Time to catch up

Here was the plan... I would take a few minutes out of everyday to politely give everyone an update to how our build was coming along. That was the plan.

I made it one post.

If you've ever built a house, you'll understand when I tell you that cataloguing our every decision, every phase, was not something I was able to realistically keep up with.

Not willing to give up completely, I then decided to attempt to post everything in retrospect.
I made it two posts. Sad, I know...

Bump all that.. Here we are now. If something needs back story, I'll give it.

In this picture, we still need to paint. the exterior is Hardi siding which is primed but not painted. How we ended up with hardi is a whole nuther story. That backstory will have to wait till another post.

Soil Sampling

As I mentioned in my last post, the field retains water in a horrible way. So before we built, we made sure to take the necessary steps to answer the question... "Can we really build here?" The answer came back "Yes", but it would take some engineering... which wouldn't be cheap (more on that when I post re: the foundation)

Here's a picture of Abby and Abram strolling in the swamp. The picture faces northeast... I am standing on the road leading to the pond, which is over my left shoulder. The engineering company is delivering the cool contraption on the road.

It was too wet to bring out the "normal" drilling equipment, so they had to break out the special equipment to avoid getting stuck. A remote controlled track-driven drilling machine. Yeah, it was awesome.




They drilled 2 twenty-foot borings. Every few feet they would take and label a sample. It was so soupy, at times it seemed as though they were taking water samples rather than soil samples. Christy and I couldn't help but think "And we want to build our house on this mess?".


The results were not promising. The geotechnical survey essentially said we were building on crappy ground. It only took 30 pages of engineering-speak to tell us that.

The short version. We have very silty dirt which retains moisture. That silt sits on top of highly expansive clay... meaning that when it gets wet it expands, causing the ground to heave. "highly expansive" is apparently a 4-letter word in the foundation/engineering world. After the layer of clay, there's more silt sitting on top of even more clay. The clay (at both levels) acts as a liner of sorts... It doesn't allow water to soak into the ground (no wonder most successful ponds have a clay base). As a result, we have a water-table 1 to 3 feet below the surface... Making engineering a challenge... to say the least. But more on that later when we talk about our foundation.

The Field

The field is a 13 acre hayfield. It retains moisture horribly in the winter and spring, so we chose the highest spot in the field. (far right of picture 1)
I realize these pics are pretty non-descript, so i will attempt to help.

Picture 1 demonstrates the main driveway off FM 561. You can kinda see the "crop circle" on the far right which is the actual build site. The main driveway will take you to the farmhouse, where we are living during the build process. This picture is facing South, North is to your back.



Picture 2: The then grass driveway leading up to the build site (center). The cluster of trees (top-center) hides a pond. The driveway continues beyond the homesite to the left, leading to the pond. This picture faces West.


Preface to picture 3: We eventually figured out that we should take pictures of the various stages of the build from the same spot. So later we could have are really good idea of the house "coming up". We hadn't had that epiphony at this stage, but this location is probably the closest to the later-chosen "spot".

Picture 3: This picture faces south-southwest. The road to the right is the road mentioned in pic 2 leading to the pond. The driveway is out of frame to the left.

More to come. Next time: The Soil Sample.

The Plans

Let's get this kicked off with posting a simplistic version of our plans. After looking at literally thousands of house plans, this is what we decided upon.

http://www.houseplans.com/plan_details.asp?id=338

One deciding factor for us was the location of the Home Office. We really like the idea of having it connected to the master suite. In the past, the office has been on the opposite side of the house or in a guest bedroom. This became quite annoying when we had overnight guests and I needed to work late... tip-toeing around by their door or unable to do any work at all.

There are tons of other great features we love about the house, but don't want to discuss them all on the first post...