Ridge, and Rafters

 Rafe's last day here working culminated in a house topping ceremony in which we invited a few friends over to help lift the highest beam in the house. Following tradition, we affixed a living bough to the beam to express our appreciation for the trees that went into making our house.

Cid, Rafe, Jesse and Sarah Joy working to raise the ridge beam.

 

Rafters now spanning the main part of the upstairs. The spacing is 24" o.c. on the North side where the span is shorter, and 16" o.c. on the South side.

 

Although Rafe is gone, his shoes show where he would be standing proudly atop the ridge, surveying the new rafters, if he were still here.

The framing looks great! The 2nd floor porch floor framing is complete. Today scaffolding will be brought to the site so they can start framing the high walls and the roof structure. Now that the 2nd floor porch is laid you can really get a feeling for the space in the kitchen/living areas. I'm so excited! I keep walking through the structure and imagining where all the furniture and fixtures will be. To be honest it reminds me a little of playing house as a kid and saying, "the kitchen's here & this is where you wash dishes, and this is where the couch goes..."


The large opening is looking through the living space into the kitchen




south wall L/R: guest room w/office above, dining room, living/kitchen area


Outdoor laundry area under the Master Bedroom, north of the guest room. To the east is the bathroom


South wall with Jesse and Rafe working hard

Rafe leaves this weekend so we're planning on having a little get together this Friday to celebrate the progress thus far and give him a nice send off. They probably won't be done with the roof yet but we might have an early topping out party so he can be here too. Come by if you're in the neighborhood!

Don't forget to leave us some comments.

Framing

The framing is going well so far. Framing is always the fastest part of building a house. It can be very deceptive. As Haas would say, "Never let the client see you frame!"


The first floor was framed in about 2 days. Sara and Haley stopped by to hold up a wall




Then the first floor sheathing and some load bearing interior walls



The second floor is a heart beat away.

forms to floor

Setting the string lines and locating the piers


Sonotubes in place and braced awaiting concrete


Concrete is poured and setting (they look like alien pods in this pict)


Ghost worker slaving into the night


Haas lays out joists


Subfloor and plates gets laid


Rafe is today's super hero! Go headers go!!

Moving Right Along

So we're moving right along. Jesse, Rafe and John have been working diligently and it's paying off. The piers are all poured and the first floor is in place! It's all very exciting and stressful. A work in progress on all fronts. We're learning a lot though and we've had a number of really great neighbors and friends come by and help out for an afternoon here and there. Can't ask for much more then that!

Things are rolling

Much has happened since I last updated this site. Trinity's friend John arrived to help out, we laid out some string lines to mark out where the piers should go, we finally got our building permit, my brother arrived, we started digging...

The structural engineer called for the piers to go 9' deep. I think he was playing it extremely safe because our neighborhood is known to have some expansive, clayey soils, and because a geotech report wasn't in our budget. He did tell us that we might be able to modify that if based on what we encountered as we dug. So, after a day and a half using an earth auger attached to a back hoe, we'd only managed to dig two of our 17 piers. A neighbor who is also a structural engineer stopped by and rescued us by showing us that the soil which was making the digging so difficult was viable as a bearing soil. It's a reddish soil mostly composed of sand and gravel, with redish clay mixed in. I had thought because we were still encountering clay that we didn't have any reason to amend the nine foot depth, but my neighbor explained that with such a small amount of clay, there's really no expansion and that the high amount of sand and gravel created a good bearing. So, we started digging everything to a depth of three and a half feet, and on Monday morning showed up at our structural engineer's office a little before he got to work with a ziplock back full of the redish sandy gravely clayey soil we were encountering. He checked it out, let his boss look at it, agreed, and sent us happily on our way. We still had a terrific amount of trouble with the digging, what with the auger bit getting ground down to the point of unusability, and the drive itself seizing up so that we had to finish the digging by hand. But our neighbor's intervention saved us from having to hire vastly larger and more expensive equipment.

Shorter posts and more of them on the way!

Big Houses

So, I was sitting here at the computer, writing about the house, and getting curious to know how big houses are these days on average. I couldn't find anything very up to date, but I found this link to an NPR story back in 2006:  Behind the Ever-Expanding American Dream House. The best part is the following quote:


"I always wanted a house big enough that my kids could be in their room screaming, and my wife could be in a room screaming, and I could be somewhere else and not hear any of them," he says. "And I think I have accomplished this with this house, because this house is so big that everyone has their own space."

Anyhow, the number they gave was 2,349 square feet- that's the average new house built in 2004.

More Permitting Woes

We got an email last Thursday saying that our permit reviewer was objecting to the definition of Gross Floor Area we used, and didn't accept how we wanted to meet the parking requirements. We lobbied, they deliberated, and as of today they basically rejected our appeals on all fronts. The details get pretty complicated, but basically the city's code has different definitions of Gross Floor Area. This is what determines whether our design is less than the 850 sq.ft. limit for our Secondary Apartment. The one we used is the one that originally was used to evaluate the Secondary Apartment provisions. They're using a definition from new ordinance which has nothing to do with our 850 sq. ft. limit. It makes sense that they would make sure that we're compliant with the new ordinance, but applying its definitions to the Secondary Apartment rules seems like a mistake. The new ordinance explicitly does not eliminate the original definition, and it explicitly is not meant to interfere with or influence the Secondary Apartment rules. In fact, the new ordinance specifically says that the Secondary Apartment section of the code supercedes it in cases of conflict.

Also, they are counting the area of our stairs as livable space twice, as if each stair tread were part of our square footage as well as the space below that tread, too. But you can't fight City Hall. We set out to build a house under 850sq.ft., and changing our design to fit the way the permitting office works is just going to have to be a part of that project.

Permitting Woes

The good news is that we got our life safety permit and our tree permit easily. The bad news is that Trinity taped them to the upper window sash, and they both got ripped up when she opened the lower sash.

Morning Mission to the Permitting Office

This morning Trinity and I went down to One Texas Center with her drawings, freshly stamped and ready for submission. Shout out to Kevin A. for taking one of those pictures.