A Family Project

Hi- this is Terra again, with a few thoughts about our family project.
When we were growing up, my dad always found a way to make work into play; paving the patio gave us all a chance to put our handprints in the tiles, and a trip to the neighborhood dump always seemed like an adventure.

Although this project is a lot bigger, and sometimes the ninety-degree, ten-hour days seem never-ending, we are still having just as much fun. Now, my family is building more than a house, we are building new relationships, respect, and countless memories. Everyday that I work with my dad and my brothers I have a fresh opportunity to appreciate their individual talents. I have always marveled at the speed with which our dad's engineering mind works through challenges, and watching him augment his recent inventions on the spot gives me new respect for this talent. Every day I am impressed by Khyber's balance of artistic vision and practical persistence, staying to work a fresh earth corner into the perfect shape even at the end of a long day of ramming. I am enthralled watching Taj mixing, sampling, and working with our soils, sifting a new mix design through his fingers with the same intense expression I am used to seeing on our father's face.

Through my work in the non-profit sector I have had plenty of opportunities to observe the practice of building important interpersonal skills by working together. Cooperative projects provide a perfect forum for team building and are often used by companies and organizations to improve communication and respect in a work or school environment. For our family, this project means all this and so much more. I look forward to making dinner in my new kitchen and remembering the jokes we were telling and the stories we were sharing as we rammed the red clay together.

Roofing Phase One

Once the wall forms were moved from the kitchen to the master bedroom, we had a clear shot to set the roof beams and SIPs on the first half of the house. With the crane on site, it was only logical to do this right away.

Abe cut and notched the 6 x 16 Doug fir beams he milled last fall, Terra painted the underside of the SIPs while they were on the ground rather than on the roof, and with a bunch of hands to guide the beams and panels into place, we made short work of it. Frank Gilbeau, the crane operator, had a lifting "eye" that allowed us to pick up the panels in the dead center, which made installing them quick and easy.

We still have some refining of the lay-out plus framing of the clerestories on the end walls, but getting part of the roof up was a sort of celebration for the hard work of concrete, steel, and rammed earth.

It also gives us a chance to see how the contemporary roof lines are going to look.

The photos in this post are of Abe squaring his beams, Terra painting one of the panels, a beam being lowered into place, a panel on its way to landing, and a glimpse of the front of the house.

Kitchen walls/master bedroom forming

On Monday and Tuesday we rammed earth for kitchen walls and poured the bond beam. I had thought it might be possible to complete this work in one day with a larger crew, but as it turned out, there is just too much time involved in the complicated shutoffs, electrical, and the bond beam itself to finish in one day. The crew was comprised of four rammers and two people working the delivery conveyor and monitoring lift depth. We mixed the soil slightly wetter on the kitchen than the first bedroom and we kept the lift depth to eight inches. You can see in the photos the different quality to the walls.

We spent Wednesday pulling screws and form ties, removing scaffold planks, plus building VDB's and tieing steel in the master bedroom in preparation for receiving the forms. On Thursday the crane arrived and for the second time we lifted out form panels, washed and oiled them, then reset them for the third and final installation. The really fun part about Thursday, in addition to a flawless form relocation, was that we set the beams and roof panels on the first half of the house. I'll cover that in the next post. The photos in this post show the kitchen formwork and delivery conveyor system, Terra and Abe tieing steel for the master bedroom, the crane moving a panel, and the finished kitchen wall quality.

Slab floor Phase Two

Prepping the third slab went even more quickly than the first two, because we had learned a few tricks: electrical conduit is more easily run in the footings than under the floor; keeping the insulated copper water pipes deeper makes leveling the sand easier; and the 4" form board around the perimeter was installed with tap cons and "L" blocks. All of the work of floor prep: gravel bed, vapor barrier, insulation, sand, steel, and radiant tubing took Khyber, Danny, and Terra one day.

For the floor mix we tried a different system than on the first two slabs. This time we used Bob Noble's volumetric mixer, set up with 3/4" rock in one bin and a blend of 90% sand and 10% screened Calaveras red clay in the other bin. Volumetric mixers are different from transit mixers in that the gravel, sand, and cement are proportioned and blended with water in an auger on the back of the truck. This type of equipment allows for a wider variation in the formulation. In this case, it allowed us to add our dry red clay into the formula without going through the slurry step that we used for the first floors. We also increased the percentage of clay in the mix to add more color to the floor. The extra clay may have the disadvantage of increasing shrinkage cracking. To control the shrinkage, Khyber used a diamond saw and cut score lines in the finished slab. We've covered it with black plastic to slow the cure, and will leave the plastic in place until after the walls are built.

The photos in this post show the steel, radiant tubing, and perimeter form board in place; pouring and screeding; floating; finishing; and cutting the score lines.

With the master bedroom footings and floor complete, we're now returning to the kitchen. We've organized a larger workforce for the kitchen walls than we used in the baby's room, so that, barring equipment breakdowns we'll be able to install all of the rammed earth in one day.

Footings phase II

We're back to work at Terra's House after a short diversion to another project. The last activity on the site before the break was moving the forms from the guest bedroom to the kitchen. We could have built the kitchen walls this week except that we had no place to move the forms because the master bedroom foundation wasn't yet ready. You'll remember from reading Taj's posts how important it is to provide extra water to the walls to improve the cement hydration. We didn't want to leave the earth in the forms for too many days.

We made the decision to prep the master bedroom foundation and slab before building the kitchen. This post illustrates the work involved in the footing.

Luke Noble arrived with the backhoe on Thursday at 8:00 to dig the six-foot wide footing. It took him until 11:00, then Khyber, Junior, Rigo and I set form boards and tied the steel grid (#5's at 12"). The next day we laid out the wall center line, tied the verticals, and were ready for an inspection on Monday. Abe, Terra and I spent Monday afternoon running electrical conduit and copper supply lines for the roof top solar collectors.

The pour on Tuesday morning was simple: four trucks, each with nine yards, spaced thirty minutes apart. We pulled stakes and cleaned up Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday stripped the forms and started the floor slab prep.