May 2019: Foundation, rough plumbing
We have real internet again!
That means I can MUCH more easily organize and caption pictures on here.
I'm going to play catch-up by grouping one or two months-worth of happenings into each post.
That means I can MUCH more easily organize and caption pictures on here.
I'm going to play catch-up by grouping one or two months-worth of happenings into each post.
May 10
If I had known how much digging in the sand and dirt I
If I had known how much digging in the sand and dirt I
would be doing in the next few months, I probably would
have tried to find a way out of it. However, taken one job at a time,
it wasn't so bad! Here's the first digging we did in our
house "pad": rough plumbing. With a grumpy overseer... on a timeout.
Here's the REAL overseer figuring things out step by step.
(I knew that Randy knew how to do a lot of stuff, but I didn't really
know how much until we started [and kept] building this house.)
May 20
The next digging task was a bit more strenuous: footings. You can see the yellow
string line representing the outside dimensions of the house. The horizontal pink
foam under the sand piles is indeed on the outside of the house, keeping the frost
from creeping in under the foundation. This is called an "Alaskan foundation" or
"thickened edge slab/monoslab". Frost travels underground at a 45-degree angle,
and with our frost line at around 5-6 feet around here, a 4-foot insulated ground
perimeter should be sufficient to keep things under the house from
heaving in the spring.
The next digging task was a bit more strenuous: footings. You can see the yellow
string line representing the outside dimensions of the house. The horizontal pink
foam under the sand piles is indeed on the outside of the house, keeping the frost
from creeping in under the foundation. This is called an "Alaskan foundation" or
"thickened edge slab/monoslab". Frost travels underground at a 45-degree angle,
and with our frost line at around 5-6 feet around here, a 4-foot insulated ground
perimeter should be sufficient to keep things under the house from
heaving in the spring.
With 2 stories of concrete walls sitting on our foundation, we knew the footings would have to be BEEFY. There are 24 inches of flat bottom, then begins a 45-degree slope up to where the actual 4"-thick FLOOR of the "basement" would sit. The string is about level with the top of the floor. Randy here is assessing the situation after a long day of work.
May 24
Lunch break: let's play in a toybox!
Oh yeah, and we had to create footings through the
middle of the floor for our support walls to rest upon.
That pink foam worked quite nicely, not only to keep the floor heat from escaping down, but to make concrete forms. The scraps we had left over made nice braces (they look like the rungs of a ladder here).
May 28
We had some dear friends over for supper one night
and Alan, the dad, helped Randy on the last zone of
in-floor heat tubing. Here they are, wrestling with the
"orange snake". 1/2" Pex tubing is really quite stiff and
has a mind of its own.
We had some dear friends over for supper one night
and Alan, the dad, helped Randy on the last zone of
in-floor heat tubing. Here they are, wrestling with the
"orange snake". 1/2" Pex tubing is really quite stiff and
has a mind of its own.
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