Drawings and Plans

I just realized that I never posted any other drawings besides the detail of the knee wall. I did a few of the elevations myself, and Mark has a really great plan drawing that gives a sense of the interior space.

The entrance is on the North side, at the top. There will be a small mud room that leads into a hallway. There will be a closet on the left and an office space on the right. (Directions are reversed when looking at this picture.) The bathroom and the bed room are down the hallway to the left, and the kitchen and living room occupy the open space on the south side of the house. 

One thing I love about the design is the large picture window on the south side that looks out onto the property. Mark has plans for a garden and a deck, which will make the view even more picturesque. I also really like the openness of the living room and kitchen areas. This will be good for heat circulation in the winter, when the masonry heater is going. 

There have been several changes to the plan since this drawing was made. There will not be a window on the west side of the living room. That's where the masonry heater will go, and it is better to have some good solid insulated wall behind it. There will already be a significant thermal break because of the large picture window. Mark also decided that the sliding door that is drawn in the bedroom will just be a window, and that there will be another on the north wall.

Some decisions have yet to be made. I know Mark was thinking about using partial barriers and partitions for the office space. Perhaps a half wall, or a glass wall. That way it would not be entirely closed off from the rest of the house. There is a lot of time to think about that still. 

Here are some of the elevations that I drew. Hopefully they convey a sense of what the house will eventually look like. 

South Elevation

West Elevation

The roof is pitched pretty high. It will give Mark a lot of expansion space and the possibility of another finished room. Here is a cross section of the roof structure. 

June Update

It has been a while since my last update, and, not surprisingly, there has been a lot of progress! I did not work a lot in May due to finals and the general craziness of the end of the year. But my official internship started June 1st, and I am now in my third week of working full time on the building site. I'm still astonished by how much we have been able to accomplish. In just the first week, Mark and I finished erecting the posts. We have nearly completed the knee wall (against which the stone wall rests), finished installing the flashing, and we have laid a significant amount of stone.

Here is a picture from June 4th. The posts themselves are somewhat obscured by the bracing, the non-vertical beams that make those tipi-like shapes. The site, which is on a hill, is pretty exposed and the wind can be very strong. All the posts have bracing that secures it in all directions, just to be sure that the frame won't blow over. The bracing will probably stay there for quite a while, but will come off when the frame is completely finished, there is a substantial roof, and or we need to start putting in bales of hay.

The whole bracing ordeal struck me as funny because even though the bracing is not a permanent part of the structure, it took so much longer to install compared to the posts themselves. The 2x4s that reach to the ground are anchored with stakes, and to bury those stakes we had to dig holes that were about 2.5 feet deep. This doesn't sound like much, but this site is located on a kame formation, which is a mound formed in conjunction with a kettle, or basin formation. These formations are the result of glaciers melting and depositing the sediment they carry. Pine Lake is actually the kettle to the kame on which we are building. The mounds are generally made of gravel and rocks of varying size, whatever the glacier happened to be carrying and happened to deposit. These mounds have several advantages when it comes to building. Aesthetically it is very appealing to be situated on a hill. There is also great drainage due to the large amount of gravel, so flooding will not be an issue. However, digging in this kind of soil is... difficult to say the least. The most useful tool is called a "Delaware County shovel," and it is a 30 pound solid steel bar used to loosen up the stones so that you can scoop them out. Real shovels are not really much help.

Here's a picture of the kames. They make for really pretty rolling hills. Mark's house is situated on the highest hill, behind where the picture is taken.

After all the posts were up and braced, Mark started on the knee wall. The purpose of the knee wall is to provide backing and support for the stone portion of the wall. It will also partially support the straw bales when they are installed. Between the frame of the knee wall and the stone work there is a layer of R15 extruded polystyrene insulation. Here's a picture that shows all three components.

The stone work has consumed most of our time on the site this past month. It takes a remarkably long time to find and fit the stones together because there is a lot to consider. For a wall like this, that is not slip-form, you have to pay attention to the joints between the stones, the level of the row as a whole, the depth of the stone (whether or not it will run into the rebar). You also don't want the shapes to be too regular lest it be too brick like, so variation in size and shape is good. While you fit them, you also have to leave room for the mortar, which adds between half and inch and an inch to the level of the stone. The most basic rule, however, is that you want to lay one stone on top of two stones. This makes the wall far more stable, as long joints that run up the length of the wall are vulnerable. Sometimes a long joint is unavoidable, however, due to a large rock that reaches up a few levels. But in cases like that it's generally ok.

Here are some pictures of rocks that I fit. You can see that the larger rocks will have large seams on either side, but for the sake of some variation it is ok.

Sometimes, you have to cut the stone to make it fit better in one way or another. Maybe you have to cut a protruding bit off, or angle the face of the rock so that it is more vertical (that is called rocking the face). Sometimes you have to cut the rock in half entirely. This is generally not advisable because it takes a long time with a chisel and hammer and it's usually better to just find a stone that actually fits the spot. But if the fit is otherwise absolutely perfect it is justifiable. This was my first successful major cut, and I'm proud to say, the stone fit perfectly afterwards. :)

The downside to doing this kind of work is that the weather dictates what you can do to a great extent. The mortar, in which we lay the stone, and concrete, which we stuff behind the stone work against the insulation, need to cure and set and are very delicate for a few hours. If it looks like it will be a rainy day it is better to not even try to lay stone. Even on good days, we cover the work we have done to protect it from potential showers during the night. We've had some intense storms in the past few weeks. I caught some nice clouds right before a storm broke last week.

For the coming weeks, we will be focusing on installing the rim joists, which will tie the posts together so that the whole structure can support the roof. We have started on the North wall. Each wall will get a double layer of 2x12s. But since there is not one piece of wood that can span the whole distance, we have to stagger the endings of the 2x12s so that both pieces don't end on the same post. Some of the posts, the solid 6x6s, have a lip cut into them to hold both pieces of wood. But the other posts are 2x6s' nailed together and do not have a lip to keep the rim joist in place. So, we nailed a brace to the backs of these posts, which gives the joists something to rest against.

We will also continue to lay stone. That project will probably continue all summer. But, as we determined yesterday, we are about 3/8ths of the way done with the entire house, and we are nearing the end of third week in June. Perhaps we can finish by the end of the summer. Weather permitting.