Happy New Year….A Super Bowl Pool….Hmmmm, This is Going to Take Longer Than I Thought

Ah yes, Free Folk of Middle Earth it’s good to see you back again! Thanks for stopping by. The holidays in the middle of the week is weird. At least for me anyway. Had a half day Wednesday, New Years Eve and Thursday off. Had to go into work Friday though. It wasn’t bad. Traffic was light. I got hurt at work though. Not too badly. One of those metal post shore jacks fell on the back of my leg while I was holding something. It really hurt. Got a pretty nasty scrape/cut from the thing right through my Carhart pants though, and the back of my leg swelled up quite a bit. I could walk though so it was okay. Good thing the jack didn’t hit me in the head….I might still be sleeping.

My New Years Eve days are over. The kids were all out for the night so me and the missus watched CNN coverage with Anderson Copper and Kathy Griffen. It was pretty funny. Entertaining. I was going to stay up but at like 11:30 I hit the wall and couldn’t handle it so we went to bed. Happy New Year!

New Years Day we had my wife’s family over for an early dinner around 1PM. Very relaxed, baked ziti, meatballs, gravy or sauce (depending on which part of Italy you’re from). Watched the college football games. (Where do they grow these huge kids?) We got to talking about Super Bowl Pools. For those of you who live in another country or under a rock, the Super Bowl is the most heavily bet sporting event in the world. So my father-in-law comes up with this crazy family pool so that everyone in the family can make a wager and sort of get into the action. It went along these lines…Pair up everyone in the room and then they get to pick two of the playoff teams out of a hat. Whoever gets the winning team wins the money. So this is kind of a long term pool here because the playoffs have just started. But…and I know what you’re thinking…there are certain teams that have a lot better chance of winning than others. Like Green Bay and New England for instance. So as the hat goes around and around guess who winds up with New England and Green Bay…..My father-in-law and his partner. What a coincidence, right? It had nothing to do with the fact that my father-in-law cut up and placed all the teams in the hat. Nooooo! It’s the children I worry about though. They’re being disenfranchised. By their own grandparent nonetheless! Amazing! Not only that but nobody liked who they were paired up with or who they picked out of the hat…except me and my wife. (What a great pair!)

Oh yeah the construction blog, I almost forgot!

So like I was saying I had a half day Wednesday so I headed up to the Hobbit House to meet Jude and Ethan. I was thinking we might be able to finish leveling and tamping the gravel base in an hour or so. What I was thinking I don’t know. It must be the perpetual optimist in me. Anyway I started showing them how to fine tune the gravel base and as soon as I started I realized this is a pretty big job. To get it right  is at least a full days work. I had them pick up a tamper so that was a waste of $70. Anywho as I was telling them it is pretty critical we get this right. You’re not going to get it perfect but it should be within a quarter inch plus or minus. The main thing though is to get the gravel bed flat…that is really the critical part. You want the Styrofoam to lay on a flat gravel bed. If there are voids underneath the Styrofoam this could lead to settling of the slab which could lead to cracks in the slab. If the cracks occur where we put tile down this could transfer to and crack the tile as well. We don’t want this to happen. So I would rather spend an extra day or more making sure the base is flat.

Other than going over that with the boys that was the extent of our work on Hobbit Hollow this week. Hopefully the weather will stay in our favor and we should get back to work in the next week or two.

This Friday I met the Editor down at Grand Central Station and went to see the play “Discraced” at the Lyceum Theatre on 45th street. It was really good. Not for everybody but I really enjoyed it. Very thought provoking and quite controversial on a lot of levels, as well. Without getting too into it it was all about varying degrees of racisim and your own perspective as far as racism is concerned. It’s deeper than that but it was very entertaining. We stayed right next to the job I am currently working at on 31st street and 6th avenue at the Hampton Inn. It was great because we were able to walk to the theatre. We had a great night.

We went to the Museum of Modern Art the next day to go see a special exhibit by Henri Matisse. It was a zoo though. I mean I think it must have been the holiday tourists. I’ve never seen so many people at a museum before. It was ridiculous. It was like you were being pushed along by a mob. People weren’t even looking at the art! We left early without seeing the exhibit we wanted to see. We still enjoyed the time we spent at the museum though.

I hope the holidays were good to you and here’s wishing everyone a wonderful 2015!

Jim

 

 

Hobbit Houses and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

 

Interesting. Yes? Let’s face it home maintenance is a drag. I’ve never really been a good home maintenace guy. That being said I’m not going to go on a rant about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. On the contrary, I don’t want to do any maintenance at all. (I tried reading that book but really struggled with it. I guess I’m never going to be a Zen Buddist.)

So now that you know that I’m not such a great maintenance guy let’s get back to maintenance and Hobbit Houses. This topic all came to me when my master bath toilet sprang a leak last Monday. It’s summertime  and sometimes your toilet sweats and me being a low maintenance kind of guy I happened to notice that this toilet seemed to be sweating  quite a bit this summer. (Just so you know this particular toilet never really sweated in previous summers.) Ok so the toilet is sweating away. Then on Monday I noticed a small puddle on the floor next to the toilet.( Maintenance man senses are tingling.) I look under the toilet and see a stream of water coming out from the bolt that attaches the bowl to the tank. I’ve never seen a toilet leak from this spot before but here we go. Anyway the short version is it took me till Sunday to get around to fixing it. It’s a long story but  lets just say there were complications getting the bolts out etcetera and some of my plumbing tools were broken.(The little hacksaw blade with the plastic handle). One day after work I tried fixing it but began to sweat profusely so I canceled and had butter pecan ice cream with whipped cream and two cherries.(With a little extra cherry juice on top). So I guess you’re wondering what this all means?

Well one of the aspects of this particular Hobbit house is that it will be a relatively low maintenance home. The structure is reinforced concrete. No rotting or deterioration.  It should last about 1000 years. The roof is going to be vegetation. Just let whatever you plant grow and grow. No reroofing to worry about or gutters to clean. The small amout of siding that exists will be sheltered by the roof eaves and is only one story high.If you do want to repaint you’ll only need a step ladder. This particular Hobbit house will also have stone veneer siding as well which is totally maintenance free. Another huge aspect of this Hobbit house is that it will not have a conventional boiler or air duct system. The Passive house aspect of the home (Superinsulated and air tight) eliminates the need for a large conventional type boiler. No oil deliveries and yearly maintenance checkups on your boiler. All we are going to put into this house is what they call a ductless minisplit heat pump. This will provide your winter heat and your summer air conditioning. Where’s the hammock?…Lets take a nap!

The other reason I was thinking about maintanence was the stripping of the concrete forms which we started in earnest this Labor Day Weekend. I mean when you see these walls it’s just like a thing of beauty. Who has 16 inch thick concrete walls for their home?  Its gonna take an M-1 Abrahms tank to knock this thing down. When I see concrete like this- it’s just like we’re never going to have to worry about this. Ever.

So I got started Saturday around 8 AM. Stripping is pretty simple. Begin where you finished, end where you began. More or less anyway. It can get a little tricky depending on the complexity of the formwork. But this was pretty straight forward. First order of business was to strip the top waler off and any form ties that were above the scaffolding. After that I took down the 2×4 protection and the planking. Here’s a picture.

Walers and scaffold stripped off.
Walers and scaffold stripped off.

I don’t know how it was over the weekend in your neck of the woods but over in New York it was disgustingly humid. I mean all you had to do was start breathing and you were sweating like a pig. Thank goodness I put in good drainage around the perimeter of the site. With the amount I sweated I think I would have washed most houses right off their foundations.

Forget about P90X, the Cleanz, Weight Watchers or whatever else you’ve been doing to lose weight. And totally forget about the gym.Stairmasters, treadmills,free weights. Just come to the Hobbit house and help me strip symmons forms and you’ll have the workout of a lifetime. Symmons forms weigh in at about 90 pounds. Move those suckers around all day and that is one hell of a workout. I was a mere shell of a man by the time I finished on Monday.

It is fun to see what is behind the forms though. I was especially looking forward to seeing how the retaining walls came out. If you remember we had some trouble getting the concrete to flow into this area during the pour. I was really happy with the way it came out. Check it out.

 

Retaining wall stripped.
Retaining wall stripped.

You have to look really close to see the joint where we poured the two lifts of concrete. The boys did a really good job.

One of the things I was worried about was air pockets at the top of the form here at this particular location. You might not think that air would create a void in the concrete but it does all the time. That’s one of the reasons you need a good vibrator man on a concrete job. But at this location it was hard to get the vibrator underneath the top form. So I drilled 5/8″ air holes 16 inches on center into the form to let the air out as the concrete filled up the form. I don’t know if you can see it but there are only very small air pockets in the topface of the retaining wall. Check it out.

Top face of retaining wall
Top face of retaining wall

If you look closely at the above picture you will see an outline of a little rectangle. I cut out that rectangle in the form to allow the vibrator to go into the form on the first lift of concrete. Once the concrete filled up to that opening we stopped and I screwed the little plywood block back in place. Hmmmm…smarter than the average concrete guy wouldn’t you say! The skewbacks on the edges were a nice touch too.

Ok I did forget one thing. I forgot to check all of the locations where I had the 4 inch styrofoam for our thermal break. I was supposed to tell the guys while we were pouring to put a little concrete on each side of the styrofoam. This will equalize the pressure on the styrofoam so we don’t have a blowout. I actually put a form tie 6 inches from the bottom to prevent this from being an issue but I forgot one corner. Look what happened.

Styrofoam moved during the pour at the very bottom of the form.One location only.
Styrofoam moved during the pour at the very bottom of the form.One location only.

We got lucky here. The styrofoam didn’t break so our thermal barrier is still intact.Whew! It just goes to show you how important the little things are in a concrete pour. Oh yeah check out how the electrical boxes came out. This was sweet.

Exterior electrical box and thermal break at exterior wall assembly.
Exterior electrical box and thermal break at exterior wall assembly.

Jude had a football scrimmage Saturday and Terence was at a friends so I didn’t have any help. I asked Jude  if anyone might want to work for two hours on Sunday popping pins out. He got a hold of RJ and they both came over Sunday at 11. It was great.There are literally thousands of pins that have to come out and it is time consuming and hard work to boot. You have to remember all the pins are now in tension after the concrete has been poured so you really have to bang the pins hard to get them out. Here’s a picture of them working away.

Rj and Jude popping pins out Sunday morning.
Rj and Jude popping pins out Sunday morning.

We got a lot done Sunday.Here’s a picture of the Northern retaining wall before I stripped off the top form. It kind of gives you a better idea of what we did at this location.

Norhern retaining wall before the top form was removed.
Norhern retaining wall before the top form was removed.

So the big picture this weekend was to try and get all the wall panels off and stacked. This way next Saturday we could load out the truck and get all these forms off the site and move onto phase 7 b of the project. I knew that was a tall order so I decided to just try and get the panels off. I figured if I did that I could probably stop by after work and stack panels for a half hour to 45 minutes a night. This way we would be ready for Saturday trucking.

I employed Jude and Terence Monday for about an hour popping pins and that was the trick. We’re all ready for next weekend….well almost.Here are a few pictures with all the forms off.

End of the day Monday
End of the day Monday

From the bridge.

I’m sick of looking at these forms though. I can’t wait to get rid of them. Which brings me to another conundrum. Who’s going to help me put these panels on the truck? Jude and all his football player friends start playing next Saturday. Lightweights need not apply. This is heavy work so I just can’t use anyone. We’ll have to scour the Shire for some help. I’m sure we’ll find some. Hobbits are quite strong actually and are always up for a good days work as long as they’re well fed.

Enjoy your week!

Jim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready, Set, Pour….Oh, Noooooo!

“It’s a dangerous business going out your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”-Bilbo Baggins. The concrete business is a dangerous business…I hope I’m being swept in the right direction.

I met the building inspector Thursday afternoon at 2:15. I had to leave work early but this was the latest appointment I could get with him. It wasn’t too bad work wise because we had gotten rained out around 10:00AM so I really didn’t have to be there for anything special. I got up to the site around 2 and had a bunch of things I needed to finish for the pour anyway so I got set up while I was waiting for the inspector.

The inspector arrived promptly at 2:15 and proceeded to walk to the edge of the site. He turned and looks at me and says, “It looks like you know what  you’re doing, pour away.” That was music to my ears. The final step before pouring is in place.I also asked him about the under slab plumbing. Did it really need to be cast iron pipe under the slab? He said no and that I must have gotten an old checklist from the building department. More music to my ears. That would have been such a pain to take on a cast iron job. At least for me it would have been. If you make a mistake with PVC you just cut it out and reglue a new piece on.

Once the building inspector left I really got into it. I started finishing off the little things I needed to do before this Saturday’s pour.I called the concrete plant and set up concrete for 8AM Saturday and called the pump company and set them up for  7:30. It takes about a half hour to prep the pump before concrete arrives.

One of the things that I really wanted to do was lock up this area where there is a step in the footing. I used #9 wire at the top of the footing and through the footing about 9 inches off the bottom. I put 3X4 stongbacks on either side of the forms and wrapped these with the #9wire. Once this is done you take your handy dandy lineman pliers and twist the #9 wire to tighten it up. Here’s a picture.

# 9 wire twisted to hold 3X4 strongback.
# 9 wire twisted to hold 3X4 strongback at step in footing.

The other thing I did Tuesday after work was pin the rock where it’s exposed to the footing. I didn’t have my camera that day but basically what you do is take a Hilti drill with a 3/4 inch bit on it and drill 8 inches into the rock. Once the hole is drilled you take a vacuum blower and blow any dust that is in the hole out. I brought a tube of Hilti HY150 epoxy with me from work and using the dispenser for it you squirt the epoxy into the drilled hole and insert a #5 bar. On a warm day the stuff sets up in less than a half hour. (You can use non-shrink grout in lieu of epoxy.The epoxy is a snap though) It was raining when I did this so I just did one hole at a time. I also epoxied some 1/2 inch coil rod in place as well. I used the coil rod to help brace a couple of the forms for safety reasons.Here’s a picture.

#5 bar pinned into the rock using Hilti HY150 epoxy.
#5 bar pinned into the rock using Hilti HY150 epoxy.

By the end of the evening on Thursday I was pretty much ready for a Saturday pour. I had about two hours of work left to finish things up which I was planning to do Friday night or early on Saturday.

Forms ready for Saturday's pour.
Forms ready for Saturday’s pour.

Then something happened on Friday that was most unexpected…and also quite unusual. We lost power to the placeing boom at work while we were pouring.This is a placing boom.

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.

We actually lost power to the placing boom right before we started to prepour the columns on this job. As soon as I heard that I called the plant and told them to stop shipping concrete until they hear back from me. That part was fine. They had only shipped the grout truck that’s used to prime the pump and two ten yarders of 5950 psi concrete aka 5950 (pronounced fiftyninefifty in the business if you want to sound like you know what your talking about.) The electrician foreman Tony was working on it already so that was great and Johnny aka Johnnie Chiz, aka Chisel,aka Super Chiz was with him monitoring the situation. There was an electrical connection on the 15th floor that had gotten “fried” because water had run down into the fitting during the rain storm the day before. There was a slightly heated discussion about whose fault it was for not leaving a rain loop in the line but we were able to get past that. It took about twenty minutes to fix it and we were back in business and started to pump the concrete up the building. I called the plant back and released the balance of the concrete for the day which was only seventy yards. I also reminded them to put retarder in the last truck because it takes a while to clean out the line once you’re done pouring.( Retarder in a concrete mix slows the set time of the concrete once it is mixed. We use this in the summer all the time.)

Placing Boom 101:

For the uninitiated the concrete goes into a hopper in the street and gets pumped into a 5 inch riser pipe that goes straight up the building into the placing boom turret and into the placing boom itself. When you finish pouring you put a round sponge into the tip of the placing boom and blow it back down the riser pipe with compressed air into a box in the street. This cleans out the pipe for the next pour and you wind up with a box full of concrete that gets thrown out the next day.

What happens to the placing boom if the concrete starts to get hard? That’s when trouble really begins.

And things cease to be fun.

This is the short version: We lost power to the pump when we were almost done pouring 60 yards. The electrician was on it right away. He was on the deck. I met him on the 13th floor.”I found the problem and it will be fixed in ten minutes.” OK. You should have power. We still don’t have power. ..Let me try something else. It’ll take 5 minutes. I call Johnny Boo and tell him we have to get ready to move fast if this doesn’t work because the concrete is going to start to set up in the line.The next thing Tony the electrician tried didn’t work either. The placing boom can’t move we are totally screwed now. I waited too long to make a move. So much went on in the next half an hour I could write a book on it. (I keep forgetting that this is the short version.) When we went to blow back the line they couldn’t switch the diverter valve over.( The diverter valve is used for the blowback so the concrete goes into the box I mentioned before.) I broke open the line in the street before the diverter valve and the concrete started to come out of the line like 5 inch diameter sausages two to three feet long.(It really did look like sausage albeit concrete sausage) The concrete really started to pile up. I thought we were going to be a able to clear the line. At that moment I thought we were going to be fine.

Why didn’t the sponge ball come through at the bottom? Because the concrete in the boom never moved. The concrete that I had gotten in the street was all from the 22 stories of concrete in the riser pipe(It was a lot of concrete). Gravity had forced it all down the line.  The last position of the boom was completly horizontal. The worst possible position. We lost the boom. We were doomed. I couldn’t believe it. We were done, finished, game over. What a mess. I called and cancelled  the footing pour for the Hobbit House for Saturday. To say I was upset is an understatement…so were my wife and kids.

Saturday was spent taking the boom down to the street replacing all the lines and then reinstalling the boom. It took six hours. There were a couple of gliches during the day but we got it to work and everything seems to be OK. Here are some pictures.

Sending the placing boom into the street.
Sending the placing boom into the street.( Freedom Tower in the backround.)
Replacing the pipe on the boom.
Replacing the pipe on the boom.

 

Reinstalling the placing boom on the turret.
Reinstalling the placing boom on the turret.Johnny “Deck” signaling with Jeff the Hick assisting.

Well, we are ready to rock and roll for next weekend. Hopefully the weather will cooperate! (And my day job will go a little more smoothly!)  Enjoy your week!

Jim

 

Footings Continued: Are these things the hallways?

Welcome back. I hope all the free folk of Middle Earth are doing well. It sure seems like a long time since my last post. At least for me it does. Last Sunday was Mother’s Day here in the United States and we had two birthdays as well last weekend. My son Jude on Friday and Terence on Monday. So it was quite busy here last weekend and I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend on writing a post.(It really does take me a long time) Oh yeah, I almost forgot,we also had my wife’s family over for Sunday brunch. About 16 of us altogether. I cooked the eggs and bacon. I thought two pounds of bacon would be more then enough. I was wrong. Three pounds would have been more like it. I could not believe how much bacon these damn kids ate. I bit my tongue and said nothing. I mean it’s Mother’s Day. I mean the last thing I need is that battleaxe of a mother in law of mine yelling at me for not letting the kids have what they want. And bacon isn’t cheap either! This post is really starting to spiral downward. So let’s get started shall we. (And actually get along really well with my mother in law, I just had to throw that in there to break chops a bit.)

Where were we.The last post showed the begining of the footing forms etc. For all intents and purposes last Saturday was just a continuation of the same thing. I worked  a full day last Saturday but boy what a miserable day it was. Overcast light rain on and off right from the start. I probably could have gotten more done if it was nicer out.Around 3:00 o’clock it started to rain pretty hard. When I heard thunder I knew it was time to wrap it up.

This weekend  I wanted to finish the footing forms.. I was up early and got a good start. I was pretty much done by 10:30. I had my daughter Georgia go to the rental store and pick up the flat plate tamper again. Why? Well as I was setting the footing forms I noticed that in a lot of spots I had to excavate some of the gravel to get the form to the correct elevation. This means we placed the gavel too high. So what we had to do is remove gravel in some spots and add it to others. Once that was done we raked it level and then had to retamp the whole thing.

Retamping the gravel after fine tuning the gravel bed.
Retamping the gravel after fine tuning the gravel bed.

 My daughter just returned from college this past week so it was her first day back at the site. She was pretty surprised at how much we had done since she was last here. One of the reasons I started this construction blog was to show people what building a house is really like. Most people just don’t know or understand how a house is built. So my daughter gets to the site and I had her and her brother wrap up the string lines I had up. She’s walking inside the formwork and says, “Wow this is so cool! So what are these things? Is this like where a hallway is going to go? ” Here’s a picture of where she was walking.

Is this a hallway?
Is this a hallway?

I don’t know if that was a location joke (You had to be there.)but I got a kick out of it. Even though I thought it was funny it gets back to people really not understanding how things are put together. There’s a lot of dirty work to do out there and somebody has to do it. This is one of the functions of this blog.

One of the things I spoke of in a previous post was the problem of bracing the forms to withstand the pressure of the concrete.We are going to be doing a number of different things but as I said before we want to make sure everything is secure so we avoid having a “blowout ” during the pour. Some of this “securing ” is going to seem like overkill but I want to sleep well the night before the pour so we are going to be extra careful.

I used D-stakes to brace the forms but I don’t have enough of them to brace everything I need to. I used #5 rebar instead of them in other areas and clinched two 16 penny double head nails around them. At the bottom of the form I put a block and wedge to make up the space difference where the plank didn’t extend to the ground. This is important because this is where the most pressure will be when we pour the concrete and the plywood will move outwards until it hits the stake. Here’s a picture.

Rebar stake used to support form. Nails haven't been clinched yet.
Rebar stake used to support form. Nails haven’t been clinched yet.Wedge has to be installed between block and rebar at bottom too.

Securing the top of the form is imortant as well. I’ve seen a number of forms bend outwards as the concrete was poured. We are not going to secure the top just yet. What we are going to do is set up for it now. Before we put in the insulation and the rebar we are going to place perforated banding wire on the bottom of the footing and leave enough overhang so we can loop it around the whole form. After we do all our work we will take this loop and tension it with what we call a banding machine and clip it tight. This is a picture of what it is going to look like when we use the tensioner.

Banding wire looped around footing form with tensioner pulling the wire tight.
Banding wire looped around footing form with tensioner pulling the wire tight.

Banding wire is really strong and great in tension. There are a couple of other areas we will use this later on.

Here’s a picture of the site at the end of the day Saturday.

 

Formwork 95% done!
Formwork 95% done!

Next weekend I’m hoping to install the insulation and get the rebar going! Have a great week!

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

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