For some strange reason, I have always wanted to build a block wall. So of course, I had to work at least a bit of that into the plans. I chose to build the bathroom out of block because it was all internal walls and I liked the idea that it may slightly brace the quonset hut before we added concrete over it. We also had this idea that the garage would be finished first and it would be great to have a bathroom in there so we could use it during the rest of the build…
Also, I have often joked (only half kidding) that I would like the bathroom to be waterproof so we could clean it with a power washer. And that would require no drywall…
First, the Video…
Glass Bottle Wall
I have also wanted to make a glass bottle wall for a long time, but with a low R value, they are not practical as an exterior wall in Michigan. Instead, I plan to finish the gap between this bathroom wall and the Quonset ceiling with glass bottles… This way, it will be an internal wall and will let light in from the garage skylights while still finishing off the bathroom wall to the ceiling to provide privacy. Video to come later… much later. Maybe after we move in.
Pro-tips
1) Buy half blocks, etc. When you go to price the blocks, you will find that the full 8″x8″x16″ blocks are pretty cheap. In my case, they were 86 cents each. But then if you look at half blocks, you will find that they cost almost twice as much for half as much block. At first, I said, “No way, those are for suckers, I’ll just split the full blocks.” And while it is true that some of the full blocks come designed to be split, it was not easy and I wrecked half the blocks that I tried. Eventually, I realized that those half blocks were expensive because they were worth it! I also bought 4x8x8 blocks and cut those in half for some quarter blocks.
2) Pay for delivery. Blocks are heavy and it took hundreds to make even my small bathroom. You could make a bunch of trips with a pick up truck (be careful not to overload it), but for the money you would pay in gas, you could just have them delivered all at once and without risking wear and tear on your vehicle. Delivery also saves you time, and time is money.
3) Cut the blocks for electrical as you go. I guess we were just so excited to be building that we forgot to do that. When I came back later, it looked pretty easy in the video, but… If cutting the block had cracked it, how would I have replaced it? It was also pretty challenging to get the ENT boxes to fit in the holes with the conduit attached to the tops, and then I had to run the conduit and wires all the way up to the top of the wall and back down again, which wasted a few extra dollars. Plus, you just look silly for forgetting.
4) Make sure your concrete dye is a nice liquid or powder so you can mix it accurately. Mine was a lumpy semi-solid mass that had been sitting on the shelf at Home Depot well past its expiry date and this made it very difficult to get a uniform color. I found that I could blend the color by wet sponging the wall later, but it still doesn’t look quite right.
Gallery
Here are some pics from along the way…
This was the plan for the bathroom. The shower plumbing was supposed to come up in the wall, inside the blocks, but it was placed about 6 inches off… We discussed how to adjust the bathroom to fit and ended up moving the ind wall back another 8 inches, so things ended up a little bigger than this.
Get your blocks delivered. They are heavy and delivery is cheaper than all the trips it would take to carry these safely in my pickup truck.
Sherri waiting patiently for me to setup the camera
Blocks at the end of the second evening, before the bond beam went up.
Before the bond beam
View of the door buck and scaffold inside.
Laughing about something… Sherri has water in her bottle with a pin hole in the top that she was using to help smooth out the walls.
Michael helping out on the inside while Sherri and I finish up the outside.
Half done the inside, and I am leaning back to adjust the camera.
Sherri finishing up surface bonding the last wall
A view from the inside…
I had accidentally touched up some of the outside with lighter cement from the inside (see above the door), oops. I decided to try and smooth it out.
The surface after sponging to smooth out the color and texture.
I installed the toilet flange with a hammer drill and some tapcon screws. Easy.
Brand new toilet… Oh the horrors it will see.
After the walls and door were in, we could add a toilet…
After the Quad Deck ICFs were installed, there was still a lot of work to do before we could pour concrete, and then still a bit of work after.
Before we could pour, we had to install the pex tube for the radiant floors, build a perimeter form to hold in the concrete, put in plumbing, electrical conduit and duct work, and generally clean up any mess from the previous steps.
While we had the pump truck there, I also wanted to pour a couple 7 ft tall columns, so we also prepped those. We also poured a section of ICF wall, but I will save that for another post…
After it was all over, we had to remove all the forms. We gave the concrete a couple weeks to cure (and gain strength) and then we removed the scaffolding and shoring.
Video
You can find the Video here:
Experienced workers and new technology
They workers are used to pouring concrete on stable ground, so they were quite nervous about pouring on the ICF forms. They started out walking very carefully and there was a lot of nervous laughter. I made sure to pass along the pour instructions I had received from the Quad Deck installers. After the grooves were filled, the guys appeared to forget what they were standing on and began stomping around as usual. We had no problems with the Quad Deck system. Everything held up and there was only a little bleed water in the basement.
The blow out
During the column pour, the weight/lateral pressure of the concrete blew out the forms. To be clear, these were my column forms, that I built, not the Quad deck forms. My heart sunk as concrete spilled into the basement.
Next thing I knew, the guys from Dysert concrete, who were working on finishing the slab, jumped into action and helped strap the form and re-level it. This was really going the extra mile because they were really only there to look after the floor. They also went another extra mile and helped me scoop some concrete out of the basement. When it was all over and guys were packing up, I tried to give them some cash for their extra efforts, but they wouldn’t take it. If you are in the SE Michigan area, I recommend these guys.
In contrast, the pump truck operator (not my usual guy who is very helpful, so I won’t blame the company), clearly did not want to be there. He was grouchy from the start, perhaps not a morning person? When the floor was finishing up and I told him the columns were next, he complained a lot because he thought he was only there for the floor. He threatened to charge me extra. At that point, we were not even half way thru the minimum 4 hour window that I had to pay for. Also, I had specified (in writing) the volume of concrete and listed the columns and the ICF wall when I booked the truck. I didn’t bother arguing all these details with the driver, but I simply ignored his threat and told him it needed to be done before he could pack up.
Amateur legal note: If a contractor tries to change the price part way thru a job without sufficient justification, you can safely ignore the threat. Legally, if it would be even more expensive to switch contractors at that point, the threat of a work stoppage amounts to extortion and puts you in financial duress to agree with their unjustified price increase. In this case, I didn’t verbally agree to the extra charge, but I did tell him to continue on, which could be considered implicit agreement. However, even if I had agreed verbally, or in writing, I would still be able to contest the extra charges in court later due to financial duress making the amended agreement invalid. In order to increase the cost mid project on a fixed bid, the contractor would need to prove that the scope of the work increased significantly beyond a reasonable expectation. For instance, my septic field guys found a 1940’s garbage dump almost as soon as they started digging. The health department got involved and ended up raising the cost of the installation by about 30%, which I agreed to and paid without an argument.
When the columns failed, he was even more annoyed at the extra delay and kept saying he had another job to get to. I reminded him that he had been there less than half the minimum time I was paying for. A moment later, he started dumping concrete on the sand, we suspect it was intentional so he could leave. Sherri got mad and yelled at him until he stopped. However, as a result of the waste (intentional or otherwise), we did not have enough concrete to finish the ICF blocks in the north wall, but that is another story.
This pic is just one the time-lapse caught as I was moving the camera. It shows Sherri trying to clear the dumped/wasted concrete off the footings. Definitely not princess work, but I never asked her to do it… I was running too much to even think about it, but she separated it into smaller piles that I could move after it hardened, so I am glad she did.
Friends
You can see that a few of my friends in this and other videos and in the gallery below. Some of them actually like this sort of work, others come out and help anyway. I appreciate them all.
Working with friends makes the work go faster and the day fly by. Some of them have also taught me some good tricks based on their respective experience, or mentioned tools that would make the job easier. I will definitely have to have a big party when this thing is all done.
Pex connections
In the video, you might have caught that the pressure test dial didn’t hold the pressure when I filled it. I ended up using some dish soap from the camper to find the leaks. I had one easily fixed leak in the manifold, but most of the trouble was with the Shark Bite connections. Basically, I had not left enough extra length to reach down to my manifold (oops), so I needed to connect some short bits to make the final stretch. The SharkBite connectors are individually expensive, but easy to use without any tools, and I only needed a handful. However, try as I might, I couldn’t stop some of them from leaking. I talked to the plumbers (who use Pex for everything) and they said they prefer the crimp connections. I figured I would eventually be putting in a bunch more radiant, so I decided to spend the money on the crimp tool and it easily sorted out my issues.
Fibonacci Spiral
I had long planned to insert 1 ft long glass rods thru the Quad deck to let light thru in both directions. When it came to the layout, I went with the points of a simple Fibonacci spiral, centered in the room and leading around to a spiral stair case around the corner. Later, I can etch or mosaic in the actual curve if I want to.
These are sorts of fun little extras that make building your own home fun.
To keep the glass rods from being pushed thru the floor by the workers stepping on them, I screwed boards up underneath to hold the bottoms in place. This is why the lights turn off just before the pour in the video.
Rented Scaffolding
The scaffolding that I rented has been stacked nicely and ready for pickup for more than 4 months with no responses to my monthly texts to the builder to come and pick ’em up. You will see it in the background of various other videos ;^) It was actually quite labor intensive to remove it from the basement, so I hope the builder appreciates that that free labor. I wonder if I could surprise him with storage fees? I had to move it again recently.
Our earth sheltered home relies on thin shell concrete to support the earth loads. I do know of large earth sheltered homes with >50 ft domes made of thin reinforced concrete less than an inch thick, but that sort of precision is difficult. My vaults are relatively small (<15 ft across), but will be 6 to 8 inches thick of very strong (>8000 psi) shotcrete. Once that shotcrete has set, it will be very strong, but before it sets, it is very heavy and needs to be supported.
Rather than build a separate frame to support the structure which will later need to be removed, I am embedding a rebar skeleton within the structure that will support it while it cures and then reinforce it for the next few hundred years until its final job is making it very difficult for someone to tear down.
The #4 rebar is spaced 12 inches apart (horizontal and vertical), tied and then welded (mainly because my family is climbing all over it). We then use metal lath on the inside, tied to the rebar, to catch the externally applied shotcrete.
You can see how the shotcrete was done on the basement level in this old post. Due to the mess of shotcrete passing thru the metal lath in our basement, we have decided to add an additional layer of fine fiberglass screening to the bedroom. The fiberglass still needs to be backed by the stronger metal lath, but it should prevent much more (probably all) of the shotcrete from passing thru.
The video
The schedule
I don’t want to go back and look at my gantt chart (schedule) to remember how long this process of rebar and lath for the bedroom wing was supposed to take. Actually, I don’t even think it is taking much longer than I estimated. The real problem is that I work full time (and even spent 2 weeks traveling to Germany for work) and there were other important things to work on (the electrical service entrance, ribs and quad deck floors all took more of my time then expected, those videos will be compiled sooner or later), so I just didn’t get to put enough time into this frame.
Of course, I wanted to push thru and try to get shotcrete up before winter, but then I got thinking about all the other things I had to do first, such as install the electrical conduit and build forms for the skylight curbs, and I decided I had best take my time and do it right.
Strategically, I also decided that if I focused on the electrical and garage instead, it would give me an enclosed workshop space to work on those skylight curbs and other forms over the winter and I would be in a better position to proceed in the spring. Hopefully, that works out as planned.
The Side Stories
Zack
Zack (the teen I met thru the high-school guidance councilor) has been helping me off-and-on for a few months now. Zack has many siblings, mostly little girls, but a couple times he has mentioned that he has an older brother named “Will” that would like to help. Now that we are tying rebar, there is as much work as they can handle, so I told him he could bring his brother. It turned out that Will couldn’t make it, but Zack said he would bring another brother. He didn’t give the name, so I told my wife, Sherri, that I would guess it. I figured they were going for late letters in the Alphabet because they already had a “Will” and a “Zack”, so I predicted that they would use a “Y” or “X” for the next brother. I couldn’t think of very many names that began with those letters, and figured that Yuri was unlikely (in our Dutch/German area), but since they went with Zack, I bet my wife that his brothers name would be Xavier… I was right.
Rotating Mount
Sorry if that rotating scene made anyone sick. At first, I thought those rotating scenes were pretty cool, but I may have run the speed up a bit too high in the final edit. I can’t promise not to do it again because I ended up using that mount a few more times to film scenes for upcoming videos ;^). The mount was basically just an Ikea cooking timer that I added a 1/4-20 nut to the bottom (to fit my camera tripod) and a spare go-pro mount to the top. It makes one full turn per hour. This is the Youtube video that I followed (roughly) to make it. It cost less than $7.
Shock value?
There is one sequence in the video where Michael (my 9 year old) is climbing all over the outside of the master bedroom vault. Moments later, Sherri is doing the same thing to tighten all the wires (note her clearly “Egyptian” stance). Anyway, I thought this would freak out my mother-in-law pretty well, and I kind’a like doing that from time to time, so I rushed that clip thru a mini production and put it up on the Facebook site (which you can join up on the right side of this page). To my disappointment, it didn’t surprise her at all. She either didn’t think it was very high or dangerous or she is getting quite used to Sherri doing all sorts of crazy things to build this house. Oh well.
Generator
My generator was on the fritz a bit in the middle of all this and there were several weekends where it would only start on the rare occasion. It started often enough that I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to replace it, but rarely enough that it really killed efforts to get this rebar up and kept shifting me to other jobs that didn’t require electricity. Eventually, we decided that enough was enough and got a new generator. Of course, we got a bigger one. Suddenly my welder has a lot more power and I can weld that rebar much more quickly, so woo hoo. Anyone want to buy a used generator with a mystery starting problem?
The Gallery
Just some pics and timelapse stills from this portion of the build.
