Of Footing Forms and a Quick Update

Hello again, I hope you are having the same kind of weather that we are having in New York. It has been a beautiful few days in a row here. I actually took a picture of the sky on Saturday morning. Sometimes you really do have to stop and smell the roses. Or stop and appreciate the beauty around you.

Saturday morning May 4th. A gorgeous day.
Saturday morning May 4th. A gorgeous day.

I took Friday off from work to participate in “Career Day”. I thought it went pretty well. I talked about my career path in engineering and the construction industry. I talked to 8 different classes of students for 16 minutes each.  It’s funny, I never really thought of myself  as having a  career.I had my website up on a screen and was able to spend about 5-6 minutes talking about Hobbit houses. I had a lot of fun talking.Ithink t was interesting for the kids at least I hope so. Some of the teachers thought the shed was cool so it was nice to get some positive feedback.

Career day ended around 11:00 AM so I was able to get over to the house and start the footings. Believe it or not Fiday was the first time that I really felt like this thing is really going to happen. I don’t know what it is about nailing wood together to build stuff but somehow when you start using nails and the skill saw I really get into it. The first board is always a little tricky, setting it in the right place, securing it, leveling it up. Once I got going I came up with a few tricks to help me along and I really got a lot done. I worked till about 5 then went to the gym. Here’s a picture after the first day.

Begining of the footings.
Begining of the footings.

Saturday my wife and I went  to Massachusetts to visit my daughter at college . She was in a dance show at a place called MassMoca in North Adams. The show didn’t start until 2 PM so we weren’t going to leave until about 10am. I woke up at 5am and got a couple hours work in on the footings before I had to go. It was great! I got so much done.I think in one more long day I could have all the footing forms up and in place! The ride up to North Adams was really nice and we had a great time watching our daughter dance. We had a really great dinner at a place called “The Hub” in North Adams. Good food and good specialty drinks! It was nice seeing Georgia. Good luck with finals! We love you!

The footings that I am putting together are not your typical residential house foundation footings. These footings are 16 inches deep and are going to require some special attention. Most residential footings are about 10 inches thick and can be braced quite easily with re-bar or D-stakes. Or a number of other ways which I will not get into here. Once the height of the form increases the potential of the concrete to push the forms over increasees dramatically causing,what we call in the business, a blowout. That’s when the forms break and the concrete goes all over the place. I have never been involved with a blowout that was fun. And anyone who is in the concrete business who says he’s never had a blowout hasn’t been in the concrete business very long. Anyway it’s a little early but we’ll get into how we are going to brace the footing forms next week I hope. Here’s a picture of the footings with a D-stake support. The D-stakes have holes in them so you can drive a nail through it and into the plank.

Footing form: 18 inch BB plywood backed up by a plank with D-stake support.
Footing form: 18 inch BB plywood backed up by a plank with D-stake support.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a residential foundation and this is the first time I ever used a laser level to help with setting the footing forms. But man, what a breeze. The top of this footing is probably within a quarter of an inch if not better. I hope the weather holds up for next weekend.

Maybe we have a gardener or arborist out there? I have a bush on the property that bloomed the other day and I was hoping someone could identify it for me. Let me know what it is or if you have an idea of what it is. Here’s the picture.

Unkown shrubbery. Where's Samwise when I need him?
Unkown shrubbery. Where’s Samwise when I need him?

Now the fun really begins! Enjoy your week till we meet again.

From Hobbit Hollow Jim

 

Of Second Breakfasts, Bat Houses and Career Day.

Well this Saturday wasn’t a complete bust but it’s one of those days where you feel like you have nothing to show for 7 hours of work. Let’s begin with where we ended last time. Oh yes my second breakfast last saturday. Yes, two eggs on a roll with bacon. Simple, concise, easy to remember, something that every deli in the greater New York metropolitan area has heard of about eight million times. Yet this must be something quite unheard of by the men of Bree. Or at the Inn of the Prancing Pony for that matter.

Have you ever seen something coming at you and you know what it’s supposed to look like but you know something looks a little strange about it. Well this is one of those times. As soon as my son gets out of the car I can tell that there is something larger than a egg on a roll in the bag. I know they had breakfast at home so as they’re walking to me I ask “You guys got something as well?” They say no. I open the bag. One egg on one roll and another egg on another roll…no bacon on either…… I mean these guys are good students too. Where did I go wrong? Of course after that the denials and blame game begins. Somewhere in all of the bickering it was somehow my fault.???????????????? There will be other second breakfasts.

Like I was saying before, Saturday felt like a bit of a bust. I picked up a flat plate tamper and spent the better part of an hour and a half pushing this thing along. Very boring work. The exciting part was getting it off the truck. I should have taken a picture of how I got it off. That would have been a bit more interesting.Here’s a picture of what one looks like.

Flat plate tamper.
Flat plate tamper.

The rest of Saturday was spent re-establishing the batter boards around the house. It took quite a while. I had to make a few adjustments here and there. If the batter boards are set up correctly and the string lines set right the footing forms go in a lot quicker. After I had everything set we checked the diagonals to see if they were the same length. This goes back to your high school geometry.  I think the proof  goes something like this: If the diagonals of a rectangle are of equal length then the sides of that rectangle are perpendicular. Our diagonals were close, within a half inch over 58 feet or so. That is close enough for now.

I forgot about another thing I did: I also backfilled the footing drain trench that I dug by hand. I capped the end of the drain pipe so critters wouldn’t go into it.

Footing drain to daylight: Capped and enclosed with some stone.
Footing drain to daylight: Capped and enclosed with some stone.

I don’t know how many of you have been reading these posts but I harken back to :This Lot is Soaking Wet. When I bought this property the water would run down the hill and kind of stop on the lot. Wherever you would walk you would get that squishy sound of water getting mushed into the dirt. Well it wasn’t everywhere but it sure seemed like it was. Anyway this place was like a breeding ground for mosquitoes. That is why I put the curtain drains in. The mosquitoes aren’t that bad this year but I had looked into putting up a bat house for insect control.

I went on the internet and found www.batmanagement.com. these guys have done the research and make bat houses that you can buy. I bought the three chamber bat house. All you have to do is paint it, put the roofing shingle on and the landing screen. Once that is done you have to mount it on a post,dig a hole and plumb it up and backfill. It was pretty simple. Hopefully in a few weeks we will have a couple of bats on pest control. They say a single bat can eat up to 3000 insects a night.Maybe I should offer a free toaster oven for the first resident. The sucess of a bat house is very dependent on it’s location. It has to get a lot of sun so I didn’t have a lot of options as to where I could put it. Here’s a picture of the installation.

Bat house for mosquitoe control.
Bat house for mosquitoe control.

On an experimental note. I’ve been meaning to test the strength of a 2×4. When we pour the roof slab of the hobbit house the maximum thickness will be about 16 inches. If the 2×4’s are set at 12 inches on center and are supported at four foot centers we have a load of about 798 pounds on that one 2×4. I made a small mach up and brought it to the gym. My son loaded it up with 760 pounds of weight. I’m going to add some extra support when we pour but I was glad to see the 2×4 take so much weight. It didn’t seem to deflect much either. Here’s a picture.

Load testing a 2x4. Simply supported holding up 760 pounds.
Load testing a 2×4. Simply supported holding up 760 pounds.

 

 That’s all from Hobbit Hollow this week. I hope to start the footing forms next weekend.

Oh yeah, career day. They have a career day at my sons school for seveth and eigth graders so they can get an idea of different things people do for a living. The teacher thought that  I had an interesting career path so I got the call. What follows are just a series of pictures of the job I am currently working on in Queens, New York. It’s right across the East river from Manhattan.

Front of building
Front of building
Courtyard
Courtyard with crane and concrete pump

 

Scaffold supporting 9th floor
Scaffold supporting 9th floor
Top deck looking north towards the 59th street bridge.
Top deck looking north towards the 59th street bridge.

 

Placing boom: Concrete is pumped up the building and placed with this machine.
Placing boom: Concrete is pumped up the building and placed with this machine.
Courtyard from above: Crane and concrete truck dumping into hopper.
Courtyard from above. Crane at left and concrete truck dumping into hopper.

Enjoy your week!

Jim

Foundation Sub-base: Hobbit houses need lots of gravel. 93 tons to start.

I forgot all about my Hobbit calendar for April. April is the scene where Bilbo opens the door and the dwarves come falling into Bag End. Gandalf is behind them laughing. It’s an interesting picture architecturally. The door is much bigger than it needs to be for a Hobbit. I would say Bilbo is about half the size of the door, yet Gandalf is leaning over to see in through it. It’s interesting to me because my original doorway for this Hobbit house was basically a typical 6 foot 8 inch door, rounded over to make it look circular. (We’ll get into the door later this year I suppose if all goes well) But every time I looked at the drawing I could tell something was not quite right. So I oversized the door on paper and it really made quite a difference in the look of the front of the home. I think you are going to like it.

Well, if you are keeping score you will remember I had to make  some phone calls after my last post. I had really made a disaster of the site with the excavator I had rented. There’s just something about operating an excavator that is very compelling for me. I called Steve who owns an excavating company in town here. I tell him what happened and that I need some help. He calls me back when he’s at the site and asks me who made the mess. I confess and say I need him to bail me out. I wind up meeting him over at the site after dinner and he comes up with some great ideas. He fixes the site digs the rest of the foundation and makes a ramp so that when we put the soil on the Hobbit house a year from now we’ll be all ready to go. He  did it in like one day. It was unbelieveable. Here’s a picture of the excavation. It had rained the day before so it’s a bit flooded.

Site prepped and ready for subase.
Site prepped and ready for sub-base.

Saturday April 14 6:30 AM: I begin the dreaded ditch digging for the footing drain. For those of you who are not learned in the ways of footing drains I will explain. The footing drain is basically a 4 inch diameter perforated pipe that runs along the side of your typical house footing. The drain is installed usually after the footing is poured on the outside edge of the footing. Builder’s usually pour the foudation walls and after that install the footing drain and then put crushed stone or gravel over the drain. A good builder would then put filter fabric over the gravel. The fabric allows water to get through but not soil this prevents the drainage system from clogging.So what we have in place is a gravel bed that allows water to travel through the dirt and escape into this layer of gravel. The 4 inch diameter perforated coil pipe I used is a facilitator for the water. If there is a lot of water in the soil it will drain much faster going throgh the pipe than just through the gravel alone.

The key element of the footing drain system  is running the pipe to daylight. Which is the task I had to start with on Saturday. The key to this task is getting the right pitch for the drain to daylight. I set up the laser level. I take a reading  at the low point of the footing excavation which happens to be in  exactly the place I need it to be. I don’t know how that happened but it wasn’t by design. (I guess the gods of Hobbit housess were watching over me.) I figure I need about a 6 inch difference in elevation to make this work and I find my starting point.

6:45 AM. I get my digging tools: long handled shovel, pick, tree branch cutters (for roots), long pry bar (for rocks). It had rained the nite before and was kind of misting out when I started. I was soaking wet by 6:50. As my wife would say “I’m sweating like Paddy’s pig”.  They say the human body is made mostly of water, this body had significantly less water by the time I was finished. 452 roots later I reach my destination. Thankfully it wasn’t too rocky.

I had some 6 inch perforated coil pipe left over from the curtain drain so I wrapped this in filter fabric and set it in the trench shown here.

Perforated pipe wrapped in filter fabric in hand dug trench.
Perforated pipe wrapped in filter fabric in hand dug trench.

You can see in this picture how much water there is in the excavated area just from a little rain. I always liked watching water flow from stuff like this. I waited till my sons got there before I broke the dam. It took about 10-15 minutes for all the water to drain out. The pitch I made worked ot really well.

After the draining of the excavation I got into the real work of the day, the foundation sub-base. One of the issues the engineers brought up was differential settling of the two main support walls for the Hobbit house. One wall is sitting on solid rock the other is sitting on soil. What they wanted me to do was put down stabilization fabric before putting the gravel sub-base down. What this does is put a barrier between the gravel and soil so that the gravel does not separate and get mixed in with the soil.They use stabilization fabric for roadwork. You have to purchase it by the roll so I decided to put it down wherever I didn’t have rock. It really is such a good idea especially for a house like this where there is going to be heavy loading. It kind of makes everything act as one unit and will really help minimize settling. What we did was layout the fabric and then install the footing drain around the entire perimeter before adding the gravel. We wrapped the 4 inch coil pipe with filter fabric as well so it won’t silt up in the future. Here’s a picture.

Men of Bree installing footing drain and stabilization fabric.
Men of Bree installing footing drain and stabilization fabric.

During the week I had  Mike the local trucker bring over the washed gravel to the site. I originally figured I would need about 80 tons of material but I had him bring exta because I need it under the slab as well so it wouldn’t go to waste.He brought about 93 tons of stone…we didn’t have any left over. We used a Kubota skid steer to move the material.

Roughing in the subase with the skid steer.
Roughing in the sub-base with the skid steer.

The skid steer never stopped once we started.

What we had to do is work our way aroung the foundation with a rough gravel grade. Once we got all the way around we backed our to the begining with a finish grade. We did this using the laser level and a benchmark that I had set on the telephone pole where the electric meter was.

 

Laser level set to transfer elevations.
Laser level set to transfer elevations.

What is the benchmark? The finish floor elevation as per our drawings is 506 feet. The original house first floor elevation was at 504 feet. So our finished floor height will be 2 feet above the original floor. So before I chopped out the first floor slab I took the laser level and transfered the original floor height to the telephone pole and put a 16 penny nail there so I wouldn’t lose the spot. This is our benchmark. Our bottom of footing elevation is 502. The laser level spins so you can get a 360 degree reading around the level once it is set up. The laser level comes with a reciever that picks up it’s signal and tells you if you are high or low. Here are the young men of Bree using the laser level to get the final grade for the subase.

Men of Bree setting the final grade for the subase using the laser level. And some muscle.
Men of Bree setting the final grade for the sub-base using the laser level. And some muscle.The receiver for the laser level is attached to the wood on the right.

We really got a lot done in a day. The only thing left to do is tamp the subase with a flat plate tamper. Then we can begin the footings!

Before the “Men of Bree” got to the site I called and asked them to pick me up “Two eggs on a roll with bacon”. I want you to think about that for a moment  mull it over and think what did I mean by that statement? Next week I will explain what I actually got in the bag from the deli. I think you will find it a tad interesting. Till then enjoy your work week.

Jim

 

The Pass of Caradhras: This Little Thing.

Welcome! I”m glad you stopped by again. I hope everything is going well in your part of Middle earth. Yes, the Pass of Caradhras. Do you remember that scene from the Fellowship of the Ring?  We’ll talk about that a bit later. Apologies for the delay of this post as well. I worked all day Saturday and part of Sunday on the  foundation.  I started the post sunday but then this site crashed and I’ve been busy at my day job ever since. This Saturday my wife and I and our two oldest sons went to look at colleges. So I’ve been “delayed” as Gandalf would say. (Having trouble adding  pictures for this post as well. Will add them as soon as possible)

So here we are about to start digging the foundation. I had a carting company drop off a 20 yard container to put the slab concrete into and rented a Komatsu Pc 138 excavator with a hydralic hammer. Here’s a picture of the site before I got started.

Breaking ground: Hydraulic hammer to break up concrete slab
Breaking ground: Hydraulic hammer to break up concrete slab

I had the rental company put the hammer on first so when I got there on Friday night I would be able to chop up the slab while it was still light out. This worked out great.I think I was pretty much done in about one hour.  I’m thinking this is going to be a home run. All I have to do is take off the hammer and put the bucket back on and I’m going to be good to go! The guy from the rental company said that the PC 138 is equipped with a “coupler”.  And I quote ” The coupler makes it easier to switch out the attachments”. Did you ever notice when someone says something like that  it never seems to work out the way they describe it. Well this is one of those times. I even You Tubed a video on changing  a bucket with a coupler Friday night after I got home. They just showed a guy hooking one up though with no nuts and bolts explaination so I knew that wasn’t going to help.

Saturday morning  6:30 AM I begin the dismantling of the hydraulic hammer. I’ve never used a hydraulic hammer before let  alone dismantled one. I go to the operators manual. I’m not kidding  this thing is 800 pages long. Frustration  level,  mild. It’s 6:50. Chapter 3 page 179. Dismantaling attachments. Funny thing about this chapter… it doesn’t show removal with a coupler. Oh boy, here we go. The coupler has two hands, if you will, that grab the two pins of whatever you are attaching. The hands spread apart to grab the two pins and retract when you have to remove the attachment. Like the hydraulic hammer shown here.

Hydraulic hammer
Hydraulic hammer

So I’m looking at this thing saying to myself there has got to be a simple way to get this thing off. I try a couple of things. I see this little thing. A square bolt that is attached to the coupler.

This little thing, the square bolt shown here,nearly drove me to the brink of insanity for about three hours
This little thing, the square bolt shown here,nearly drove me to the brink of insanity for about three hours

I turn it one way a few turns and it stops. I turn it the other way (counterclockwise???? ) and it stops. I know this little thing is the key to getting the hammer off. It’s 7:45. Frustration level mounting rapidly. I cant believe I’m paying for this aggravation. I pick up the phone and call the rental company. They don’t open till eight but they have a 24 hour emergency service number. I call and leave a desperate message. Then my phone runs out of juice. Is this really happening on my day off? I go to my car and plug in my phone. What is it denial, rage, acceptance. I think for me it was rage,denial, rage, acceptance, rage one more time and throw a rock at the excavator. I realize I cannot work on this while my phone is charging so I go to the deli. I get two eggs on a roll with bacon. Sorry, but it’s not an egg on a roll without the bacon. Apologies to all pig lovers. (You’re not going to believe this but the emergency service guy calls me Monday morning at 8:30 and asks if I’m having trouble with the machine. This is like right out of the movies.) I’m really going to try and keep this a clean family friendly blog so I won’t print what I was thinking when this guy called me two days later.

8:20 AM. I call the rental company back. I get Joe. I think I woke him up. I explain to him my situation. I tell him I think I have to remove a pin in order for the hands to retract. He tells me no you shouldn’t have to remove anything. I know he’s wrong. I don’t tell him this though. We actually had a pretty good conversation. I think I just needed a little moral support. I finally figure it out. Pull the pin turn the little thing clockwise, junp into the excavator and disconnect the attachment put the new one on. Joe was right about the coupler though it was pretty easy to change the attachments once you get the hang of it. Here’s the machine with the bucket attached. By the time all was said and done it was 10:00AM before I started loading the concrete into the 20 yarder.

Hammer off, coupler about to grab the bucket.
Hammer off, coupler about to grab the bucket.

As all of this was happening (Over the course of four hours)there was this tingling of fear and doubt about what I was doing.  I’m saying to myself did I make a mistake trying to do this? What if I can’t get it to work? What if I don’t have time to finish this weekend and have to rent it for another weekend? What if I damage the machine trying to take this thing off? What about the money I spent on this damn thing? And about a million other what ifs?

It was only later that I looked back and thought about the “Pass of Caradhras”. For those of you who don’t remember . The Fellowship has taken to walking over the mountain Caradhras after being seen by spies of Saruman. As they are walking over the snow covered peak Frodo “the ring bearer” falls and rolls down the hill a bit.When he gets up he realizes that the ring is not where it was. Boromir has picked it up. He holds it up to his eyes and says “Tis a strange fate that we must suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing…this little thing.” I really did suffer a bit of fear and doubt over that small thing.

Now I’m an expert at changing attachments. The rest of the day was spent digging the foundation and moving dirt. The footings for the Hoobbit house are called “Frost protected shallow foundations”. What this allows us to do is dig a shallower footing that is insulated to protect the footing from frost heave during the winter months. I thought this would yield less dirt(which it did) and I would have plenty of space to store the soil that I was excavating. Wrong again Jim. All of a sudden I realized I really don’t have that much room and I really don’t have great access around the site either. In fact I have access on only the front side of the site and that’s it. I get this crazy brain storm to build a ramp with the soil and pile it up so I can stockpile it up on the eastern slope of the site and out of the way. ( This way when I backfill the Hobbit house later I will just use this material). I build the ramp but when I drive up to the top of it I realize yet again that I’m making a mistake. This material has to be hauled out of here. There’s just no other way.  I have to make some phone calls.

This is going to be some adventure! See you soon.

Jim

Hobbit House: Foundation layout…Now the Journey really begins. And so does the Unexpected.

I really don’t know where this weekend has gone. It’s always amazing how fast time goes by when you’re really getting into something.

I had my wife laminate my building permit and I nailed it onto the garage over my temporary mailbox.  There always has to be some sort of twist to everything  that goes on. I was figuring to get started digging the foundation next weekend but as I looked at the list of scheduled inspections number one was inspection of the house stake out/ silt fencing. I hope they’re not looking for a surveyor to come up and lay this house out. That could wind up setting me back another week or so. As I look at the balance of the inspections I see “Slab Inspection: All under slab plumbing must be service weight cast iron.”  That’s great…Another thing I wasn’t expecting. I’ve never really worked with cast iron before . That should be interesting. Hopefully the plumbing foreman at my day-job is a nice guy and can give me some pointers. Maybe he’s a fan of The Hobbit.

For the uninitiated,it all starts with laying out the outer walls of the structure you are building. I don’t know if it’s me or what  but I always have a tough time with the batter boards and setting them up parallel and square. What? You don’t know what batter boards are? Are you serious? How long have you been in this business Moe?Apparently not that long. OK Moe this is what it’s all about . I mean even the Egyptians used batter boards to build the pyramids. It doesn’t sound like we’ve progressed that much. It’s a tried and true system though. I watched an episode of “This Old House ” once and Norm had the batter boards plumb, square ,level and parallel before the first commerical break. I was thinking Norm really knows his stuff.

I seem to be digressing. Oh yeah, the batter boards. Batter boards are for all intents and purposes a horizontal two by four nailed to two vertical wooden or steel stakes driven into the soil.  A nail is driven into the horizontal 2X4 and a string line pulled from the nail on one batter board to another at the other side of the foundation. The batter boards are placed far enough away from the house so they will not be disturbed during the excavation. This way when you are done with the excavation you just have to restring the lines and you have your rough layout. There are a million different ways of setting up batter boards here’s a bit of what I did.

Batter board layout of critical wall. This wall layout could not be one inch closer than the original structure was to the adjacent stream.
Batter board layout of critical wall. This wall layout could not be one inch closer than the original structure was to the adjacent stream.

Northeast corner. I transfered the stringline up to a batter board on a tree above using a laser level. The x marks the corner of the house. I have to chop out the rock here.

 I should have asked for help from the men of Bree. It took me a couple of hours to do the layout.It was my first real day back working on the site in a long while and it was really nice out so I didn’t mind. I had a lot of thinking to do. Sometimes, at least for me, it’s better if no one is distracting me.

I don’t know what I was thinking but for some reason I thought that leaving the existing slab on the site wouldn’t be a problem. But after being there for the day I realized it’s gonna be a problem. There really is not much room around the site at all. I thought I would be able to bury the slab after taking it out but the more I thought about it I realized  that that would be just another hassle. So the next unexpected thing was that I would need another container for the slab and a hydraulic hammer to break it up with. The silver lining here is that it turns out I need a hydraulic hammer anyway. The layout in the Northeast corner hits rock ledge. It definitely needs to come out. I need a certain amount of clearance to get what I want for the passive house aspect of the slab. It’s more than I had originally anticipated but I want to get it right.

 I have to cut this post short because I have some other stuff to do and it’s getting late. There were a couple of other things I wanted to talk about but we’ll get to that next week.

It’s nice to hear from other people interested in passive Hobbit houses. For those of you who might be interested ,Lynn Dean from Texas has a kindle book that has just come out about Hobbit house designs. It looks very interesting and if you’re into Hobbit homes  you will definitely want to take a look. It’s called “Home Sweet Hole” and can be found on Amazon. Feasible fantasy floor plans in the Hobbit tradition. Enjoy!

I would love to come up with some words of wisdom right now that would finish this post off. I guess I have a bit of writer’s block. Let’s just end with this: No one ever said building this Hobbit house was going to be a snap but it sure is going to be interesting…

Have a nice week!

Jim

Bag End: A Passive House. Huh?

Thanks for stopping by. Just a few short comments this week.

If you read the bar title “From Hobbit  Shed to Hobbit House” you would have come across a sentence or two mentioning that a Hobbit House would be considered an earth sheltered passive house.  An earth sheltered home is obviously a home with some form of soil as its cover. There are a wide range of what some would call an earth sheltered home. There are also quite a few products that architects use to call the roofs on their structures “Green”. So I think we can all agree that  Bag End would be an earth sheltered home.

Calling a home a passive house is another thing altogther. The passive house standard is, in my opinion, the state of the art in building technology. It is a construction standard that was developed by a German physicist named Wolfgang Feist in the 1990’s and is just catching on in the US today. In order to claim that your house is a passive house the home must meet certain requirements. If it meets these requirements then it can be passive house certified by the Passive House Institute. I will be trying to meet these requirements as I build Hobbit Hollow.

I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of the requirements but basically a passive house has these attributes: 1.Low air infiltration. 2. Super insulation 3. Triple glazed high performance windows and exterior doors. 4. Energy recovery ventilation. 5.Elimination of thermal bridges.

These items when combined together properly will result in a home that uses 90 percent less energy than a new typical home built today. That is probably hard to believe but it is true.  This is what we are going for with this project. I am very excited about getting started.

As we go along on this project I will delve into each of these attributes from time to time.

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a conference sponsored by the Journal of Light Construction. It was called JLC Live and was held in Providence, Rhode Island. The session I went to was about building to the Passive House Standard and was given by a guy named Chris Corson. He built a passive house in Maine and is currently working on a few others. The Maine house was featured in The Journal of Light  Construction last year in the May and June issues. It was very helpful for me to hear a guy like Chris speak about the nuts and bolts of passive house construction. Without getting too technical I have always felt that this Hobbit  House we will be building will be an excellent fit for a passive house. We will see!

Just a quick update. My building permit was approved this past week and the electric utilitycompany connected my meter. I hope to lay out the footings next weekend! Of course I picked up the DVD of “The Hobbit”  Friday at Best Buy.  Whoever designed Bag End is a genius. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in a house like that?

To the free folk of Middle Earth enjoy your week!

Jim

 

Do Hobbit Houses have underground electric?

Hello again Hobbit Hollow fans. Todays topic: Getting power to a Hobbit house.

Remember the house that was standing on the property before we demo-ed it. That actually had electrical lines running to it from across the street.  Part of the demo process was to call the electric company and have them disconnect the overhead wires. These wires went from the road over the stream and were attached to the second story of the house. This is pretty typical of most homes.

House before demolition. Electric wires are on the upper left.
House before demolition. Electric wires are on the upper left.

Once the power was cut and the lines removed the problem was how to get power back to the property and into the new  house. I knew that the electric was going to have to go underground. The Hobbit house I am going to build is only going to be about eleven feet high. Running an overhead line to the house itself was not going to work.  The Hobbit house does not have an exposed side to attach wires to. Even if it did I would have to run a pole right beside the house and I didn’t think that would look good. Across the street stood the pole that the original house wires were attached too. I just figured I would have to add a pole in the general vicinity of where the original line came onto the property.

I met with an electrician on the site. I figured it might be a good idea to get some input into how much this is going to cost and if there is anything else  (i.e. permits, fees, etc.)  that I need to do before calling the electric company again. The guy I met with was great. His original idea was to run conduit under the stream from the pole on the street side right to the new house. As soon as he said that I was like: forget about that idea. This is a trout spawning stream in the state of New York. You want me to get locked up for killing all the baby trout in the state???? What is this guy, some kind of a wise guy? (For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a wise guy is watch the movie Good Fellas.) His next question was- OK but why do you want to put the new pole on the property in this location? Why not put it in the back and put a temporary service on it. This way the pole won’t be in the middle of your back  yard and you can trench the final service from the pole into the house later. You can also get temporary power and not have to use a generator for power during the construction phase. The Lord works in mysterious ways! What great ideas! I got a price from him.

This is the stream the power lines have to go over. If you look closely you can see the telephone pole on the right.
This is the stream the power lines have to go over. If you look closely you can see the street side telephone pole on the right.

After this meeting I got a few more prices and got quite a range in price. I forget the details but for some reason I was not able to have anyone do this work right away.I think the bridge wasn’t done and everyone said the truck to install the pole was to heavy for the wood bridge. Anyway, by the time I had the bridge done everyone was busy or didn’t return my calls. What’s up with these guys?

I go to the bank one day and I see a guy who’s got an electrician sign on the side of his truck. I ask him if he installs telephone poles and does service entrances. He says no but gives me a number for a guy who specializes in pole installation. I was like this is great. I call the guy up and he winds up giving me the best price for pole installation and I schedule him to come out and do the work. I finally have a pole!

I again try getting an electrician to come out and install a meter on the pole but have no luck. It is then that I remember my father. My father passed away a few years ago and he was the one who taught me how to wire houses. He wasn’t an electrician but he built and wired his own home way back when in the late sixties and was a real student of whatever he was working on. I built a few houses and renovated a few others over the years and he always was really into doing the electrical work. He really liked to do the service entrance the most and this would have been right up his alley. How could I not do it myself?

The big issue here is that you have to get an inspection for the service and have it approved by the fire underwriter before the electric company will hook you  up to the grid. So I have a pole, now the challenge was how do I mount the meter on the pole and run the conduit up 25 feet  to the top of the pole? There is no way you can use a ladder to do this. So I needed to set up a scaffold. I had some old scaffold at my house and had my sons help me put it up and secure it. I used 2X4s and what they call nailing cups to tie the scaffold to the pole. Once you have scaffold over 12 feet high it becomes unstable and can fall over if it is not securely braced. This scaffold was about 25 feet high. I used screws on the bottom to level the system up before I started. Here is a picture of the scaffold with the meter and conduit ready for inspection. The box below the meter is a 100 amp temporary service with 2 outlet boxes beneath it.

Electrical pole installed with working  scaffold in place.
Electrical pole installed with working scaffold in place.

 The wires that are used have to be resistant to sunlight because  when they are connected to the overhead wires they will be outside of the 2 inch conduit running up the pole. Another item that is critical is the grounding rods that have to be installed. The grounding system consists of two half inch diameter copper rods 8 feet long that have to be driven  straight down into the soil about 6 feet apart. I thought for sure we were going to have trouble doing this, there’s rock everywhere on this property. We took turns. I held the rod and my son used a 10 pound sledge hammer to drive the rods into the dirt. Then we would switch. It took us about 20 minutes or so. There was only one time I think we hit a rock but we were able to bust through it.  Here’s a close up of the grounding system.

Grounding system for the electrical service.
Grounding system for the electrical service. You can see the grounding rod attached to the green wires on the left.

Another very important part of the installation is to label the wires coming into the meter. There are two “hot legs” and one neutral. The neutral wire has to be marked with white electrical tape inside the meter and at the top of the mast where it comes out of the weather head. If you don’t do this the inspecter will fail the installation. Here’s a picture of the wires coming into the meter.  

Meter wired and ready for inspection.
Meter wired and ready for inspection.

 This was all about two and a half days work for me. I learned a lot and passed inspection. I should get hooked up to the grid within the next two weeks

My father would have been proud. I thought of him a lot while I did this work. I miss him.

I talked to the building inspector this past week, also. He said he should be done going through the house plans by the end of the week. Hopefully we will be issued a building permit by Friday.

And what is the matter with those New York Knicks? Maybe we need to write to the new Pope for some help on the court.

Best wishes, Jim

Building a Hobbit House: More than meets the eye or the eye of Sauron.

To the free folk of Middle Earth: Thank God the winter is almost over!

Hobbit shed in winter.
Hobbit shed in winter.

March is finally here and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I keep thinking of the time in Moria when Gandalf didn’t know which way to go. He restarted his journey with the Fellowship following his nose. The air seemed different in a certain direction. Sometimes during the winter months I get a little lost, if you will, but once March comes around I can see the light or smell the change of the new season coming. This particular winter wasn’t such a bad one for me though. But I digress.

I turned to a new page on my Hobbit calendar. It  is the classic one inside of Bag End looking out of the front door, I believe by John Howe. This picture was one they tried to replicate in the movie and is remarkable for its architectural beauty.

Hobbit houses are beautiful but the fascinating thing about them is what you don’t see. There is much more to a Hobbit house than meets the eye . The engineering that goes into it is significant and was much more of a challenge than I had anticipated. The passive house aspects of the design created a different set of challenges to the structure that I usually mulled over on my commute to my job in the city every day. I came up with some great ideas while heading to work. Lets just stick with the structure today.

The structure. The Hobbit house I will be making is essentially an arched highway overpass. I wanted to make the span 32 feet across and about 46 feet deep. Now instead of cars going over this bridge we have dirt and snow. These loads are substantial. Soil weighs in at about 109 pounds per square foot (psf),concrete is 150 psf and the snow load I used was 70psf. I wanted to use a 9 inch concrete slab. When you add the numbers up you are talking about a structure that has to support almost 300 psf. That equates to a vertical load of almost 440,000 pounds!  I don’t want to get too technical here but on a regular house the roof system is basically a triangle on top of two outside vertical walls.The vertical weight of the  roof and the snow load come down on the roof  and try to “flatten” it out,pushing the two outer walls away from each other. This force is resisted by the bottom chord of the triangle which are usually in the form of ceiling joists or collar ties. I did not want any collar ties in my Hobbit house. What I did was create a series of concrete buttress along the walls to resist the lateral force pushing the walls out. (You see buttresses on the outside walls of churches and cathedrals a lot) I  also made  the footings four feet wide to spread the vertical load on the soil. I wanted to keep the soil load under 3000 psf.

Here in New York you need a stamped set of drawings either by  a professional engineer or architect in order to get a building permit. So I took my set of design drawings that I had completed and brought them to an engineer. There aren’t a lot of engineers out there and there aren’t a lot of Hobbit houses out there either. Their proposal was twofold. One , analyze the structure and see if it is safe. If that all checks out: redraw my design drawings and make any necessary changes to meet code.

Sort of as a side note. In my head I was always thinking that this type of house would be something that would last forever. Did you notice the house I demoed in the last post. Six years after the owner’s passing the house was ready to fall apart. I wanted to over design my hobbit  house structurally so it would last 1000 years.  That is one of the reasons why I chose heavier than needed snow and soil loads.

So I met with the design team and went over what I was doing and what my thought process was and how I came up with the design. One of the things that I didn’t really figure on was that this was going to be “their” design. In other words if the structure fails they will be liable. Which kind of gets back to what I said before about over designing the structure.

A few weeks after this meeting I got a call from the engineer working on it saying I should come in and that he didn’t think the structure was workable in this form. My heart sank. According to his calculations the horizontal force pushing the walls outward could not be overcome by the buttressess I had penciled in. They also said that because of the site conditions (the house being next to a stream) they were worried about the soil condtions where the footings would go. They wanted to have soil borings done to make sure that the soil could withstand the snow and soil loads that would be placed on the footings.

If I remember correctly I think he said that horizontal force was on the order of 10,000 pounds per linear foot of wall. He wanted to put collar ties in or supports in the center of the building to mitigate the loading. But I didn’t like this at all.  We also tried larger buttresses but they were massive and complicated the building of the walls even further.

So the wheels started turning.I had to find another solution. I talked to my brother and he had a couple of good ideas. We are both civil engineers  but wound up getting into NYC  high rise concrete construction. Then an engineer who we know gave me the number of another engineer who he said is a concrete genius. I talked to the guys I had hired and they said  they would have no problem working with someone else to come up with a solution.

This guy was unbelieveable. He came up with a solution within a week and that is what we did. Thanks Nat T! What he came up with is a tapered slab. The slab would start at 9 inches and thicken to 16 inches over the walls.The walls would also thicken to 16 inches. Originally I had 10 inch concrete walls. The intersection of the walls and arched roof would be considered a rigid frame. The only other thing I had to add was horizontal rebar through a 6 inch concrete floor slab which would be tied to the walls. This is essentially the collar ties but you won’t see them. This design eliminated the buttresses  and will make building the footings and walls ten times easier. So the structure was really a collaborative effort and very satisfying.

By the time all this was said and done another almost 3 months had passed and it was nearly November!  So I took a pass on getting my building permit and decided to wait until spring to start. That’s where I am now.

I did have soil borings done. Here’s a picture of the rig they used to do them.

 

Soil boring rig getting test samples of the soil
Soil boring rig getting test samples of the soil

The borings actually came back OK. The only problem was on one side of the house I had rock and the other was soil. The engineers were worried about  a difference in settlement between the two. In other words, where the footings sat on rock there would be almost zero settling over time and on the side where the footings sat on soil there might be an inch or two of settlement. This could ultimately cause cracking in the roof which we obviously don’t want. The solution, a six foot wide footing on the soil side. It’s a little extra concrete but that will let us sleep better at night.

I’ve had a number of people ask about building a Hobbit house. It’s not to be taken lightly. There are some serious forces at work here that are considerable and could be dangerous if not considered by someone who is not trained in this kind of work. Those forces can change significantly depending upon the span and support system you or your engineer choose. The one thing that I like about my design is that it is a completely open floor plan. When the structure is finished you will basically be left with one gigantic room with no intermediate supports.This enables you to arrange the rooms however you want.

There were a number of other items that were problematic during the course of design but most of them would be hard to describe without sitting down with paper and pencil. So for now lets just call it a day. L ike I said there’s more to Hobbit houses than meets the eye.

Enjoy your weekend and week!

Jim

 

 

 

Demolition Plan and Morgoth’s Destruction of Gondolin

All that once was, is lost. . . for none now live who remember it.

 When I think of demo-ing the house on this property many things come to mind.Of course the begining lines from the Lord of the Rings but also of  the destruction of so many buildings in times of war and so forth. I’ve renovated a few houses in my life and have always found it interesting to see what gets uncovered along the way. Sometimes you find stuff or see how they built the structure or find writing or calculations on an uncovered wall. Every once in a while you’ll find tools. It is always amazing how quickly work can be destroyed.

As I have mentioned before  this house was supposedly built in the late 1700’s so people who knew I was going to demo the house kept telling me to look for stuff in the attic. Just a bunch of papers from the 1970’s all garbage.When I tore the roof open with the excavator a suitcase comes flying out of the wreckage and lands on the ground. I hear my son yell “Dad a suitcase!” and we both run over to it. All sorts of crazy scenarios start going through your head when you start to open the suitcase….. But it was empty. Oh, well. I was actually hoping for a Mithril vest. Or something that might come in handy when traveling into Mordor. Could be the beginings of a back to the future type movie.

For fans of  “The Hobbit” the swords  that Gandalf found in the trolls cave were all originally from the hidden city of Gondolin. This was one of the great stories from Middle Earth as told in the Silmarillion. Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, eventually became aware of the city and sent his army along with dragons and balrogs to destroy the Elves and everything that they had created there. So whenever I demo something there is always this thought in my head that says that there was a time when someone sat at this very spot and decided to build something that they wanted right there.

Although much has been lost my idea with this project is to build something and create a place where people will remember what once was. A simple life, a simple structure, and the melding of what people and nature need to coexist. If I can do this then I will have suceeded.

I had never demo-ed a whole house to the ground before.For some reason I thought I was going to go to the building department fill out a demo permit and get started. So I figured once that was done I’d be off to the races with building the house. I was wrong. The first thing I found out was that I needed a site/demolition/erosion control plan from an engineering firm showing all of the stuff I just mentioned and the procedure I would be using to get all this stuff done. Well,you just don’t walk into an engineering office and say “I need a demo/site plan for this coming Wednesday”.I had to meet them at the site and go over what I wanted to do, show them my design etcetera and so on. Their schedule was booked and it would be a few weeks before they had a completed plan to give me. It was actually very educational for me to talk with these guys. It opened my eyes to a few things I hadn’t considered and the firm I used was very helpful. Although this took a couple of weeks I thought that now I was ready to get my demo permit and get started. I was wrong again. The town also needs the company to have workers comp, disability and a general liability insurance package in place before issuing a permit. I didn’t have that either at the time so that wound up taking up another week. I finally submitted my permit application, which has to be reviewed by the town engineer before approval, and got it back a week or two later approved!

The first thing we did was set up erosion control around the perimeter of the site as per the erosion control plan the engineering firm had designed. After this was completed we needed an inspection,which was approved! The next part of the demo plan called for everything in the house that was breakable, mainly glass and the like  to be removed by hand. I met a few young men from Bree who I hired to give me a hand.

Young man of Bree removing windows prior to main demolition.
Young man of Bree removing windows prior to main demolition.

 

Back of house with some windows removed.
Back of house with some windows removed.
Wounded man of Bree after battling a window.
Wounded man of Bree after battling a window.

He took it pretty well it seems.  The other guy seems unconcerned.

As I stated before, I had never demo-ed a whole house before. I talked to a friend who had done some demo work and he gave me some tips. For some reason I was thinking that tearing the roof off with a machine was going to be difficult. I took a skill saw up to the roof and cut up the shingles into 6 foot by six foot squares so it would come apart easier. That was a complete waste of time. I didn’t realize how easy it would be to break the house up with a machine. I rented a small excavator with what they call a thumb, I think it was a PC-85. The thumb is an attachment that helps you “grab” stuff easier. I had the machine delivered and also a 30 yard container delivered to put the debris in. When I got a price for 30 yard containers I failed to ask if they deliver on the weekends. This being a weekend warrior project I should have asked about multiple deliveries. I was thinking I would need between 4 to 6 thirty yard containers.By the time all was said and done I had used 7 thirty yarders. If I had known how quick it was to crush up a house I would have scheduled a series of switches throughout the day. I also could have had them “drop” the containers closer to the house. Being that they did not deliver on Saturday I had to stockpile all the debris in one huge pile.

30 yard container dropped for first day of demolition.
30 yard container dropped for first day of demolition.

So that first Saturday we basically tore down the house and loaded the one 30 yarder. During the week I had to find another carting company that would deliver Saturdays and schedule multiple pickup and drop offs for the following Saturday. Unfortuneately now I had to rent the excavator for the next weekend as well. Including pickup and delivery. That was a bummer. Demo is a snap but it can be dangerous. More than once stuff flew at the excavator as we were ripping it apart. Also, I don’t know why I did this, I left the chimney up. So it was feestanding at one point wobbling back and forth. I was lucky it did not fall on the excavator. Here’s a few more pictures of the machine going at the house.

Using the bucket and thumb to rip down the roof.
Using the bucket and thumb to rip down the roof.
Making the pile of debris.
Making the pile of debris.
Just after ripping the roof over the front porch.
Just after ripping the roof over the front porch.

All in all the demo went fairly well. Loading all the debris the following weekend was a snap. It took about an hour to load a container. The only real problem was that there was kind of a lot of little stuff on the ground that we had to pick up by hand. That could have been remedied if I had gotten the containers delivered while we were tearing the house apart. I would have been able to put the box right next to the house. I don’t have a picture of the debris pile after we finished but it was huge! We kind of had to spread it out a bit so we could finish the demo. Here’s a picture of what it looked like when we were finished.

Demolition competed
Demolition completed

One other issue surfaced while doing the demo. The container trucks nearly got stuck pulling in and out of the site. I’ll save that solution for the next post.

Next post:  Engineer: There’s no way this structure is going to work.  Me: You’ve got to be kidding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Second Conundrum: This lot is soaking wet!

Hobbit calendar for February: Bilbo Baggins outside his front door smoking a long pipe just before Gandalf arrives to ask him to go on an adventure. I picked up a long pipe from some smokeshop online. It worked pretty well but I didn’t like the tobacco I had. I tried two different kinds but neither of them had the smell I was looking for. Not that I’m a smoker but if you’re going to build a Hobbit house you have to kind of play the part a bit. Don’t you? You’ll know Longbottom Leaf or Old Toby when you smell it and then you’ll wish you had a long pipe too. I’ll have to practice my smoke rings come the spring!

It might not have been obvious from the pictures I’ve posted so far but the property is encased on two sides by very steep hills. When it rains all of the hillside water comes racing down and runs across the property and into the stream. (One of the neighbors told me it also quite frequently ran right through the house, down the stairs and out the front door!)

Steep hill that forms the eastern border of the property. This hill wraps around towards the north and goes right around the existing house.
Steep hill that forms the eastern border of the property. This hill wraps around towards the north and goes right around the existing house.

So what we have when it rains is a soaking wet yard and building lot. This will not do.  Hobbits as we all know enjoy their comforts and squishing through mud on the front lawn is not comfortable.

So, quite naturally, the next thing on the agenda was to build a curtain drain to divert the rain water around the yard and into the stream. I had a hauling contractor drop off about 40 tons of 3/4 crushed stone and rented a small excavator and a skid steer machine. So one Saturday the boys and I dug a trench,lined it with filter fabric,put in a 6 inch diameter perforated pvc pipe,backfilled it with stone, covered it with filter fabric and put a 2-3 inch layer of stone on top of the fabric to finish it off. We did about 250 feet of curtain drain that day and it works really well. Below are some of the pictures from that day.

Digging the curtain drain
Digging the curtain drain
Installing the fabric.
Installing the fabric.
Trench backfilled and covered with stone.
Trench backfilled and covered with stone.
PVC pipe runs to daylight and into stream.
PVC pipe runs to daylight and into stream.

Second conundrum solved! Next post: Demolition plan!

The name of the stream I was looking for in the last post was called Nimrodel. Named for an Elf princess who had once dwelt beside it. The waters of the stream are said to refesh tired travelers and are also said to contain the voice of the singing Elf princess.

Hoping to post again in the next week or two.Take care!

Jim