the least. But it will be a strong incentive to keep the construction moving along.

Right now the broker is preparing a contract. Unless something goes wrong, we will soon end up owning five acres down the street, and we’ll be looking at starting a process that will be long and a little intimidating.

I contracted our current house, and did a significant amount of manual labor during construction, including a good deal of site prep, digging and framing footing forms, moving and packing dirt and gravel, putting in the subgrade sewer lines and acting as the framer’s helper. My brother and I lifted many five-gallon buckets of concrete into a 10-foot-tall form where the wood burning stove hearth is in the basement. I contracted the plumbing rough-in, the electrical work, and the floors. Then with some help from family and friends, I finished the interior: paint, stain, trim, doors, bathroom vanities, toilets, and sinks. So I have a pretty good idea of what the process will be like.

That’s both good and bad.

 

All hands on deck

Our deck has not weathered well. Many of the boards are warped and cracked (which might apply to me, too). Since I’m in the middle of some much-needed exterior maintenance, I decided it was time to replace some of the decking.

There are three problems. The first is that the current boards are tongue-and-groove, the result of a not-so-great idea by my framer. That means I have to run a circular saw down the joint between the boards to free them up to remove them.

The second problem is that the boards are nailed rather than screwed, which is also the result of my framer’s practices (plus the fact that he apparently didn’t have a good drill to use for deck screws). Deck nails tend to rust in place, which makes them hard to extract. Each nail is a little mini-project in itself.

The third problem is that tongue-and-groove two-by-sixes use some of their width for the tongue and groove, leaving the exposed face between a quarter and a half inch narrower than a standard two-by-six. That means that every new deck board has to have a thin strip ripped off the edge. Twenty boards by 12 feet means I have to rip about 240 feet of pressure-treated lumber. My father’s old table saw bogs down severely on every inch I rip. Ripping each board is a somewhat bigger mini-project in itself.

In the two hours (selected carefully so that they would be in the hottest part of the day) I worked Sunday afternoon, I got three boards down. I takes somewhat longer to get all the nails out than it does to rip the board, and I have to do it all on my hands and knees.

Here are the five new boards I installed over the last two days, along with some of the shards of tongues and grooves plus other assorted chunks of wood removed during the nail extraction process. The missing stiles will be replaced and stained some day.

deckboards

Our spindly tomato plant makes a cameo here, too.

The deck faces due south, a real advantage for solar gain in the winter. Unfortunately, solar gain also works well in the summer, too. Since having a heart problem diagnosed last fall, I have been exercising enough that my weight went down from the upper 160s to the upper 150s. I have been weighing around 157 to 159 each night. This afternoon when I stopped working on the deck, I weighed 150. That means I lost nearly a gallon of fluid in two hours Sunday afternoon. It was 82 F up on the mountain. I don’t know what would have happened if it had been 92 as it has been for the last few days.

I had three glasses of iced tea with supper. I am now planning on one Shock Top Belgian White as a finishing touch. I’ll probably be completely rehydrated by tomorrow around noon, just in time to start working on the deck again.

An afternoon on the deck

One of the reasons Leah and I are talking about moving is that our house requires a lot of maintenance, and I can’t see myself doing it indefinitely.

We have two decks in the back that are about 10 by 30 feet, and a front walk constructed like a deck that is about 25 feet long. They are seriously weathered and I am currently in the process of re-staining them. I bought a gallon of gray for the decking and a gallon of white for the railings. The salesman said a gallon should cover about 300 square feet. I knew I would need more of both, but it’s not going as far as I thought. I have just now run out of the white stain and am about two-thirds finished with the railings on the front walk.

It seems to go on forever

It seems to go on forever

The front walk slopes up so it’s about seven or eight feet off the ground at the front porch. That means I need a ladder to reach the outside part of the railing. The floor of the upper back deck is about 13 feet off the ground at the highest end. I’ll need an extension ladder to reach it. This does not make me happy. The last time I did any staining of the back deck, I fell off the ladder and tore my rotator cuff, an injury that required surgery.

The other part of this task that I don’t like is that each side of every baluster has to be stained individually, and there are a lot of balusters on our decks. That makes it a tedious, repetitious job. On the back deck I’m going to have to do the outside parts on a high ladder, which will be tedious, repetitious and potentially dangerous. So to do the whole deck, I’m going to have to lie on my back, crawl around on my knees, stoop, stand, reach, climb and descend. I will have to swap between brush and roller, and when I’m doing the outside of the railing I’ll have to do that on a ladder.

Painting the roof overhang would be even worse. Not only is it higher, but I decided to go for the farmhouse look, so there are no soffits to enclose the rafter ends. That means a lot of detail painting, done from a high extension ladder. We hope to have moved before that’s necessary.

I mentioned that we will probably make an offer on some land just down the street from us. Based on that possibility, I have been thinking of what a house would look like there. Unfortunately, the lot slopes, so a house will almost certainly have to have a daylight basement, and that means parts of the house would be two stories above ground. We also like decks, so they will be high off the ground, too. I don’t want to have to do this kind of maintenance 10 years from now, so if we get the property, whatever kind of house we build, it’s going to have to be different from this house and its decks.

This is going to take some thinking.

One thing leads to another

Some tasks aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Sometimes things have to be done in a certain sequence; you can’t do one thing until something else is done first, and sometimes the chain of things that have to be done goes back a ways.

We ran out of firewood this winter. Also, the trees on the east side of the house are getting tall enough that they’re beginning to block our view. So it seemed like a good time to start cutting a bunch of trees. One thing led to another, and I had about five trees down. Now that we have a chipper, I planned to use that to make mulch to put on the path I use when I walk Zeke and Lucy around the house.

You can see the how the trees are blocking the view to the east. On the lower left you can see a little bit of the trees I have cut.

obstructed view

I learned a few years ago that I need to take care of the trees as I cut them rather than cutting a bunch of trees and then cleaning up. I once cut a large number of trees and ended up with a disaster area that took a couple of years to finally clean up. From now on I clean up as I go.

So, I intended to chip the limbs for the path right away, but first I needed to do some work on the path. I had been intending to level out the path where it leads from the back of the house around to the east into the leach field, but a lot of other things were higher on the priority list. So now I had a bunch of trees with a bunch of limbs to chip, but the path wasn’t ready for the chips. Before I could chip the limbs, I had to level out the path.

It’s easy enough in principle. All I needed to do was cut into the slope on the uphill side and dump the dirt onto the lower side. But when I cut into the slope, I needed material for a low retaining wall. So I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for garden wall blocks. I got 40 blocks, which is not enough.

Here’s the work in progress. The little line of blocks on the left took care of the 40 blocks I got.

dirt path2

As I worked up towards the back of the house I realized I needed to finish the retaining wall at the corner of the house that I started a little while ago. Make that a few years ago. It’s made of landscape timbers. Here’s the view down from the deck. The landscape timber on the left is part of the existing wall. The three others were left over from some work I did in the front of the yard.

dirt path

Today I got the landscape timber retaining wall finished and backfilled. Now I can restart on leveling the path, and then I can get about 80 to 100 more garden wall blocks and make the low retaining wall along the path. And then, after touching up the level of the path, I can bring the chipper around and start chipping the limbs.And then I can cut some more trees.

Unless I run into another chore that needs to be done first.

Getting stoned

When I was planning to build our house, I thought that T1-11 siding would be fine. It looks, or at least is intended to look, like vertical boards. It’s used as a finish siding in lots of applications, but most of the books I read to prepare for construction recommended against that.

But of course I knew better.

It turned out that the T1-11 siding was OK for the short term, but over the years was beginning to show some weathering. I also had allowed the siding to be too close to the ground at the northeast corner of the house.

This is what the house looked like about two and a half years ago, before we had new siding installed and before I solved the problem of having siding too close to the ground. I had already made a horizontal cut at the height of the lowest masonry wall and started to pull nails from the siding.

Just getting started

Just getting started

Here is what I found after I removed the siding. The dark edge at the lower left part of the front wall is water damage. I removed the old sheathing from the corner and put new sheathing up to cover the insulation you can see. Then I put up two layers of roofing felt, or tarpaper as I used to know it. I then screwed a layer of cement board over the roofing felt as a base for my next planned upgrade. As you can see, the new siding went up during this process.

The big reveal

The big reveal

Roofing felt and new siding

Roofing felt and new siding

Here is what I have been working on for about a year. We decided on a cultured stone product. It’s actually a cement product that is formed in molds and colored to look like stone. It is convincing if it’s installed properly. This shows the elevated front walk that I have mentioned before.

stonework in progress

In the meantime I also started some additional landscaping. The two hollies are transplants from the other side of the house. The stonework around the hollies uses native stone I find around the lot and here and there on the mountain. The wheelbarrow is not a part of the permanent landscaping, although it does make frequent appearances.

I finished the north-facing walls except under our front walk about a year or so ago. I have been having trouble motivating myself to finish the wall under the front walk and along the foundation of the garage, but I finally prodded myself into it. I expect to have this part of the foundation finished by the end of next weekend. Then I start on the other side of the garage foundation and out to the rear of the house. That will be a substantial amount of work, at least as much as I have already done.

And then I need to do the east foundation wall, which is only about three feet high. I want to get all the concrete covered by the time I finish.

And then I need to work on the front walk. It needs stain, and the handrail is in bad shape. I’m thinking man-made materials here, too.