January 17, 2020 We Are Building Our New Home THIS YEAR!

This is the South-eastern corner.
The Kitchen will go in this corner.

Click for a larger picture

Our New Year's Resolution for the past three years has been to build a permanent home for us on our Farm. Needless to say it, things sort of dragged on and on. We adopted the new house resolution for the fourth year in a row. But this year will be different.

The forms we removed

We finished the foundation for our new home yesterday by pulling all of the wooden forms off the fresh concrete. It took three long days to get all of the forms and supports taken off, but it took two weeks to put it all in place, so we are doing well for time. The wood we used got no lighter in weight, and the mud around the home-site only got deeper. Taking the forms off was heavy work. But the end result was pretty nice to look at.

Our next steps will be difficult, just not on the scale that this huge first step proposed.  There are  quite a few things needing done prior to building the first floor. We need to hand dig some trenches, one for the water supply, one for the electrical lines. These trenches have to be inspected prior to them being filled in, but after the trenches are filled in we will be able to dig a sump to collect any water that might find its way under the house. The sump pumps the water through a hole we put through the foundation to be drained away. We'll put down a plastic moisture barrier, lay a drainage pipe around the inside perimeter, and bury the drain pipe in rock. The whole thing is fairly easy to do, but this will take a few days.

This is the hallway.
The W/C is at the close end of the hallway.
The engineer designed this house very heavily.

Once done with the preparations, we'll begin laying out the first floor framing. One of the features of this house will be putting in a floor and ceiling with an insulation r-value of 38 (really thick bats). This requires that we use twelve inch wood to frame the sub-floor, the same heavy stuff we used to do the concrete forms, so we will be working hard carrying boards around. We will re-use the foundation form lumber in building the sub-floor frame and this will save us about a thousand dollars while keeping to our re-use, re-purpose, plan. The sub-floor framing will  hold most of the house plumbing as well as the insulation. We will be using copper pipe throughout the house, though it likely costs a bit more. 

This view is from the North-west corner.
Our bedroom will be in this corner.

I've done a lot of copper plumbing through the years, and the choice of copper is mostly for comfort in knowing they won't leak. And freezing pipes won't be any trouble since we'll run the pipes inside the frame, the insulation bats will protect them even in the coldest Winter. We'll also hang the septic pipe from the sub-floor frame and run all of the other drains to it before calling for more inspections. If all goes as expected the County will give us permission to put a flooring plywood on. At that point we'll have a large flat place on which we can put up our walls.

We are hoping to get most of this preparation done in the balance of January, but weather has been a constant problem this year so we're going to have to dodge a few more raindrops. We are not far behind in our plans, considering we did the foundation work in Winter we're lucky to have come this far. The idea is to get the framing up and a roof on the house by April. We still want to get our gardens planted this year, so the Farm will take so good days away from the building project. But we think that, with a bit of luck, we'll be move in ready in August.