Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Admittedly, my eyes are often bigger than my stomach. This is the case with the updated plans. I have decently underestimated the cost required to build the second story per plan. So, Bubba and I have been putting our heads together to figure what our options are.


Bubba thought it was important enough that he wear his thinking cap.

So far, we are considering the following options:

• Burning down the house and collecting insurance money.
• Finishing the first floor per the updated plans, but add a bedroom instead of the library / stairs
• then build the second story once we save up enough money
• Framing the entire house, finishing one bedroom / bathroom and finishing it as money permits.
• Getting a construction loan and finishing the whole thing now.
• This is more complicated as we need to obtain bids from three GCs and go through a bunch of red tape

Honestly, all of those options are viable (ok, well *maybe* we won't burn down the house). We are gathering information and will make a decision in the near future.

In the meantime, one of the GCs we asked to bid on the project, found some older pictures of the house. So I present them here for your viewing pleasure:

This is a picture of the house from the 1930s, when a WPA project was commissioned to document all of the homes in Seattle.

This is a picture of the house after the previous owner bought and "renovated" it by enclosing the front porch. The property was purchased in 1990 and this picture was taken sometime after that.

This last picture was taken sometime in the late 2000s, during the housing bubble.

Public Service Announcement

I feel it necessary to write this post for a few reasons. But mainly because I think people should understand the amount of financial, emotional and mental commitment necessary to deal with a project of this scale.

I'm not rich, this project will consume all of my cash reserves and I will still have a higher mortgage payment. There is a reason I'm doing as much of the work as I can.

Which brings me to the best description of the stress; I've heard *many* anecdotes about couples who've done this and it almost drove them to divorce, or it did drive them to divorce.

And so I need to remind myself why I'm doing this. I'm not doing this as a cheap way to get a new home, I'm doing it as a challenge to myself.

Sometimes in the thick of it all, with the stress and uncertainty, I need to remind myself that this is a challenge, and fuck all. I am not going to lose.

Sounds like I am trying to motivate myself. I am. I write this on a snowy day, when I can't even drive the truck down my local side streets. So nothing happened on the house today. :(

New plans!

When I started this project, the idea was to cheaply, and quickly (ha!) renovate this old home, while keeping the existing roof. This led to quite a compromise in terms of idealized living spaces, but it was what I wanted at the time.

Well, plans change and my plans have changed both figuratively and literally. Figuratively because I've met an incredible woman with whom I plan to share my life. And literally, because we have redesigned the house a bit.

As a refresher, here was the original plan, which would remove the front 2' and the back 6'.

The big change is that if there are two (or more) people living in the house, we would need more bedroom space, which could only come from a second floor. And once you consider a second floor, do you go with a simple room in attic design, or do you add a gambrel roof, or do you go nuts and add a complete, wall to wall second floor?

(Side note: I wanted the foundation designed to bear the load of a second floor. Mike, the architect, had designed the foundation / pin piles accordingly. I knew that you only get to pour the foundation once, but you can always expand upwards.)

So, that brings us to the present, we've worked with Mike to come up with a design. Mainly this involved Mike and the future missus conferring, with me occasionally whining that something was hard to build, or would add cost or complexity. I'm good at fixing problems, not so good at design, so this worked out rather well.

The design we've settled on is this one:

The internal layout has also changed significantly. The original plan was to have a completely open interior, except for the bathroom. Now, with the addition of stairs, the first floor is broken up better, with a living room in the front and kitchen / eating nook in the rear.

The upstairs is made up of three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a small open area for movie watching and reading.

Well, there is more to say about the updates, but I'll reveal those details in the future as we encounter them. I just wanted to post an update of the new plans.

Stemwalls and Rat Slabs - Part II

TIME FOR MUD!

So, helping me get the stem-walls completed and working the concrete during the pour, again, is Joe Strickland from Skyline Development and his crew, Bob and Nick.

In come the pump truck and the concrete truck:

The pour started with the front corner and slowly progressed around the house. The major issue with pouring concrete walls is the pressure that builds up at the corners. It's entirely a matter of hydraulic pressure and the corners will face the greatest loads. So the guys were incredibly careful when pouring the corners.

Here you can see a good view of the concrete pump filling the cavity in the ICF. There is both horizontal and vertical rebar within the cavity.

Once the stemwall pour was complete, we quickly finished preparing the crawlspace for the rat slab. The dirt had already been graded and the next step was to lay down a 6mil plastic barrier that would help limit moisture migration into and out of the slab.

 

While the guys were handling the rat slab, I started setting the various bolts. There were two types of bolts, hold downs, which needed to be set in a specific way so that they looped around the rebar in the stem-wall, and anchor bolts, which only needed to be set in the concrete, but without any special placement. Here you can see the guys finishing up the rat slab and you can see the anchor bolts set into the stemwall.

And the result is incredible. I now have a smooth rat slab, a strong stem-wall and I can begin working on the next phase of the project (rough framing).

Stemwalls and Rat Slabs - Part I

As you'll note, it's been over a month since the last post. I (naively) thought that the stem wall would go rather quickly. And, realistically this *could* have been the case.

But I had a few decisions to make, and once the decisions were made, I had to finish up the work to make it happen.

The big decision was around interior of the crawlspace, and whether I should insulate the floor of the crawlspace now and cover it with a thin layer of concrete. (This thin layer of concrete is called a "rat slab" because it's not thick enough to be structural, it's just thick enough to keep rodents from tunneling up through it.)

The advantage of pouring the rat slab at the same time as the stemwall, is that I wouldn't have to have the pump truck come out a second time, and the pump truck costs roughly $600 per visit. The disadvantage is that I haven't picked out the type of insulation I want to use to insulate the floor. Normally, when insulating a floor like this, you place the insulation underneath the concrete (see above).

In the end, I decided I would go ahead and pour a rat slab when I pour the stemwall, but I wouldn't insulate underneath. The reason I think this will work is that I'll simply place the foam insulation above the rat slab and then lay down a plywood subfloor above to protect the foam.

Normally, this wouldn't work very well, but because the crawlspace will not be heavily used, the plywood should do a decent enough job of distributing the load.

Now that I've made the decision to pour the rat slab, I also had to figure out how I would support the house during the pour. Currently the house is supported on the interior with eight steel posts sitting on 1/4" steel plate. Unfortunately these supports are on the interior where the rat slab needs to be poured.

So I consulted with my architect and confirmed that I could support the beams with some of the left-over 2" pin pile pipes. I then used a laser level to cut the various pipes to the perfect length to bring the house to level.

Above, you can see the pipes after they were cut and welded to 1/4 plates on the bottom to help distribute the load. I also took the precaution of filling the pipes with concrete so they wouldn't be hollow, on the assumption that this would help strengthen the pipes.

I then jacked up the house a little bit, positioned the pipes underneath the beams and welded the pipes to the beams. I then welded the pipes to the vertical rebar, so that they would be supported laterally and keep the house from moving. And as you can see in the picture below, the posts were positioned within the stem-wall.

So I used a relatively "cheap" rotating laser when performing the measurements. According to the laser, the footings were sloped by about an inch over the length of the house. That didn't seem extreme to me, but when Joe the contractor came out, he was surprised. He was very exacting when he leveled the footings, and used his *very* expensive and *very* accurate laser. As soon as he said this, my shoulders slumped because I realised my laser was likely off and I had cut the pipes to the wrong lengths.

This led to him using his really awesome laser to help me figure out how far off each of the beams was from level. I then had to figure out how much I would need to shim each beam in order to bring the beams and house to perfectly level. This took about two hours, but I can't complain too much, because now the house should be level within 1/8". And because the foundation is sitting on pin piles, there will be virtually no settling. It is a little surreal to think that 50 years from now, this house will still be level within 1/4".

Now comes the ICF! ICF stands for Insulated Concrete Forms. The idea is that you used thick Styrofoam for the forms, and then after you fill the forms with concrete and the concrete cures, you leave the forms in place. The Styrofoam then acts as insulation. An added bonus is that they are pretty quick to setup as well!

The easiest way to think of ICF, is as large, hollow LEGO blocks. You stack them up and overlap the edges for strength.

Up next, the concrete trucks show up again and it'll be time for mud!

Trees be gone

From the footing pour, you might remember that the trees out front were a pain in the ass.

Well, no more!

I had an arborist come and remove the trees. Because the trees were on a city owned planting strip, I had to have the work approved by the city arborist and then utilize a city approved contractor. But luckily, due to the time of year and the slow economy, it was relatively cheap.

I had them leave the firewood, which I'll give to my neighbors.

Time for MUD!

(Mud is slang for concrete.)

When I last left off, I had decided to bring in a contractor to get the foundation completed and get the house framed up. Well I sought out bids from roughly 10 contractors and in the end, ended up going with one who had previously worked with a friend on his renovation. I chose Joe Strickland with Skyline Development. Great guy, intelligent, respects my budget and has tons of ideas for making the whole build faster and more efficient.

Onto the foundation!

The first thing to be done was to setup the forms and tie the rebar for the footing. This wasn't trivial as it would require a little excavation cleanup and then leveling the forms, reinforcing them and finally getting the rebar cut and in place. Joe and his son Bob, did a terrific job.

The inside form is made from 2x8s and the outside is a plastic drain / form called Form-A-Drain. The idea is that it will be used as a forms and then left in place as the perimeter drains, instead of having to install a 4" perforated pipe. I chose it because it seemed like it would make the footing easier to form and also because I had limited space for excavation and it would help with that. In the end, it was a pain in the ass to work with, and I'm not sure I would do it again.

To place the concrete, a pump truck was hired. The truck had a boom that would raise over the house, so that it could place the concrete around the entire perimeter without a lot of hassle. I couldn't believe how much easier this made the job, it was terrific.

In total, 12 yards of concrete were ordered, split into two trucks, one truck had 8 yards, the second truck had 4 yards. This is the second truck arriving.

 The process is simple actually, the concrete truck backs up to the pump truck and unloads the concrete into the hopper.

This picture hopefully shows the scale of the trucks, they are both quite large. Also, I was happy with the amount of use the curb cut took. I'm happy to say it fared perfectly well, no cracks, no damage.

Here, you can see the boom as it reaches over the house and pumps the concrete into the form at the back of the house. You can also see Joe and Bob working the concrete into the forms and smoothing it out.

You can tell from Joe's smile that this is the completion of the pour. I estimated that we would need 11.6 yards of concrete and so I ordered 12 yards, just in case. It turns out we needed just that amount. It worked out perfectly, no waste.

One of the odd things I found during the demolution, was that someone had placed a horseshoe under one of the original concrete piers for the house. I assume it was placed there for good luck. I made sure to save it.

So now, with the new foundation poured; I placed the old original horseshoe into the footing, along with the handprints of those who will make this house a home.