Forms removed; backfilling begins

The foundation crew removed their forms last week, and Brad started laying the footing drain pipe and backfilling. Here's the garage:

The insulation and wire-mesh for the garage slab has been delivered:

Not exactly sure when Paul is planning the garage slab pour for the garage, but probably soon (week or so).

Here's a nice view of the finished foundation:

Looking good, ain't it?

Foundation walls poured

The foundation walls were poured today, and I was able to make it onsite for a bit in order to take some pictures. This is the kitchen and main house front wall:

The tall metal thing to the left is an earthquake retention strap, to better secure the house to the foundation; the gray box-thing is a crawlspace vent.

Here's the concrete pumper truck, from Ralph's Concrete:

The concrete was supplied by Cadman, and the job took about 3 1/2 loads. Their truck drivers had to back their way up the entire driveway but seemed to make it look easy; I'd guess they're pretty expert at this sort of thing:

I was expecting the walls to be poured of course, but I was surprised at the large number of concrete "pads" that were also needed. Clearly I had not paid much attention to the foundation plan, although Paul had told me that the county engineer had required a second row of supports near the front of the house. This picture was taken shortly after the pour started, and you can see the two parallel rows in the background:

I had never seen a concrete pour before today and wasn't sure what to expect. I have to say, the whole crew was really moving as a team, with two guys managing the tube from the pumper truck, the guy in the orange shirt managing the pump boom location (with his little joystick control box), and the other guys pulling strings and inserting post brackets, etc. This is a good picture of the job site during the pour:

Here's the garage back wall being poured:

The guy managing the pumper truck tube tries to pour concrete up to, or just slightly above, the expected level line, which is marked by a red chalk line inside the forms, with small nails pounded periodically into the line. After the form was filled (roughly) to that line, everyone started chipping in to manually make sure the form was filled to that line as precisely as possible. Mainly this was done by smoothing the surface out with gloved hands, shaking the forms to induce settling, and scooping excess concrete out as needed:

Another guy would come behind them then, and float off the surface to make sure it was nice and smooth, using the aforementioned nails as a guide:

Next strings were strung (or re-strung) to mark the outside of the framed walls, for use as a guide in inserting the hold-down bolts that secure the wall bottom plates to the foundation:

From there things seemed to relax just slightly, and some of the crew started re-checking the walls for straightness, adding a brace here or there in case a wall had moved slightly under the pressure of the concrete. I had to leave at that point, but I'm glad I was able to see most of the process in action.

Later in the evening, here's that double row of concrete pads:

And a nice view of the front kitchen wall, with its hold-down bolts:

The pockmarks on the concrete were caused by some rain we got after the pour...otherwise the surface would have been much smoother. Doesn't really matter though.

I'd like to thank Dan and the rest of the crew from Complete Concrete Construction (no web site, afaik) for letting me hang around during the job, take pictures, and pester them with questions.

Some house details

Here's a short post to share some details about the house. As I mentioned previously, this is going to be a simple, colonial-style house. Here is a couple of elevations that I scanned from the plans:

And:

The directions ("North Elevation", etc) on the plans are accurate. Square footage is also accurate, at 3900 sq ft - yeah, I know it's pretty big. There was just several things we definitely wanted, and it just turned out that way. There will be four bedrooms (master on ground floor), and one upstairs bedroom will have a private bathroom (strictly for guests, although my kids think it's for one of them - ha!). The bedrooms are generously sized, and each one has a walk-in closet. My wife and I each have an office on the ground floor; the kitchen has a nice-size walk-in pantry. There will be a second laundry room upstairs, and also a large game/rec room (possible pool table...). Ceilings will be 9' high, both upstairs and downstairs.

We will have a nice-size three-car garage, with 10'-wide stalls, and 10' high doors - no more worry about only having 2" clearance for the darn outside mirrors (this is the case now with my wife's car in our current home), and a depth of 26'. The garage depth was chosen specifically to have enough room to accomodate a 2009 Ford F150 Lariat Crew Cab long-bed pickup truck....not that I have one now, and I can't afford it either, but hey I can dream, and be prepared, right? (Sorry brother Bill, I'm not ever gonna buy a Chevy, especially these days.) It's not currently in the bid but I'm thinking of going with attic trusses over the garage, just in case.

Kitchen will be good-sized but not mega-fancy. We have always had good luck with Kitchen-Aid appliances and chose that brand again for our new house (white appliances, NOT stainless-steel), including an induction cooktop which I can't wait to try out. There will be an island with a second sink, and the countertops will be granite (so far we've chosen a "Kashmir White" style, search for it if you want and you can easily find online pictures). Cabinets will be a traditional oak style (we like oak).

We are tired of carpet (just gets so dirty!) and are going nearly 100% with white oak hardwood throughout the house; bathrooms, entry areas, and laundry rooms will get tile.

We're going with a radiant-floor heating system, upstairs as well as downstairs (I've learned that a lot of houses will go with forced-air heating upstairs, if the budget is really tight, but this is an item I held out for). The system will be based on Warmboard which is supposed to be an efficient, fast-responding product (but darn expensive! - let's hope I still think it's worth it five years from now). The heat will come from a Unico reverse-cycle chiller (kinda like a heat pump, but does air-to-water heat exchanging, and is supposed to be far more efficient than a heat pump). The house will have eight heating zones, including one for the garage :).

We didn't have room in the budget initially for an A/C system, but I am hopeful that we can scrape up enough money to install one (a high-velocity system, powered by the reverse-cycle chiller - just need to add air-exchangers).

We're not getting everything we wanted in this house, but perfection is the enemy of good, and let's face it, I don't think we'll be suffering.

I've gotten some questions about why we chose to build now, during these tough economic times. Mainly it's because, for those who can afford it, this is a good time to build, since materials and contractors are less costly than they were (will be) in busy boom times. Paul Davies (our GC) did two rounds of requesting bids on various items, first one back in Nov-Dec timeframe, and again in Feb-March. The first bids were low, and then dropped even more the second time around. He guesstimates we're saving $60-70k on materials and labor by building right now.

Anyway, this post should help set the stage for the rest of the construction process. Any questions, feel free to email me.

Footings poured

The foundation crew has been onsite this week making progress. This is looking from the side-entrance, you can see how far down in the far corner they had to go to get to bearing soil:

Same day, looking from the northeast corner (garage):

A day later, with more progress made:

This morning the footings were poured; I wasn't able to be on-site to take any photos, let's hope I can make it out there when the foundation walls get poured. Here's the garage area:

That low spot at the southwest corner will be getting a really tall foundation wall:

Paul suggested, and I agreed, to putting a small access hole in the tall crawlspace area, which will make it possible to use that portion of the crawl space for storage, and will also make it possible for subcontractors to get long or large material (eg, pipes, etc) into the crawlspace. There will be an access hole from within the house but that can be hard to get stuff through.

Foundation hole dug

Drove out to the site after work; the foundation hole is now pretty much done and the foundation crew will be setting up forms pretty soon. This was our first real chance to get a feel for the scale of the house - now it feels pretty roomy!

Here's a short video I took of the hole, standing on top of Brad's excavator; when the video starts, I'm looking roughly south-south-west. The smaller area as I pan right is the garage:

I was impressed with the care they took in leveling the hole and keeping things straight. Maybe this is all completely normal, but it looks great to me. The southwest corner is the low spot and will require some minor extra funds since the bid assumed that we had a nearly level building site. Most of the foundation walls will be the spec'd out 2' high though.

For scale, here I am in the middle of (roughly) the living room:

The foundation crew had already dropped off their form stuff:

I'll try to get out there later this week for some pics of the forms when they're setup.

Foundation excavation started

My wife and I drove out to take a look this afternoon after work. The debris piles are now gone, which is really cool - makes the space look a lot better. I was out there Tuesday morning before work, to help do a rough stakeout of the foundation outline on the site. I'm happy with the orientation and things are looking good IMO.

Here's a picture of the garage layout, looking west from the gravel driveway; the nearest four stakes form the garage outline:

(Sorry - not my best picture...the angle wasn't so good with the sun starting to set either.).

This will be a three-stall, 40' wide by 26' deep garage, which from the plans I thought would be simply huge, and is certainly larger than any other garage I've ever had. Seeing it staked out on the ground makes it look smaller for some reason. Walking around the staked-out outline of the rest of the first story causes similar feelings.... :)

Same garage outline, looking more northwards; I'm standing roughly in the pantry, or maybe the living room:

The only thing I didn't really like is the size of the cleared area...both my wife and I thought that the front of the house is going to be a bit close (30-40' or so) to the tree line. The project is on a budget though and this is the best we can do for now.

I'll share more details about the floor plan layout in a later post, but don't expect anything grandiose - briefly, we're building a large, colonial-style, four-bedroom, two story house, with master bedroom on the ground-floor, along with two ground-floor offices (for my wife and I). The other bedrooms are upstairs, along with a second laundry room (our kids will be expected do their own laundry after we move in....my wife is looking forward to this :)).

Site clearing

Brad Elledge is the clearing\grading contractor. He's been on-site for a few days now and has got about an acre or so cleared out, next to the driveway. Here's some of the details of what's going on; the original site plan included room for a large detached shop (about 40'x80'):

The above picture also shows you the location of the house, septic field, well, and driveway...it was all going to turn out perfect, right? Well as Brad cleared more and more space though, we found a lot more elevation change than we expected. There is about 1-1.5 acres of high ground next to the driveway, roughly southwest of the well (just outside of the 100' well buffer zone), that now looks to be the best absolute spot to locate the house. Both Paul and Brad felt pretty strongly about this (partially for drainage reasons, but also for house esthetics and view reasons), and after studying the site for awhile I now agree with them. So the house is moving closer to the well and the driveway.

Here Paul (on the right) and I are chatting about the details; this is looking north I believe:

Even with this limited view, you can see how the ground starts to drop pretty fast about 20-30' beyond where we're standing. This is the main reason the shop just can't go in its original placement. One could argue that we should have done a better job of site planning, but the vegetation is so thick that it's very difficult to see elevation changes when you're traipsing around in there; so on-site plan revisions are a necessity to accomodate the reality on the ground. My future shop will have to be located either further to the west from the house, or (more probably) to the south of the house. Which has some advantages - I can leave a tree break between the house and the shop, and also run a small driveway extension to the shop.

Clearing this much wooded and overgrown space has created another monster pile of debris:

The pile runs east-west, the above picture is looking westward (standing on the driveway) and the pile is easily 30-40' long. Brad will be getting rid of this debris for us (both because it's ugly, and because it's now in the way of where the house will go).

This picture is looking roughly west-north-west from the driveway; gives a better perspective on the size of the pile :):

This is looking roughly southwest, and I'm standing about 60-70' west of the driveway:

These pictures don't really capture the scale of what's happening on the ground (which is a shame but it's the best I can do). A co-worker suggested that I rent a plane ride in order to take some aerial photos of the site, which would be really cool, but perhaps too expensive? I'm looking into the cost of a "scenic flight". If anyone happens to have access to a plane and wants to do a fly-over, I would love to get some pics - email me :).

Brad will be working for a few more days to extend the cleared area and dispose of the debris. Then it will be time to meet on site one more time to nail down the exact location of the house.

It's official - we're gonna build a house...

My wife and I went to the bank this morning and signed the papers. Here we go.... :-)

I don't think I have yet mentioned our bank by name. We are working with Washington Federal Savings; they describe themselves as a "portfolio lender" which from what I can tell, mostly means that they don't immediately sell their loans off to Countrywide Bank of America - instead they hang onto them for the long haul (works for me). I initially started working with them because they were one of the few banks in the area that offered jumbo construction loans. WaFed has been very stable during the recent financial turmoils and I'm very glad we ended up with a bank that didn't go belly-up in the middle of the process. Our loan officer is Susie Garcia at the Bothell branch and she's been great to work with throughout the process. The loan is a construction-to-permanent loan that will convert automatically at the end of the construction process, without another closing. I know there's pros-and-cons to this type of construction loan, but I'm satisfied that we're getting a good deal.

Our contractor, Paul Davies, met the with the county "pre-con" inspector ("pre-conditions" - basically a last-look at the site to make sure things are ready to begin construction) last week and got the final thumbs up. The inspector was pretty reasonable and said we don't need any hay bales (eg, along the driveway) for "drainage control" - yay. Next step is to clear the rest of the building site area so the foundation excavation can begin. I met with Paul on-site after closing today to do a rough scan of the area and make sure we were in sync before he meets with the clearing contractor and tells him what to do. We took a compass bearing and dragged a super long tape measure into the woods to about where the center of the house will be...wow but the vegetation is thick in there. I can't wait for all of the clearing to be done so we can finally see where our house is going to sit.

One cool thing: whenever I got close to the well, the compass went crazy and tried to point to it. All that metal was clearly influencing it...