Slowly, slowly we move forward.
Framing is the current focus, and we got a push today from a little work party with our friends. Put the architects to work!
Barbara and Thomas came over and puzzled some tricky bits with Morgan, and then they actually started putting boards up. This after demolishing the roof of the back porch, leaving us vulnerable to rain until that chunk gets finished again.
Then John and Anthippy stopped by for even more moral and physical support.
One wall complete!
It has been a bit since I’ve posted, but we have something big happening here and it’s worth showing off. It may not seem like much, but since we had really hoped to get this done by the end of October, we are thrilled to be able to check it off the list now: BACKFILL.
I know, right? It’s a bunch of rocks. But the thing is, we’ve had a couple of cave-ins where those mud walls just couldn’t handle the wet, and it’s dangerous and laborious to clear that dirt out of there. The dirt can’t be there because we want drainage rock to fill that space, so we can rest easy that our walls will stay dry– the famous “French Drain” that every homeowner in Seattle is familiar with.
Speaking of dry walls, we had to take some remedial action on our waterproofing attempt, which failed to properly seal around the footings. This caused Morgan much consternation, as there isn’t necessarily a standard fix, and many options had to be weighed. He finally settled on a big continuous sheet of expensive thick red plastic wrapping the whole wall all the way down and around the footings.
Next the black dimple mat, another standard operating procedure for keeping your foundation walls dry.
Finally, gravel, to fill the trenches! This had to wait for the slab to be poured, as the slab lends stability to the walls. Despite the slab being ugly, a problem we have yet to decide the fix for, it IS sturdy, and the trenches are almost full! I made a little movie showing one of the five or six eventual loads coming in, posted on Facebook, if I can grab a link, I’ll get it here soon.
It’s winter solstice, the shortest day/longest night of the year. We took pains to consider this time of year when we were planning our house remodel, as we have the blessing of full southern exposure for our home, something we intend to take full advantage of. Passive solar design principles measure the angle of the sun at summer and winter solstice for your latitude with the idea of allowing the sun to reach into the house and touch a heat-sink (in our case, the slab of concrete that is our floor) to help warm it up when warming is needed. In the summer, there is an awning (in our case, an overhanging balcony that runs the length of the house) that blocks the sun from touching the floor at all when heat is unwelcome. As you can see, at winter solstice, the sun reaches all the way to the back wall of our new construction. There will be a bit more front wall to block some of that so the sun will be coming through six panels of sliding glass door instead of just streaming through open space, but still– it will get pretty far! Fun to see it in action.
Along with solstice, of course, the holidays. We only have room for a tiny little tree this year, but look how cute it is!
I’m skipping the hard-copy end of year card this year, just one of many small things I’ve let go of to make life a little more manageable as we live in this transitional state. Let this blog entry suffice, and maybe we’ll be more traditional next year.
If you have been following this blog at all, you know what we have been up to in the home realm. That is pretty much what Morgan has been doing. He sold his share of the Applied Ecology business to one of his parters, stopped taking other people’s projects on in April, and has been dedicating his time to building us a nice new home ever since.
In September, I moved my bodywork practice for the first time in 21 years. The prospect was unwelcome, but the actual move went well and I am enjoying my new space in the SODO district of Seattle. My practice has not suffered significantly, but there is more breathing room in my schedule these days, so if you are needing bodywork you don’t need to wait two months to come and see me. I kind of like that.
Huck has been taking film making classes at the Northwest Film Forum in addition to his regular Kung-Fu schedule. He achieved double-digit status in August (10 years! OMG!) and is in the 5th and final elementary grade, at Orca K8. He plays the trombone in the band at school, loves to read, and hates homework. He seems to be rolling with the big house changes pretty well, though he can’t understand what was wrong with our house to begin with.
Here’s a family pic from my sister Ella’s wedding at Deception Pass State Park in August:
This year has been a huge step forward for us. We are glad to have moved from the realm of planning into the realm of doing. Despite the disturbance and the awkwardness and all the rest, it feels really good to be moving forward, however slowly. We feel really lucky to have the opportunity to do this, and are enjoying the encouragement and support from you all while we do.
We wish you and yours the very best this holiday season and into the bright new year!
The number one question we get about our remodel is: When will it be done?
The short answer is we don’t know. How can that be? Well… we started planning this project in 2009. We hoped to be long done by now, but circumstances (and insane neighbors with easement issues) forced the plan to change at least twice, so that the design process itself took four years.
We are doing this project on a shoestring budget. We don’t have a lot of money, we have a Morgan– a skilled worker with an uncanny knack for picking up new skills as they are needed. Working on a project of this size with an essentially one-man crew means that it takes a whole lot longer. I got home from work a couple of weeks ago and he was moving gravel with the excavator: scooping up a bucket, dumping it into a wheelbarrow, getting out of the excavator, moving the wheelbarrow to distribute the gravel, and climbing back into the excavator. It’s not the most efficient way to get the job done.
We have probably another six months before Morgan has to start working for other people to make money again. We hope and pray that at that time a good portion of the main stuff will be done, but it’s really hard to know. There have been delays (permitting, waiting for our excavator or materials to show up) that have put us probably 2 months behind our dream schedule, and things often take twice as long as we hope they will. If we basically double the time that we hoped it would take, we will probably be done in the late spring of 2016.
“Done” is quite a concept as well– I think of this as the beginning to so many projects. We finally jacked the house up! Now we can fix the plumbing, the electrical, finish the landscaping! So, when you say, “When will it be done?” I think you are asking me when we can throw our housewarming party. I don’t know, but I do know it’s going to be fun.
This past weekend was that rare December combination of dry and above freezing–time to slap on the tarry muck that will keep our new space dry.
Ideally, this would have been a job for those very dry and warm summer and fall days we enjoyed so much, but that is just not how things went down. This meant that we spent a lot of time drying off the styrofoam insulation with compressed air before we could begin with the application, and to some degree we are hoping we got it “dry enough”.
The waterproofing material is sticky and rubbery and quite difficult to get off of your skin, even with paint thinner. We were working in very tight and awkward spaces at certain points, taping up the larger gaps and the seam around the bottom off the wall. We were only able to get 2.5 coats on over the weekend with three of us working (thanks, Monica!) Morgan got the rest of the third coat on today.
Alas, though our brief warm/dry spell threatens to come to an end, three coats is not enough. Hopefully we can score another three day stretch in the next month or so to properly finish the job.
As I was slathering black goo on the outsides of our foundation walls, I was marveling at all of the little steps that go into this huge project. I don’t get that many opportunities to participate in the work, other than occasionally shoveling gravel or cleaning the work site. It was good to be able to do something useful– one small, tedious, and entirely crucial piece of the big project that is our new home.
We emerged from another cold snap today, into the comparatively balmy mid-40’s, which makes the house feel exponentially warmer. Hats and vests can come off when we walk in the door instead of a few hours after heat has been turned on.
Stacks of supplies for the next projects on the docket are accumulating– insulation, pex tubing, other things I don’t recognize– and we have spread two truckloads of gravel over the cloth that covered the dirt.
Morgan spread some special herbs that Suzanne Ragan Lentz mixed for us (abundance, protection, love, and all the rest of that good stuff you want in the foundation of your home) before laying down the cloth. We need another load of gravel before electrical work can commence. Here are a couple of photos of the progress:
My friends, the chill has finally arrived in Seattle! We have been enjoying a singularly warm fall, but our first cold snap has commenced, and we here at the Hammershack are feeling it a bit more than most.
We are not “weathered in” as they say, with incomplete walls and plastic roofs and zero insulation under the floor of our existing living space. The photo above shows a hole in our living room floor that was once a vent for a long-defunct heating system, the grate now covered only by a mat.
We have been keeping the heat off and making due with other measures– a massage table warmer on the couch, heating pads in bed, sweaters and slippers and this heat disc to huddle next to. Morgan installed a heat mat in the bathroom and a towel warmer this week. I try to use the oven a lot.
Morgan has been studying and planning a lot this week, looking at electrical components and making decisions. He is doing a quick money-making job for our friend Greg for the next couple of days, at Greg’s factory in Idaho.
I might, upon his return, prevail upon him to consider filling the big vent-hole and maybe just insulating under the living room?
Meanwhile, I had him show me again how to shut off the water at the street before he left, because of course the pipes are just hanging out down there with no protection. They are plastic, and it’s only 30 degrees, but just in case!
Enjoy your cozy homes, people, I am dreaming of my radiant floors.
I got a flushing toilet for my birthday this year, which is probably the very best present I have ever gotten. It’s not a new toilet in a new bathroom, just our old setup temporarily hooked back up to new pipes. Morgan thinks we can probably do this until one of the new toilets is installed, which will make this winter a whole lot more pleasant.
We did a little winterizing this weekend, throwing straw down over the mountain of mud that will be under our shop extension deck and putting the canopy back over our outdoor laundry setup.
We need a load of wood chips to cover some of the other mud we end up walking on a bunch, and maybe a bit more gravel in certain spots.
This week Buphalo and Morgan are going to make some tarp roofs to deal with this action:
We did have a dirt wall collapse on one side of the house. We were afraid this would happen, and it’s a real inconvenience but luckily no real damage was done.
Plumbing drains continue to be built, and hopefully will be completed and inspected this week, clearing the way for electrical work to begin.
Meanwhile, I will be using my sweet sweet toilet inside the house, and feeling like a queen.
The all-important business of plumbing drains is the current focus around here. Water leaving the house– a luxury I will never take for granted again!
On the right in this photo you can see the bin that catches our kitchen sink drain, as well as the hose that goes to our side sewer clean out, with a sump pump assist. We do the same thing for our shower drain.
At the beginning of the summer we would pump the grey water to our ornamental garden beds, but that became quite tedious. It’s rainy season here again anyway, so off to the sewer it goes.
It occurs to me that the most disgusting part of the house is that which makes it most “civilized”. Looking forward to rejoining you all in that civility.
We’re back on the earth, my friends!
It was supposed to happen Monday, but, unbelievably, traffic in the Seattle area was so horrendous that the house lifters just couldn’t get here. Disappointing. They made it here on Tuesday, though, and cleared all their stacks out and put us down.
For the first time, we can stand in the space and get a sense of how it will feel. I went and stood in my future kitchen when I got home late Tuesday night, looking out at the room and imagining my counters, the couches in the living room, a dining room table… pretty cool.
Walking into the house for the first time was weird– my body anticipated the wobble, and therefore did a little wobbling itself, which made me a little discombobulated. I notice that where the kinetic energy of moving through the house was transferred side to side while up on the stacks (thus, the wobble), now that we are on the ground I feel the floor pushing back at me– the energy goes down and up again, more like a bounce. Not a whole lot of spring, though, which is probably good.
Next up, the slab. There is a last bit of excavation to get done under the house before construction can begin down there. I’m guessing that plumbing drains are first to go in after the excavation, then insulation, electrical, radiant heating tubes. The slab will be a complicated beast, so it’s likely to take some time.
Once the slab is poured, we can backfill the empty spaces around the foundation walls, something we had hoped to do before the rains started. Unfortunately, it has been raining in record-breaking ways this week. Perhaps it will be temporary, but you know, this is Seattle. Can’t change the weather. Mud boots and rain gear it is, and a little prayer for the dirt walls to hold for just another month or so.
Hammershack Report 