Building Home

It looks like our much anticipated "breaking ground day" will be delayed just a little bit. The graders are behind and most likely won't be able to start until tomorrow or Monday, at the latest. It's disappointing to delay but it was actually convenient for everyone- the water truck was madly catching up from a broken truck and was struggling to get to us before the graders (the water truck will wet the ground so it is easier to dig) and we had some last minute trees to get down that we now have time to do ourselves instead of paying someone to rush out and do it for us.

Kirk peaking over the pile of trees and bushes

This whole week has been an intense rush of last minute details- running around paying school fees and fire fees so that the final permits could be issued, hauling wheel barrows full of rocks and logs out of the way of the tractor work, cutting down trees and manzanita bushes, and dragging lots and lots of limbs, trees and brush into a huge pile to get it out of the way.

We had to have a last minute well test done yesterday. We had one done in 2011, when we bought the property, but it turns out the county requires the test to be less than a year old before issuing building permits. The permits are scheduled to be approved any day now, pending a few errands on our part- such as updating the well test- so that we can break ground this Thursday.

I packed up the girls and went over to witness yet another 3 hr well test - another routine formality to appease the county, right?

Our last test revealed a well depth of 275 ft and a static water level of 180 ft so the technician was expecting something similar. His first test revealed.....

NO WATER.

DRY WELL!

He assured me that the instrument could be broken (water level is measured by lowering a weighted wire down the well until an electrical current is detected- so it is possible that the wire was faulty).

He sent a second tube down the well. This time I believe he was performing an air line test (lowering a hose below where water is expected and measuring pressure). His finding?

NO WATER.

Wow- that was close. The flow was great (13 gallons / min). It was actually a little better than it was in 2011 (11gpm) but the depth of the water had gone down dramatically. The pump was sitting 2 ft from the bottom of the well at 268 ft and he estimated the static water level was around 255 ft. This was an extreme and abnormal drought year and many wells around here have dried up altogether. We were lucky that our water didn't drop any lower than it did and hopefully we're seeing a worst case scenario this year. The tech warned me that this August and September could be bad (lowering water level further and degrading flow rate) but he also assured me that a good normal winter would return everything to normal.

We have a start date! The graders are scheduled to start work on June 26.

We have a running list of building expenses going so that we can keep on top of our budget. Every month or so, I add them up to get a current subtotal. We have yet to break ground but we have already spent almost $35,000 getting to this stage. Wow.... the little bits and pieces certainly do add up.

A painfully large chunk went into geotechnical engineering and reports to clear our parcel with the county and assure there aren't any dangerous mining relics under our future house. The house design process was obviously a big upfront cost as well. The rest went into building permits (non-trivial!), tree cutting, septic design, deposit to PG&E, surveying, fire sprinkler system design, energy consultants, large scale printing, and structural engineering.

The scary part is that one of the biggest site prep expenses has yet to come- getting electricity up there is going to blow that subtotal out of the water!

We are officially wrapping up the design phase and entering the building stage of our project. The full set of plans have been submitted to the county for permits and we made our final payment to the designer. In a few days, we will work out the details of the contract with our builder (fixed price, cost plus, or hybrid). We also get to sit down and look at an itemized cost estimate which, up until now, has been a very rough target that we were all trying to squeeze the design parameters to meet. Tuesday we will get a much more accurate picture of how close we are to our budget. I expect that the pace is going to pick up rapidly once those county permits get approved.

Here are some computer renderings of our house!

One of the big hurdles we are dealing with right now is getting electricity to the property. The house will have enough solar panels to break even energy-wise over the course of each year, but it will still be tied to the grid (both for our convenience- no batteries required- and because the county requires new buildings to be hooked up if possible). So, we've been working with PG&E to design a route up to our building site.

The first challenge was figuring out a path for the underground portion of the line- the line will go underground as soon at it reaches our property and then will need to meander up the forested hill to the house site. It took a few tries to nail down a route that can wind 400-500 ft up a hill, squeeze between the house footprint and the driveway (without having to cut through the steel reinforced concrete), avoid the septic lines, put the transformer in a viable spot that won't be too obnoxious, and do all this without making more than 180 deg cumulative bends. Everything is a tight, tight squeeze but we all think the current plan is viable- I just hope that when it gets laid out on paper it looks as good as we are counting on.

The next big challenge is getting an easement from the property owners across the road. Before we can go underground on our own land, we need to get the power to our property from one of the nearest overhead lines. There are not a lot of options. The closest power pole is on privately owned land but connecting to it would help us avoid installing several new poles along the city road to span a much longer distance (at our expense of course!). So far the neighbors seem helpful so my hopes are up.

Next, we will need to get an official surveyor out to change the recorded maps and county documents to reflect a power easement along our own property (giving PG&E access to maintain the lines, etc.) This shouldn't be a big deal other than more time, more people and schedules involved, another county hurdle to record new maps, and more cost, cost, cost.

Then we will have someone dig a 400+ ft trench to lay the pipes that will house the power lines underground all the way from the road up to our site.

PG&E will install a new pole at the base of our property and a transformer on the hilltop between our house site and my parents' potential future building site.

Once pipes are laid, pole and transformer are installed, wires pulled through, the county will come inspect it for code. Once they give the go ahead, PG&E will turn it on and the county will come back one more time for the final OK.

The thing is.... this all needs to happen right this second! PG&E estimates 8-12 wks for a "normal" job and apparently ours is a bit more complicated than normal so they said 12 wks is optimistic. Of course, we will be well into the building process (hopefully!!!!) in 12 wks so our builder will be stuck using a very loud generator until this all comes together. The only thing we can do to speed things up is have everyone poised and ready at each stage. Our schedule is full of visits and estimates from trenchers and tree cutters and the surveyor- hoping to get all the balls rolling quickly.

There is an enormous amount of brush to clean up on the property. We've been dealing with blackberry bushes that try to eat the entire driveway every year. It's impossible to capture with a photo how deep and dense these bushes are. Or maybe it's just impossible to capture how viciously thorny they are! We spent most of the day clearing one side of the first 30 ft of road. Yes! Only 300 ft to go.

We are very close to having a final floor plan. Our designer is busy working on the complete set of drawings to submit to the county when we get home. We are both excited about where the house plan is going but we are also surprised to see how different it is than what we originally imagined.

Some of the changes are small- no wood stove, patios instead of decks, more substantial loft space- and some of the changes are so big that we hardly recognize where we started. For one thing, our straw bales have turned into wood framing and stucco. It's not typical wood framing- the studs are offset to block thermal leaks and it will be super insulated with recycled cotton or special integrated panels. The move from bales was a tough transition for me though. I love straw houses: they are natural, renewable, they breath, insulate, provide thermal mass with the ideal time constant and they create such cool, perfectly imperfect, massively thick walls. But, in our search for a design and build team with expertise in passive solar heating and cooling, we came across a team who we really meshed with and who share our larger goals but who have come to embrace the Passivhaus model. Ultimately this is in line with our wants (to have a house that is designed to heat and cool itself without a large input of energy) but it is also a bit higher tech than we had in mind at the start and is not compatible with straw bale. We've been feeling alternately excited by the high performance we expect and put off by needing ventilation systems and expensive specialty building techniques that constrain other choices. The energy modeling that was just performed on our design is giving great results. In the heat of summer (which is the toughest season for our sunny exposed location), our house should only change by 4 degrees! With such low heating and cooling requirements, it will be easy to put up a minimal PV array and achieve net zero energy use. No utility bills!

Another surprising reality check came from our plan to save money by going super minimalist and industrial. Some ideas in this vein were to use a concrete slab for flooring, leave pipes and plumbing and beams exposed, have no shower enclosure (just a drain in the same concrete floors that cover the rest of the house), put the second shower outdoors, and use salvaged bricks and wood for walls. Some of these ideas are still being incorporated into the house but it turns out they don't provide much, if any, cost savings. The slab requires a bit more earth moving which ends up breaking even with the cost of wood flooring over a perimeter foundation. We are going with the concrete floors anyway because we like them and they add a great thermal mass but they are not the big simplification that we hoped they would be. We have to add a shower floor anyway. It is *more* expensive and complicated to use the slab itself. Who would have guessed?! Exposing the pipes and wires requires nicer metal pipes and conduits (more expensive!) and a loss in effectiveness by running up against gravity instead of down through the slab. There are a few places where it makes sense to leave conduits exposed and we will take advantage of those spots but there aren't many. We will leave quite a bit of interior framing exposed to achieve some raw open beam feel but it turns out sheet rock is awfully cheap and so the choice is more about aesthetics than budget. We will still use as much salvaged finishing wood and fixtures as we can but the salvaging process is still a big unknown to us. I hope we find some cool stuff. Here was another surprise- an outdoor shower isn't compatible with an energy efficient house (heat escapes through the shared plumbing) and so we would actually need to use the outdoor hose plumping and put an on demand water heater outside. The imagined simplification of sticking a shower head outside over some rocks becomes a complication with additional cost instead. We may add this later because I would really love an outdoor shower but the idea was much more appealing when we thought it was a cool way to save money by roughing it a bit.

So, our straw bale, creatively economical, minimalist house has evolved into a higher tech, more mechanical, less natural, and not particular economical house (well, not to build anyway- it will be economical long term with no energy bills). Even with all of that, there are major parts of the plan that haven't changed: our house will be extremely well designed for passive solar temperature regulation, it will have a very open interior with concrete floors, it will be smoothly connected to expansive outdoor living spaces, it will be super functional and flexible in how we can live in it as our lives change, and it will be even more efficient than we had imagined.