Tubing and the Float

All,

I am wiped out...  3 hours sleep last night preparing tubing layout (measurements of every nook and crany). 

Hit the lot at 0800 this morning just a couple degrees above freezing.  Frost on everything.  Black "poly" slicker than snot. 

Long day,  we were able to get 3 circuits done and then an extra manifold set wired up for our next adventure. 

Float guys showed up and pretty much got the slab ready for pour.  They stayed until 2000 and worked in the dark to finish.   I held a flashlight and froze to death while they worked their rears off in short sleve shirts.  They were actually cold when they got done, but I felt sure that holding the flashlight so they could read the measuring tapes, levels, etc. and see where they were pounding was in my best interest and theirs. 

I am no ways near ready to pour concrete.  Still need to hire an electrician (long story), who has to set the floor outlets and island power.  Also don't have a temporary electric pole, so they have been working off generators.

We have probably 3 full days left of tubing work, plus some future electrical feeds I want to put in place...

1. 1.5 inch conduit in 2 places for future pool equipment
2. 1.5 inch conduit for future workshop
3. 1.5 inch conduti for aerobic septic system
4. landscape light feeds to front and rear
5. sprinkler timer electrical feeds to front, rear, and rainwater collection system pump.

Those will take me a 1/4 day if everybody leaves me alone.

I put some NO TRESPASSING signs in front.  Too much going on right now for the gawkers to step on, and the ICF is coming next.  I really don't want people even close to that stuff before it is poured.

It is interesting to see what shows up on the camera system we have in place.  Friends, and you know who you are, you are welcome. 

Ok, here are some pictures.  I'm too tired to explain anything.  You will have to figure it out on your own.  My fingers are bloody from the 600 zip ties I tied...

Oh, except for one explanation... Dad, the first picture is how they floated the garage.  Form guys couldn't figure out a good way to deal with the slope out the side of the garage for those 3 doors and then also with the slope out the back of the shop... So after some thought, we decided it would work good to make the shop actually level with no slope, but for that single garage door now has a ramp that drops 2 inches over 3 feet.  The picture shows the giant wedge they made for this purpose.   The concrete guys will actually blend all these slopes together so there isn't any sudden bumps anywhere.   These guys were amazing...

OH, and anybody that is wondering why I have green T posts in my house (8 of them acutally) they will be cut out later and the manifolds mounted to framing.


Good night...

Plumbing and "Makeup"

"Makeup"... what?? 

I have watched a lot of house from start to finish, but I guess I wasn't in the conversations.  I have learned a lot of new lingo in regards to concrete.  I should share some...

Form Setters -  A group of short, strong guys that swing 20 pound sledge hammers with ease.
Poly - Poly (something) that comes in several thicknesses measured in "mils" 
Makeup - Another group of short, strong guys that use flat shovels to dig trenches and "makeup" your slab.
Float - Put in place by the Form Setters.  Consists of more forms above the level of porches, garages, etc.

Well, today started out with a lot of questions   I knew the makeup guys were coming, but didn't know when.  I rolled in at 0805 and they all jumped out of their trucks.  Were they waiting for me, or did I just happen to be right behind them??   I say that because they obviously didn't need me for anything.  Without a whole lot of communication (other than some grumbling spanish comments about the mud), they just started digging.  30 minutes later they brought out the trencher...

The slab sits on 28 inch tall, 12 inch wide beams.  These beams are dug into the select fill pad, and then the whole mess is reinforced with cables and steel.  In a nutshell, the makeup guys are there to make this happen. 

Here is a picture of them getting started.

BEAMS...

A lot of this is dug by the trencher... Let me try to attach a video for the machine freaks...  It has a 12 inch wide chain a does a really good job of pulverizing what comes out of the trench into a fairly fine consistency.  This dirt subsequently is moved around and used to form the "pads" that make up the little islands around the beams.  On top of the pad will be 5 inches thick concrete (a little thicker than normal because of my radiant tubing taking up some space, I think the engineers were covering their rears a little here).

Well, this blog thing wouldn't let me download a video of the trencher... Sorry, how about a picture?

It has tracks, no wheels.  Makeup guys said they had not used it in about a month because everything had been so wet... 

So, at the end of the day, picture 120 foot slab x 80 foot, give or take.  A beam in each direction every 10 feet, plus a continuous beam under the perimeter of the ICF (living space).  By the time these guys left, they had this whole thing dug.  No breaks, no whining.  Smiles and jokes all day. 

Tomorrow they come back to finish some pads, and then poly, cables, and steel. 

Cool thing was that I had a much better idea of how the house lays out...  I could see where the walls were in relationship to the porch front and back, etc.  Looks great.  We are VERY happy with all our layout choices...

Bad thing was that chain trenchers and PVC pipe do not play well together.  I was briefed to anticipate this, because it just happens, but the trencher "nicked" 4 pipes.  The good news was that the plumber had just showed up to take a look at his penetrations. 

There is a long standard of fighting between plumber and concrete men as a result of the pipe issue.  But in our case, a deal was to be made...  Plumber would fix pipes without a penalty to concrete guys if concrete guys would clean up the mess about to be made by the plumber. 

So, a few hours later, 1 trip to HD for some couplers, and lots of measuring, and viola.... pipes are now where they should be. 

Everyone left in the dark, except for me, who stayed behind to pick up trash so the racoons didn't have a party out there tonight...

One more thing... At some point I was telling of the problems with rolling the radiant PEX into their respective lengths... Well, last week I finally broke down and went out and bought a sheet of plywood, had the guys cut it into two 4x4's, and turned it into a spool.  Did the ladder trick with the shovel again and much better succes....

Here is the spool...

1000 foot doesn't look like much...

Here is 4000 feet safely secure on my back patio...

Ok, it's late...

Goodnight!

Christmas Eve

Ok,

I was bummed out in the last post, but we really don't have any problems.  Kids are healthy, employed, wife is normally pretty happy with me, etc.

So, I should share our little Christmas Eve thing...  Homemade Pizzas...

I have traveled the world many times over, and my one thing I like to do is try pizzas everywhere I go to see how they differ.  By far, the best pizza I ever had was in Paris on the Champs des Elysses one Christmas Eve.  Jambon and champignon with some light sauce and fresh mozzarella...  Yum (oh, and of course an 8 dollar Coke with 1 cube of ice).  Only thing better would have been to eat that pizza at home.  I probably topped this off with a crepe "complete".  Ouf, fromage, salt, pepper, yummy.  The French know how to eat almost as well as the Italians... (although the best food in the world is actually El Salvador). 
So, here it is...

Pizza dough...

3 cups unbleached flour
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 pkg yeast
1/4 cup EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL (don't skimp on this)
1 cup warm water

Let that rise for a couple hours, and then roll it out as flat as you can...

450 degree oven (or hotter if you can), pizza stone, PARCHMENT PAPER (works better than cornmeal, which burns and smokes at temps greater than 450F)

We all get to pick our toppings. 
You should not put things like BBQ sauce or pineapple on your pizza... 

Kids stick with simple stuff.  Cheese and bacon...

Here is our favorite...

Fresh ball mozarella
Comte cheese (from Costco, it's a hard cheese you can grate)
Very Very light sauce, or just some chopped tomatoes
Salt
extra virgin olive oil (got some in Artentina that is awesome)
shaved Boarshead Prosciutto ham (it's expensive...deal with it)

bake for 6 minutes and then watch it till crust starts to change color.

top it with COLD fresh chopped Arugula (known as Rocket to some)

This pizza will change your life....

Remind  me when I download those photos and I will attach a pic of it later...

Merry Christmas!

PS, also spent 3 hours digging drain trenches trying to get all the water out of the plumbing trenches.  Windy, rainy, cold... Fun.  But, I have talked the plumber and concrete guys into both showing up on the 26th (yes, a Saturday).  So I want to have this thing as dry as I can...

Plumbing

Beginning of Underground Plumbing

Just a simple old outhouse would have been a lot simpler.  1 hole, 1 door with designer door cutout, etc.  Somehow we have all been talked into a far more complex system... 

This is where the plumbers began.  It is called the cleanout... I was concerned about this because 120 feet across the house causes problems for the "drop" in plumbing.  They drop the plumbing about 1/4 inch for every 10 feet, which keeps "things" flowing, I guess.   But, in my puny brain I was thinking 1/4 inch per foot, which would equate to several feet of drop...  Anyway, as usual, I was thinking wrong.

From this location, the pipe will make a turn due West and head over to an aerobic septic system, which will magically transform "things" back into water, and then make a trip due East about 450 feet to the septic field (watch out you East coasters). 

Well, this was the start of my first big problem other than weather.  Plumbers got off to a bad start, their digger broke, had to rent a new one, showed up later, wanted to finish, etc.  Anyway, we had about 2/3 of the plumbing "penetrations" miss their intended location.  We didn't know this of course until the next day when I went over to do a random audit of locations... I was agitated, stressed, and tired.

I didn't intend on having to do this, but I actually then stayed up till 6 am on the 23rd calculating out every single pipe penetration point as it was measured from the edge of the form boards.  In the plumbers defense, this house is very confusing.  There are 5 1/2 inch stone ledges, but sometimes there is another 6 inch of taper thrown in on top of that, and sometimes in several directions.  In addition, the exterior walls are 11 inches thick, which is not a normal dimension for the trades.  Interior walls range from 3 1/2 inches thick to 8 inches thick....and, the dimensions aren't called out very well on the plan, which is sometimes off as much as an inch due to where they "snapped" the dimension endings. 

The good news for the day, however, was that he did install a 6 inch PVC conduit for pulling the geothermal lines into the garage later in construction.  I had him go 4 feet deep on those based on some HVAC expertise.  Also put two 45 degree bends with a wide sweep rather than one 90 degree sweep to make pulling those lines easier.

Also noticed that there was several thousand square feet of roof that would dump water directly into my courtyard...  So, to remedy that, the plumber put 4 inch drain line penetrations through the slab that extend out beyond the courtyard.  I will hook those up later to the rainwater collection system.

Ok, another picture...

In this picture, the big pipe is a toilet drain, the one to the left is it's vent.  The one to the right is a shower drain.  The sink will later tie into the vent in a "wet wall" fashion, which as you can see has all the water from sink and shower chasing the toilet water.  The only trap needed here is for the shower, as sink and toilet have traps themselves.  This is a fairly typical bath setup.  In the background you can see the drain lines headed for the cleanout.  The farthest point starts out with 3 inch drainline, picks up the powder bath, and then turns into a 4 inch line as it picks up the rest of the house. 

As the sun goes down, you can see the trench being dug for the 6 inch geothermal conduit.  This stuff makes all the other plumbing out there look small, but I don't have a picture of it installed. 

There was rain in the forecast, and sure enough, by midnight, the place had turned back into a mudhole... 

We would find out the next day that most of this plumbing needed to be reworked.

The smell of sawdust

Taking Shape

It didn't take long for this to happen...  The form setters showed up this morning and demonstrated an advanced lesson in Geometry. 

They actually staked out points beyond the house, staked and squared, and then ran string line across all 4 corners. Then, working inwards, they set the exact position of all the forms.  You can see the shape of the house from here.  There are a lot of cuts in and out where the house changes direction.  Also, the height of the forms changes all around the house, because where there is a porch, garage door,  entry door, courtyard, etc.  All these things require a "drop" in elevation and then slope. 

Only one minor emergency.  On the plans was a dimension line that looked like it terminated in a particular place but did not.  It all made sense in the end, but a couple calls to the designer and also the CAD guy.  Nice to have them help, and made me feel a lot better when the crew was able to measure full circle around the house and get back to the same spot using some math. 

Here is a shot from the other direction...

I was hopefull we could have the plumber on site tomorrow, who will place all the drain tubing in trenches and locate all the drains, vents, and geothermal conduit.  Even though the weather is now very good, unfortunately he is behind on other jobs and can't get here till Monday.  I think that will eventually cause us not to pour concrete before Christmas. 

Otherwise, it was refreshing to see the house grow upwards about a foot, and I have to say I was pretty excited to smell fresh cut sawdust...  mmmmm.

OH, here is a shot of the "Tube" we took the other day.  Didn't get that downloaded till now...  Have a look...

I am hopefull that someday I can show you some pics with some blue sky...

That's it for now..

Mud and a 262 foot Hula Hoop

Rain for the last few days, and nothing has happened...

We didn't have hardly a drop of rain this summer, and it was smokin' hot.  Dried everything out and was really hard on everything alive..

Fast forward to December.  We keep getting cold fronts sent from the North (can't blame you Yankees for that, this stuff comes from Canada) and that meets our rather warm, humid Gulf air, which produces rain.  We have not gotten hammered from total rainfall, just drizzly wet often enough that we can't surface dry things out. 

Was supposed to have the forms set for the concrete this morning.  But I called them off for another day, and glad I did because it was pretty slimy on top.  I don't think that crew was too excited to be swinging 20 pound sledge hammers in the mud.  So, tomorrow we try again...  They say they can have the job done in a matter of a couple of hours...  Would take me weeks.

In the meantime, we made another run to town for other things.  Looks like iphones are in our future.  Since my puny brain can only store just a fraction of what it should, these should help...  Anybody have an iphone case they really like??  Needs to have a screen protector build in and still able to dock the phone easily...

Oh, got home and decided to take a stab at my next project for the house.  I will be installing a "Hydronic Radiant Heating" system myself in this abode...  What that means is warm water circulates through PEX (crosslinked poly pipe) embedded in the concrete slab, thus warming the concrete and keeping your pigs warm. 

I bought this tubing from an online retailer.  Couldn't support the local economy on this one, because the tubing needed to have an "oxygen barrier" which normal PEX doesn't have.  It turns out, that when you have hot water in a closed pipe, it sucks oxygen right through the walls of the pipe, which builds up in the water and causes things to corrode, as well as eventually forming pockets of oxygen gas which mess up the flow of water.  The pipe with the oxygen barrier keeps this from happening.  Only you Yanks seem to really know about this, and I thank you for your expertise in figuring all this out. 

Ok, back to my point... I bought the pipe in 1000' lengths, but it is installed in lengths in the neighborhood of 250' per circuit.  So, to save time later, I had the bright idea of cutting this stuff to length and rolling it up in giant rolls that would be more manageable for installation...  Good intent.  So, tonight, I get a roll, open the box, and I am staring at a 1000 foot red slinky.  Hmmm. 

OK, two ladders, an old wire spool, put the red slinky over the wire spool, put a shovel handle through the wire spool, suspend the apparatus between the two ladders, attach C clamps to the shovel so it can't move, and cut the straps holding the red slinky together.  HOLY CRAP!!...  Red slinky everywhere.  My neighbors are driving by... slowly, with looks of wonder in their eyes.  They probably think it is some Christmas decoration... 

Long story short, after much aggrevation, I get my first 262 foot piece rolled up into a nice neat 6 foot diameter loop, with cable ties holding it together about every 50 feet.  Wifey is completely pissed off at me, because she just isn't capable of reading my mind.  Daughter too, who tried to help tame the 262 foot Hula Hoop...   Not fun.

OK, for you techno savy pipe nerds out there... I have a question.  I have observed that granite countertops are cold to the touch in winter.  So, since I already have warm water circulating and pumps why not run a circuit to two places... 1.  The eating island, where people will have their arms resting whilst eating and doing homework, and 2.  Pissed off wifes makeup counter in the master bath...        Why??? Because I can...

I can easily run pex tubing over to each location and supply hot water, but how do I circulate it under the countertops...  The island countertop presents a special challenge, because the wood base under the granite also adds some support to the part cantilevered part that hangs over the edge about 16 inches.  If I cut into this too much, I run the risk of a structural failure...

Here is my idea...use some plumbing adapters to convert the pex to a 1/4 inch flare copper coupler, then use a router to make a 1/4 inch channel that snakes from one side of the island to the other.  Snake the copper tubing into place and secure into the tracks with silicone.  Then, the granite gets installed on top of all this and subsequently is warmed whenever the floor heat is on (all winter long, in my case) to a temperature of about 80 degrees. 

Since I am the "hypercomplicator" according to my first wife (actually, the wife I have now that is pissed off at me...did I mention that?), I am not quite satisfied with this design.  I feel the head loss from the copper tubing will be too high and I will end up with an island that is cold on one side and warm on the other... So, why not split the tubing and come across the island from either direction, thus reducing the head loss and increasing flow, and having a more uniform temperature gradient across the island...

I take your comments on this... Anybody with a better idea wins...  Just don't try to sell me on the electric resistive mats under the countertops.  I know this can be done but it costs too much to operate regardless of it's simplicity...  I can make hot water with my GSHP at a COP (coeffecient of performance) in the range of 4.0 and higher, 4 watts energy for the cost of 1.

Sorry, should have taken a picture of the red slinky...  I promise to construct a better design to do the rest of that project... 

I wonder if the iphone has an app for that?

Dirto Finito... For now...

This is what 120 truckloads of dirt looks like...

Let me first say that we have been really getting hammered with moisture this fall.  We could have been doing this little project back in August when we were all dry, but my own stupidity for getting the budget together coupled with the bank being pretty slow to approve things put us right in the wettest time we have seen in more than a year... 

I'm not going to say bad things about the bank...  Personally, I wouldn't lend money to myself (pretty much a bumbling idiot) at the rates they are getting for money.  But trust me when I say they left no stone unturned in terms of checking on things before we were approved.  Then, after we were approved, they fiddled around some more.  We are glad that that part is behind us, but there sure is a lot of paperwork dealing with draws and such...  I would say so far contracts and draws (and writing checks) will probably be the worst part of this whole process. 

OK, back to the dirt...  Rained this Monday all day.  Mist, fog, and crap all day.  Tuesday morning the pad was disgusting.  This fill dirt turns into really nasty stuff when it gets wet.  Slippery to walk on, and then you can't get it off of you.  Just nasty...  By Wednesday, though, things were looking decent, so a judgement call to attempt a finish on Thursday. 

This morning, bright and early, the guys showed up and started pushing things around again.  When the first loaded truck came into the driveway, it was not good, he sunk in, slipped around... but being a brave soul, kept coming in and made it to the pad.  So, we dumped a couple of more truckloads of fill in the driveway and they worked the drive back out, and surprisingly, by the end of the day, the driveway was pretty good. 

The pad, on the other hand, was excellent.  Tony, the dozer driver, did an amazing job of working things around.  When they put these things in, they normally go about 6 to 8 inches per "lift", and then work that around and pack it down.  Tony, on the other hand, pushes dirt out from the dump site in tiny little increments, and blades back and forth on it breaking everything up and packing it down.  This packs things much better and they have great control over what they are doing.  In addition, the dump trucks are asked to roll back and forth on the whole thing while they are loaded.  Here is a pic of what that looks like after they "roll" it...

As you can see..  The trucks are not sinking in much at all, and this pad is as hard as concrete.  Each mound of dirt you see is 1 truckload, which is about 12 cubic yards.  This dirt is compacted to about 2/3 of that volume.

By the end of the day, 120 loads of dirt total, 1000's of passes with the dozer, and they had a lazer flat pad.  They check everything with a lazer level and I am amazed they are not more than 1/2 inch off anywhere. 

Time also to finally "set" the culvert...  This they claim was easy, but it actually took a while.  First, they dug a trench out of the temporary driveway, then shot some grade lines, and then worked things around.  A load of "stabilized sand" comes in, and the tube actually sits in this sand.  Then, more stabilized sand, topped with clay fill and then finally topped with 4 loads of rock. 

This picture is taken as they are just digging things out.  As you can tell, things are a complete mess. 

This is the new driveway... I had them crown it up quite a bit to keep it from holding water.  I really need this to dry out and firm up a lot, as the next big task is to get the concrete over this thing.  The orange dirt you see is actually a little stabilized sand left over that didn't find it's way over the tube. 

BTW, stabilized sand (near as I can tell) is non-uniform in size, so it packs better, and it is mixed with a couple of bags of cement.  So it actually sets up hard as concrete.  Surrounding the tube, which in turn protects the tube from heavy objects up top... Tomorrow I plan on driving some 2x4 stakes in there to keep people from driving over the end of the tube. 

What appeared to be a pretty long tube somehow disappeared down in there.

OH, the engineers showed up way after dark and did some compaction "studies" to make sure all is well... Minimum compaction is 95%, and ours tested at 104%. 

We are GO for forms...  Scheduled for Tuesday, but supposed to rain for the next 2 days... For now, I am SUPER elated to have the pad in place.

The Mountain of Dirt

Yesterday's blog was too long... I need to learn to hold something back...  Sorry.

Made some progress today.  The crew showed up fairly early.  It was COLD.  I suppose the Yanks will laugh at this, but there is something about Texas cold...  It cuts into you.  The temps started out in the mid 30's and kept coming down.  Tonight it is in the upper 20's, what they call a hard freeze here...  Ha.  Windy from the North, and by noon we had a pretty good clip of SNOW coming down. 

So, they dug out the sloppy part at the bottom of the pad, and surprisingly, it had pretty good hard clay dirt underneath.  I would estimate they dug out about 18 inchs.  They also dug a little on some soft spots where my daughters bedroom will be, and later on they found a spot under the garage that required further work.  The mountain of dirt that this creates was HUGE.  I am standing on the very top of this at an altitude of about 25 feet to take these pictures.  I doubt anyone will ever stand on that spot again, as after the fill is installed they will use (some) of that dirt to fill in around the edges and taper things off and create a drainage plane away from the house.  BTW, you can see from up here the shape of things, especially the gentle curve of the driveway as it swings around to the apron.  I am happy with the location.

So far, we are in the mid 30's of truckloads of dirt.  The trucks were making a round trip of about 60 minutes, and there were 7 of them or so.  You can imagine that this is not a cheap process, and one of the few things that is beyond our control.  So it takes whatever it takes to fill the hole, make a level pad, and keep all the engineers happy...

Speaking of...as the job progressed today, the field inspector for the geotech company came by to check on the status of things, take samples of the fill dirt, and have a chat with all.  He seemed pretty happy about things but didn't like the "pumping" that was happening under the garage.  The fill is interesting stuff, it is not unlike modeling clay, except has some sand content in it that keeps it from going "plastic" and when you put a bunch down together it creates a structure over the ground.  This structure moves, though, so as things drive across the top it works the soil below up and down.  This action actually causes water in the subsurface to "pump" to the top, and in this case it literally made a little pool of water on the top of the fill.  I am surprised to witness the difference in behavior between regular old dirt on the site and what they haul it.  Regular old dirt looks good for a while while it is being worked, and then it just literally breaks apart and has no structure at all.  The geotech guys will shoot some kind of penetrating beam down into the ground to determine the percentage compaction as we go. 

So, the decision was to shut down for the day, dig this area back out, and let it breathe...  I think perhaps the fact that it was Friday afternoon at about 3:30 PM had even more to do with that decision, because nothing really prevented them from working around these spots, and they have plenty more dirt to haul... 

BTW, I promised a picture of the "Mountain of Dirt"...  Here it is.

I asked a wise old plumber once how he thought something had been plumbed, and he responded "Well, it all depends on what they had on their truck..."  Human behavior perhaps drives building decisions more than we know...  Saturday weather is supposed to be cold, but perfect, mid 50's or so...   Our weather guy has been a bit off on his calls lately....

Have a great weekend.

Rain, more burning, and lots of decisions

The "Claw" at work...

First of all, this picture is NOT of what I did today, but when the clearing crew was at work a few days ago...  We had a fairly nice weekend, but on Sunday night we got some pretty good rain, then again on Tuesday, and it really rained hard.  This has created havoc here and some decisions that aren't easy to make. 

On Tuesday, we took the opportunity to go "shopping" for some things... We have to do this while the kids are at school, and it's a minimum of an hour into the big city.  So we had to hustle.  Good luck on the door, progress on figuring out the fireplaces, and unfortunate progress on the windows.  More on all of this as we approach those subjects, but here is the skinny for now... The door(s) are cool, and they will be awesome.  The fireplaces will be 1 each wood burning and 1 each "direct vent".  We originally were planning on having two wood burning fireplaces, but the house will be so "tight" that I was having doubts about getting 1 fireplace to draft, let alone two...  Direct vents, on the other hand, suck in combustion air through the outside of a double wall vent pipe, while the hot stuff goes back out through the center.  You can run them on propane or gas (we will only have propane available).  For our house, this allows us to run 1 wood burner and the direct vent at the same time, which we would probably only do if we were having a party.  The risk is that, at this party, there is cooking going on, stinky people using bathrooms (sorry, couldn't resist), and thus vent fans in the kitchen and bath could potentially put a vacuum on the house and pull smoke back down the chimney...resulting in an unhappy set of guests and even more unhappy homeowners.  One of the things I can do to help prevent this is put a limit on how many vent fans the Centralite lighting control system will allow to power whenever the house is in "Party" mode.  Ok, I am rambling... Sorry...  Wonder if I can limit the number of stinky people at my party???

Windows, YIKES...  I have been studying windows for nearly two years, and as we come up to decision time I am still not decided.  I know that I want the "pulltruded" fiberglass variety, but frankly I cannot justify the extra price of them.  The kicker is that to even get them in the ballpark for price, I had to jury rig the types to allow for SDLs (simulated divided lites), single hung here, double hung there, wood interior here, fiberglass interior over there...  Short story long... We walked into the window place and the Mrs didn't like the interior finish of the "all fiberglass" version...  So I think we are canning the fiberglass windows and opting for wood windows that are "clad" on the outside with aluminum. 

Some more about windows...  Vinyl windows are simple, they come in "normal" sizes, and you order them up and put them in. , and vary from each mfgr Some look better than others, and they are very energy efficient as compared with aluminum frames.  Fiberglass windows are cool because they are way stronger, and the coefficient of expansion for the fiberglass is about the same as the glass, so there is less "movement" between the frames and glass, and thus less chance for a seal failure.  They can be painted, and water can't hurt them.  Vinyl windows have limitations in color.  The reason is that the material itself gets hot as the colors get darker.  You Yanks up north probably don't know about heat, but down here it gets hot, and when the temperature of the vinyl gets in the 140 F range, the vinyl begins to get "melty"...  So they keep the colors light to help keep that from happening.  Wifey here wants brown windows, and I agree with here, it's the right look for the house.  Brown gets hot in the sun... 

My advice to you... Either don't care about your windows, or start trying to figure them out now... It will take a long time to get this item right (unless you have unlimited funds).

OH, went out to the lot Tuesday night to see what the rain was doing to the mud.  It wasn't pretty.  So I am poking around in the dark and the drainage ditch on the east side of my property had water in it.  First time I had seen this happen.  Well, the developers had put some silt fence in the thing at intervals to keep it from rutting out.  Good idea, except the silt fence was overflowing and the water was coming onto my pad site...  So, like a crazed animal I start hopping up and down on the silt fence trying to break it apart... No luck, that sucker is tough.  Back to the truck for the only tool I had in there, a shovel.  Tried digging under the silt fence in the water, no luck.  So I started beating on it with the shovel, in the dark, in the rain...finally got it to tear apart. 

BTW, there is some kind of poison oak or stickers over there, my hands were itching big time by the time I got home... An emergency wash with soap, water, and then alcohol...

Two Tank Hot Water Schematic

OK... one more picture...  This one is a schematic of the hot water system.  It is not the full schematic, but the one I sketched out to keep the basic principles in my tiny little brain of what I am trying to accomplish.  In a nutshell, the water comes in cold to the Desuperheater Tank, gets as warm as it can (130 F max), then hops over into the dedicated hot water tank, where the Combination Unit Ground Source Heat pump works on it some more (only to 115 F).  Then the water is distrubuted by way of manifolds.  Now, for the complicated part...  If the sun is shining, why pay to have the GSHP come on and make hot water.  So the solar is hooked up to the lower heat exchanger and heats the water all it can.  In the wintertime, I will also suck heat out of this same tank and distribute that heat through the floor heat system.  This will be accomplished with 4000 linear feet of 1/2 inch oxygen barrier pex, snaked into the concrete (hopefully) below the level of the framers nails.  The tubing is fed via two Taco XPB pumps, which have an onboard computer to determine (based on outside air temperature) what the "target" temperature of the floor needs to be to offset the amount of heat the building is losing, and thus replacing it with the appropriate amount of BTU's.  This concept is called "outdoor reset".  So rather than waiting till your dining room gets cold, then having a thermostat telling some valve or pump it needs heat...then, 12 hours later the system actually has added enough btu's into your dining room to change the 25 cubic yards of concrete under there by a measly 1/2 degree, we make that change several hours before the room actually gets cold, by predicting what that temperature will need to be to keep the room comfortable, and adjusting it before the room ever gets cold.  In the opposite situation, it starts getting warm outside, and the system is already lowering the floor temp so you don't spend money on heat you don't need.

I am rambling again...

Ok, so if the Desuperheater tank gets hotter than the water in the dedicated tank, why not mix the two together and make both tanks hot, and store more, hotter water?  This is accomplished by using a delta T controller that triggers a "mix" pump whenever this occurs.  Another trick... If someone wants hot water, and the Desuperheater tank can provide it at proper temp, why not bypass the dedicated tank (with a strategically placed mix valve) with that hot water and leave the other tank alone??  This allows the Desuperheater tank to stay colder and the dedicated tank to stay hotter.  When the desuperheater tank is cold, my effeciency on the GSHP is higher, and if the water in the dedicated tank is left undisturbed, I won't have to pay to heat that water at all... OH, the second mix valve is for two reasons... 1.  It protects users downline from potentially scalding water from the solar hot water system, and 2.  It is set at a slightly higher mix temp so there is always a "trickle" of water coming from the dedicated tank, so it doesn't stagnate.

There is also a Grundfos pump that applies a positive pressure to the hot water system when powered.  This hot water is "forwarded" to the manifolds and the furthest spot away in the house and allowed to return through the cold water side via a "Grundfos Comfort Valve."  So, when somebody far away wants hot water, they don't have to wait, nor waste water waiting for it.  The comfort valve shuts off at something like 85 F, so hot water doesn't pass to cold after the system warms up (which would waste heat).  Also, normally the Grundfos Pump would be on a timer, but my Centralite system will actually run it...

1.  Stinky person goes into bathroom, turns on light...

2.  Centralite now knows the bathroom is occupied, so the remote vent fan is activated.

3.  Hopefully the stinky person will wash their hands, so turn on the Grundfos to precharge the hot water.

4.  Stinky person leaves, hopfully turns off the light behind them...

5.  Centralite dimms the light back down to 0 %.

6.  Fan runs for 5 more minutes and then shuts down...

7.  Stinky person not so stinky anymore...

The really cool part.... I think I have a plumber and an HVAC guy that actually understands what I am trying to do....  Even though neither of them will have too much involvement other than just getting the pipes to the tanks...  I am happy with that...

Send me your comments on the TWO TANK system   And someday, if I get in an ornery mood, I'll throw in the 3 tank model schematic just for fun... 

Tomorrow they are calling for a pretty good chance of SNOW... Yes, the white kind you Yanks are so used to... I get comments all the time about my complex heating system, but in the end the thing is designed for comfort.  Keep the heat close to the floor, close to you and your little piggys...  Plus, it gives me a great way to distribute heat that I am getting from my solar hot water system...  Total cost for the radiant heat system... Probably less than $5,000.  If I screw it up and it don't work so good, the GSHP just comes on and warms up the air to whatever the wall thermostat is set to... It doesn't even know the floor heat is there.

Dirt guys are going to try for it tomorrow.  They have to dig out some of the muck and replace it with fill dirt.  I have to remeasure things and make sure the house is sitting inside all the setbacks, plus room for a future shop and pool...  I hope it all works out...

Today I burned some more brush, and in addition cut a few trees that I decided would interfere with the house.  Tonight a raging fire burns in my fireplace.  Also put up some more orange construction fence.  My buddy is building and almost done, and the last thing the landscape guys do is drive their bobcat through his trees and leave giant ruts in the mud, but it screws up the root systems on the trees, and you can't fix that.  So I guess the fence is helpful.  Also shoveled out a 50 foot or so ditch so if it does rain, the water can't get to the pad so easily...  Surprisingly easy to shovel.  I have moved the Ibuprofin to the front of the medicine cabinet.

Sorry for the long post...

Now that's a fire...

This was taken Wednesday...

This pile of sticks was Wednesday, after the guys were gone.  They assured me they could burn them right up in no time.  Yea right... It has been really wet, these sticks were from live trees, and a lot of them really big stumps... 

Thursday was Thanksgiving... (hope you had a great one!)  So no work that day (actually not true...my wife worked her tail off while entertaining one of the kids, and my daughter and I surveyed the lot for several hours, trying to nail down the locations of the corners).  We were scheduled to burn on Friday.  The burn permit is through the HOA, but controlled by Texas State rules.  It is about 15 pages of rules, all designed for every possible contingency...  Like what if I am burning and the gravitational pull of the moon pulls a stick out of my pile...  Anyway, I thought it would be  pain to get a burn permit, but the HOA rep had it all laid out and got it approved very quickly.  I did have to call county emergency dispatch this morning, as well as the HOA themselves, which makes good sense.

So, the guys show up and spring into action...  The dozer works the perimeter, and keeps things tidy, while the "claw" expertly seperated the sticks into 3 piles, small, medium, and heavy enough to flatten your pickup truck.  The whole time they are doing this, they use the "claw" to shake off all the dirt from the sticks.  They start the fire, and feed it with the claw.  I was amazed at how fast the whole thing went, and by noon there wasn't much to do, but twiddle around the perimeter and tidy that up.  The heat from the fire was pretty intense... Even melted the dozer operators foam cup he had beside him on the dozer... I didn't check his eyebrows...

I, on the other hand, took the opportunity to do some housekeeping on brush and dead trees not just in the perimeter, but all over the place, trying to clear some sightlines and space where future stuff will go.  My normal job is a cushy easy sit down job, so by tonight I am bruised, scratched, burnt, sore, dehydrated, and tired.  I probably cut 10 pickup loads of brush, dead limbs, and dead trees, some of which were not small.  But it was nice to take advantage of the fire and burn crew, because it will never again be this easy to get rid of stuff.   I feel the day was a success, because I didn't get run over by a bulldozer, and we are ready for constructing the slab on Monday.  The next step is to remove the top 6 inches of dirt, which has all the organic material, roots, etc, and push that off to the sides.  Then, they "proof roll" the pad site to see if it supports the roller well.  If not, they have to dig out those areas.  Next, a whole herd of dump trucks (these guys call them bobtails) come in and start dumping "select fill" .  Select fill is dirt that has been selected for it's quality to do a particular task.  In this case, they want dirt that will hold the weight of the structure through the bottom of the beams, and dirt that won't overly expand and heave the slab into pieces.  They talk about a low "plasticity index," which they shorten to slang of PI.  I play along and act like I know what they are talking about.  The do this so they can charge a lot more money for this dirt.  I would love to be cheap here, and do the minimum to just get by (most builder houses certainly would), but a little more money here is probably insurance against having some really nasty problems down the road.  My civil engineer made the comment that he had never seen an engineered concrete slab fail, however, when the pad fails beneath it the slab will follow...always.

OK, there is the lot at the end of the day... Incredible.  The flag down by the chairs is the front right corner of the house, our master bath, and the flag to the right is the master bedroom.  The picture was taken from atop the excavator, as it was sitting in what will be the driveway apron.  And that is all for today.  This tired body needs to be horizontal.  My hats off to all those guys who do this and more every day. 

There is a bulldozer in our kitchen... Really!

To be completely honest, this is one of the moments I have most dread... We have so meticulously tried to plan everything else about this house, but there was so much brush intermixed with trees on our lot it took me a long time to get a feel for how to lay things out and try to save the best trees...

In the end, there was a group of about 8 really nice post oak trees that were going to have to go one way or another. So the decision was made long ago for those trees... However, around the perimeter of the house a lot had not been decided. It was just impossible to tell where you were standing... I tried everything, a friends GPS, Stellar Navigation, a handheld compass, climing up and down trees (my wife actually got bit by fireants WHILE in a tree), throwing streamers in the air... finally, I put on my safety glasses, hooked the 300 foot tape measure to my belt, and started crawling through the brush (in amongst the Copperheads and Fireants) with my wife telling me left or right...

So when the dozer guys showed up today... I was afraid they would just crash through everything with no due regard... I was wrong...

The owner of the company jumps up on his dozer, and asks me to guide him around the perimeter of the site, he would clear a patch so we could see the rest of the job, and then eventually clear the interior with an excavator and dozer. It worked perfectly.

I could not believe how he managed to get that thing between trees I could hardly walk through. He just mashed and pushed, and didn't put a single nick on any keeper trees. Even better, he didn't even mess much with the dirt around the bases of the trees. Then, when the rest of his crew got there, they were no less meticulous about the whole job, and did a great job of getting everything in a great big pile.

These guys were so careful, in fact, that I have decided to have them do some more clearing of brush on Friday. I was originally going to keep the brush to protect the rest of the trees from damage, but knew I would be spending countless weekends out there with my chainsaw. Well, what would take me 3 months to do these guys do in 10 minutes, and since the burn is already approved, I think it is prudent to take care of more of it now...

Some facts, the slab is going to be pretty big... Huge, actually by house standards, but too small for a mall. 121 feet across, with an additional 30ish feet for the apron in front of the (side load) garage. 80 feet deep at the thickest. The foundation will be a post tension slab with high tension cables. I have been a fan of these for a long time, because they are an active system rather than passively waiting for the concrete to fail. With a traditional rebar/concrete marriage, the rebar actually doesn't do anything until it is "asked" to, when the concrete is trying to come apart in tension. In contrast, the post tension cables will hold the concrete in compression all the time. The beams in the slab will be 28 inches deep, and 12 inches wide, about 10 feet on center. So it's like a huge upside down waffle. Add to that the strength of the effect of bracing the opposite side of that waffle with 10 to 14 feet of ICF walls, and you have an extremely strong structure. Way stronger than most bridges. And perhaps more expensive...

So, I rambled.

I tip my hat to a fine, young crew today...

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Wow, an incredibly busy day... First off to get some more plans... I laugh when I see these online websites that offer 8 sets of plans as a full sets, like that is enough... With the sets of changes we went through with the designer, it's been easily 25 sets of plans, and now, there are engineered drawings and MTOs (Material Takeoffs) that are all color coded and official looking to keep up with... Make sure as you get revisions you keep really close track of which sets are current. I rant...anyway, 6 sets of plans this morning another $71...

The reason you are looking at this shed/barn is because tomorrow the dirt/excavator/tree killer is coming... Yes, actually real something happening more than talk. So tonight we are furiously trying to get all the contracts ready and I wanted to have a little better plan of what to clear on the apron side of the house, so even though this barn won't be built for some time, the flat work and clearing is a lot easier to handle now... I sketched it out for spousal comments and she liked it... I colored it probably a tad too RED to go well with the house, so I will have to work on that... Send me your comments if you like or dislike it... Color comments too...

So back to the busy part... Off to meet with the framer, a prospective stone/stucco/cantera installer, and a plumber. So far I have been really impressed with the subcontractors. I thought I had a lot of weird stuff and was being really picky about certain things, and so far not one of them has even blinked.... Perhaps they lie in wait to drop all these bombs on me later???

Also stole some time to head to HD for a tool... A pocket crimp tool to crimp pex... 4000 feet of oxygen barrier tubing is now headed my way, all of which has to be laid out in the slab. The tubing will snake all over the place and end up hooked up to manifolds... For now, I want to pressurize them to make sure they aren't damaged during the pour or framing operation. So the manifold is hooked up to these really big pressure gages my wife found on ebay... My first attempt at a PEX crimp fitting tonight was successful... I tied the gages together to test my system and pressurized to 100 PSI... Holding strong...

Loaded up the truck tonight too with everything I might need for the day tomorrow... Chainsaw included... It has rained a lot this fall and things are pretty wet, so tomorrow will be interesting. If it is too wet, I am hoping they will take the day off for an early Thanksgiving... Otherwise, we could actually be burning and making some progress.... Any dirt that is disturbed is required to be removed and replaced with "select fill". That will be in addition to an estimated 120 dump truck loads of select fill. All that just to bring one side up about 2 1/2 feet.

Maybe tomorrow I will have some actual pictures.... :-)

gobble gobble

Ok kids,

Here it is, after 5 years of planning, we closed on the construction loan for "Villa Costo Mucho"...

We are excited, but pretty nervous about the amount of money this is going to take, as well as the fact that this is the first house we have ever built... Yes, 1st one.

We are getting lots of help, however, as we are using a service that provides all kinds of help to folks like us...

Here are the highlights...

1. 4800 square feet, 4 bedroom, 4 1/2 bath, single story, 3 1/2 car garage.

2. Sealed attic

3. Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) exterior construction

4. Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) with desuperheater

5. Hydronic radiant heating system throughout slab

6. Fiberglass framed windows

7. Clay tile roof

8. Hard wired lighting control system

9. Extensive use of toys... Intercom, automation controller, high voltage relays, etc.

10. Future solar electric and hot water assist

Well, lots of other stuff. But for now... That's my first post... Check back later!!!