A New Year, 2014

State of the Build

Well, I wish I were more than half way done by now, but instead, I am looking ahead to the new year.  If all goes well, I will actually be building this year and this website will get a whole lot more interesting.  I plan to get the 2014 build season rolling on Monday by calling contractors who had been too busy to get back to me during the building season.  Hopefully their pencils will be “sharper” now.

I did try to to get a few quotes in December.  I found that my window person (who we really liked) had moved on from the company (so I will need to start over with her replacement), I found a potential new electrician and tried again to get quotes on the Electro Mini Boiler install.  The only one who wants my business seems to be the steel Quonset hut people, they call me every month to tell me the latest specials.

The budget is very tight and we are trying to build a lot of house for not so much money.  I am hoping that my low cost finishes will help me keep costs down.  Based on previous quotes, I am now planning to pick up more of the work myself, perhaps hiring some teachers/students during the summer.

The architects drawings are “done”, but my “virtual build” is revealing even more problems than I had originally known about and small changes are on going. (separate section below and last week).

The website is now up to nearly 1800 visits per month, which isn’t bad considering how rarely I am posting and that I don’t spend any time on the SEO.  Google sent me a card for 150$ worth of free advertising.  Maybe I will use it once things get rolling.  I don’t plan to spend a penny past the free stuff though ;^)  If you are interested in this project, please “subscribe”, so that you will get an email next time I post.  I also appreciate comments.

Virtual Build

For the virtual build, I am essentially building the house piece by piece from the plans trying to guess where I will run into problems.  The idea is that if I find a problem virtually, I can take steps to avoid running into the same problem during the real build.  I am keeping a list of errata as I go.

Last week, I found a problem with the mezanine windows overlapping a rib and a sun tube, so I moved them along the wall by 18 inches.  The window buck on the other side looked fine in terms of lining up nicely with a steel stud, but once I put the steel arches between the ribs and covered the vaults with concrete, it became apparent that the earth may bet a bit to close to the western Mezzanine window.

I was just about to go and sort that out, when I noticed a much worse problem.  The kitchen door is supposed to tuck under the arch on the bottom right of the above image.  It was clearly not going to fit.  I started checking all the measurements related to that corner and found a few oddities.  For instance, the radius of the outer wall was listed on the drawing as 4 inches larger than the scale drawing was actually made.  I had build my model based on the listed dimension.  I also found that the architect had drawn the arch in the kitchen view as 4 inches wider than in other views, although he still labeled it as 16ft.  Those two errors added to 8 inches, but that wasn’t enough to explain the problem.  It turned out that the bigger discrepancy was the span and elevation of the rib in the drawing that showed the position of the door.

I had explained this to my architect a number of times…  The radiating vaults needed to be placed at a constant slope so they could maintain a constant peak height.  When the kitchen and dining room ribs were moved radially outward by 7’2″, they needed to lowered by 20″ in order to maintain that slope.  The architect had eventually repaired this in other views, but apparently not in the kitchen view where he worked out the door placement.  The door was always going to be clipped a little, but nothing like the problem I now face.

(correction, the rib in the above pic was not 20 inches higher than it should have been, it was just a few inches due to the whole thing being a larger scale; perhaps from an earlier iteration?  The architect had lowered it as I asked)

So, now I will sleep on this problem (and probably also think about it in the shower) and see what solutions I can come up with.  Early candidates include moving the rib another 2 ft out radially, it would be technically possible, but would ruin the look.  Optionally, I could move the basement door and stairs 2ft west along with the kitchen door, but that may cause problems on the other end of the stairs and probably would ruin my kitchen layout…  Maybe a single unique Rib without the lower spandrel, but then I may need to contact the engineer to get the design approved.

Eye Candy

And now for most people’s favorite section…  The gallery of random things that caught my eye.

I see I have quite a few from the humor site “9gag.com”, as well as a few from houzz.com.