This post is all about erecting the steel arches and rebar for the radial roof vaults. This process took us a few weeks to get done and really looked great. I’ll put details and a lot of pictures down below, but first, the time lapse videos…
The Video(s)
Yes, I had to break this one into two videos.
Here is the first 6 vaults going in…
And here are the remaining 4 and a final walk thru.
The Gallery
A picture is worth a thousand words, so lets talk about things in the context of a gallery…
We passed the inspection without any trouble.
Another exterior view
After chisteling out the concrete for the hole, I also cut that piece of rebar and then cleaned it up nicely.
I had forgotten to leave a whole for an 8 inch duct to get thru this concrete wall. So I had to drill one out.
The kitchen vault before starting on the dining room.
This is the fresh stucco on the outside of my office window.
While I worked on Steel, Sherri worked on Stucco…
We welded each steel arch to rebar pegs (#5) drilled into the concrete ribs.
Pic of the first 3 vaults in
A sunset view from the bedroom roof
View from the bedrooms
This room as 3 vaults and covers 90 degrees of the circle (the fish eye lens flattens it out). Eventually, we will have our TV in here, etc.
This room was easy to work in because of the nice floor.
David in the playroom
I needed all the vaults to be the same height, so I used a laser to set the height of the scaffold when it was out in the uneven dirt. Then we set the steel arches a fixed distance above the scaffold deck using a car jack to make the final adjustments.
Here I am just trying out one of the steel arches to see how it “fits” and how it looks
In this shot you can see rebar arches lined up and ready to go while Sherri continues to work on stucco.
While I was focused on the steel arches, Sherri looked after stucco work.
Michael helping me work on one of the vaults.
The kids treated the place like a jungle gym
While working on the living room vaults, I looked down and noticed that the steel columns had filled with rain water. So I drilled holes to let it all out.
It sprayed for quite a while.
Close up on the bedroom dormer stucco
It was nice having a skid steer to move heavy things around.
In this case, we got a delivery of 2 tons of rebar and i could just move it to where I wanted it.
I bought a much smaller tractor to replace the skid steer and it couldn’t even lift one of these bundles.
Working under the vaults felt a little surreal at times
A closer view
IN this view, you can see my form material experiment
We knew that we would eventually need to attach formwork below the rebar, but I wasn’t sure how well my options would hold up to the environment…
I ended up using just the un-urethaned brown board, more on that in an upcoming video.
We celebrated the 4th from the roof with some friends…
We bought a Kubota to replace the skidsteer. It has only 1/3rd of the power, but it won’t tear up the ground.
Here Sherri is putting the rebar chairs up in the guest room ceiling.
The top of the guest vault. This one already has the lath, etc. and is ready to shoot.
Not sure why I don’t have any video footage of the guest room being done. Maybe it will turn up later or maybe it is lost forever.
Shot from the kitchen looking toward the dining room and living room
In the kitchen taking a pick of the dining room. The kitchen island will go under that concrete rib
In the dining room looking toward the living room
Standing in the living room looking toward the kitchen…
Backing up with the camera
Just another shot
The living room, dining room and kitchen are all open concept
In order to bury the office apse at the front of our earth sheltered home, I needed to build a retaining wall with a window in it. For this corner of the build, I decided to use CMU’s, Concrete Masonry Units, AKA concrete blocks. We also had to insulate the apse structure.
I may come back and add some detail here. For now, I’ll just post the video and gallery of pics to tell the story.
The Video
The Gallery
Here are some pics to help tell the story.
Sherri getting a selfie
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Couldn’t hold the straight face
And back to work…
Camera caught a block drop in mid air and I thought it looked worth keeping.
Michael’s turn to get a selfie
We put 4 inches of XPS between the apse and the retaining wall. This first 4 feet were easy because of the simple curvature.
My mother faithfully working on the insulation dome.
Here Michael is cranking away on the dome. You know this process is decent when an 11 year old kid can crank it out.
Posing with my subway vinyl. In theory, you are only supposed to use these with the image downward, but I couldn’t resist.
We glued the vinyls together with HH-66 vinyl cement. It basically melts them together with a chemical bond.
Perspective…
Here you can see that the insulation layer completely separates the inner and outer walls. The rebar and lath were covered in concrete, ferro-cement style.
It was getting dark by the time I got that concrete up on the eyebrow.
The insulation mosaic was rough looking, but functional.
Go pro caught this fun one as I drove by… I guess I was looking at the camera to avoid driving over the tripod.
When you are burying a house, one of the tricky bits is to keep the dirt from spilling where you don’t want it… Like into the doorways. I have a number of retaining walls planned for this build, and, just to keep things interesting, I have designed each one a different way. This section is about the “Heavy Stone” wall by the back door/patio. More details below, but first… the Video
The Video
Cost
I had assumed that those concrete blocks were the cheap way to build a retaining wall and the fancy quarried sandstone was the expensive way. Of course, I probably still would have used some real stone… However, when I looked into it, At least for the cost of the stone, the real stone was cheaper. Of course, that doesn’t factor in things like the cost of the mortar, which was about 5$ per level on my wall, so still not too bad. The real cost of building a wall like this is time… Those precast concrete block walls probably wouldn’t have taken me nearly so much time, but no regrets on choosing to do this one the hard way.
Engineering
Retaining walls often fail. Keys to keeping this one from going down included…
Wide heavy stones (heavy stone is actually what they called this size at the quarry) that are substantial and want to stay where you put them.
Leaning the wall back against the earth load. Before the earth can tip your wall over, it would first need to straighten it out. Gravity helps you keep things as they are.
Curving the wall against the earth makes it a lot harder for the earth to tip it over, just as it is harder for a mug to tip over than for a domino. Making the wall concave helps even further because the loads against it are in compression, something that the stone handles with ease.
Behind the wall, I had plenty of drainage. Drain gravel, landscaping fabric and HDPE corrugated/perforated drain tube were working to make sure that water pressure never gets a chance to build up behind the wall.
Layers of carpet were also used in the dirt behind the wall. This “geo-textile” idea is used by highway engineers to keep dirt from shifting under ramps. I would have liked to have used more layers, but some is better than none.
I watched lots of videos online about how to build a retaining wall that lasts. I recommend anyone who is planning to build there own do the same, and don’t be tempted to take shortcuts.
The Gallery
Here is a gallery of pics with detailed captions.
Here is the delivery. I paid 80$ per pallet, plus something (like 120$?) for the truck to deliver all the pallets.
Here are some more standard concrete retaining wall blocks. If you check the top right, you can see how many linear ft you get per block and calculate how many square ft of wall you would get per dollar. When I compared this with the cost of my quarried sand stone, my sand stone was about half the price.
Before I could bury the garage, I needed a retaining wall, but before the retaining wall, I needed some stucco over these fox blocks… This is just the scratch coat.
Partway thru the stucco job, I checked to see if the camera was still on. This is apparently how I look after a couple hours of night stucco work. (after finishing my regular work day and driving out to the site).
To get a gentle curve, I put down a 20ft long piece of 1/2 inch PVC going thru the marks I had made earlier. Then I put down mortar and started laying blocks.
After a few rows, the wall was already looking interesting and I was already learning.
After the wall was a few blocks high, I back filled for drainage. I also covered this all in landscapers fabric to keep the sand out. Actually, I came back later and filled the whole area with drain gravel, it is easy to use too much when you have a skid steer bucket and order by the dump truck.
After dark it starts to get harder to find the right stones. This evening I probably only got 3 layers in.
The 3rd evening, I got another 3 layers in before it was too dark to find rocks…
The rocks were all aligned against the front of the wall, but the back looked considerably messier. To sort that out, I used my mortar sprayer to shoot mortar over the back of the wall and fill all those cracks. I did it at several stages, this was the first. No pics of the actual shooting because I was busy at the time.
More progress… By this point, I had most of the basics down and things were moving along nicely.
Another pic…
Once the wall reached a certain height, I put these “benches” up against it. We had first made these for the ICF blocks.
Sometimes the kids seek out the camera to get a self pic or just wave at me.
Kids love climbing on walls. However, it can be a problem if the mortar isn’t set yet. This day it was before we started on the wall though.
You can see we have extended the platform. I also added wooden blocks to make it easier to scramble up, but I usually used the ladder.
Random pic
We named our dog Sandy to fit in to the site better. She loves getting up high and looking around.
Sandy chilling on the wall while I worked…
This is how it looks from the ground. I plan to add moss, creepers, etc.
