21: Siding (part 1)

After finishing the roof, it was time to start putting on the siding, which other than installing the door is the last step needed to make the house weatherproof. The siding I'm using is salvaged redwood fenceboards that are about 7/8" thick and vary in width from 6 to 12 inches.

What I'm doing is fairly standard (other than the fact that it will be salvage wood), but the non-standard thing I'm doing is leaving out any sort of moisture barrier in the wall (such as tarpaper or tyvek) and instead putting on two layers of siding. The reason for not including any moisture barrier is to keep the wall breatheable to prevent mold/mildew/rot damage to the insulation from water vapor from the warm interior air condensing on the inside of the barrier. I was, however, worried that just one layer of siding wouldn't be sufficient to keep water from the outside out, hence the two layers of siding.

Since the siding I'm using is all salvage, it required a good amount of milling and processing. Here's a photo of some stacks of boards, sorted, but not milled:



And one of Chris chopping off beveled ends of the boards:



My friend Michele came and helped with some of the milling, but I neglected to get any photos of her, so instead here's a picture of some of the refuse from milling:



Then a stack of milled boards ready to go up:



The first boards we put on the wall. Miko, Chris, Dave and all worked to put the siding on the first two walls:



Chris chiseling out for the board that goes around the corner of the window:



Chris putting a board up on the wall:



And finally, a photo of the team at work:

20: Roof

After installing the windows, I took off to go spend four days with my family for Christmas. When I came back, I found that Chris and Dave had installed the roof for me while I was gone, which was a pretty sweet present.

The roof I chose is a metal roof, which is the best choice for a couple reasons: Its fireproof unlike cedar shingles, it doesn't leach anything nasty into the soil like any sort of asphalt or tar roof, and it weighs less and is cheaper than clay tile. Plus its pretty easy and straightforward to install.

Here's a picture of the roofing panels before installation with Dave on the roof:



Two of the finished roof:





And one of Chris from above the roof:

19: Windows

I haven't posted in a while, so I'm going to try and catch up real fast. Picking up from where I left off, the next step was to put in the windows, which is pretty straightforward. You just put the window up into the frame, shim it level, screw it into place, and caulk it. I had help from Chris on all of the windows, and Dave for the biggest one.

Here's a picture of a window prepped and ready to go in:



One of Chris looking in from the outside after we put it in:



And Chris standing next to the biggest window:

18: Rafters and roof decking

Lots of progress recently! After getting the walls up, the next thing to do was put the rafters on. In order to do that the rafters had to be cut, first to length with the proper angle on each end, and then with two birdsmouths where the rafters sit on the top-plates of the two walls. This is conceptually probably the hardest cut to lay out, but fortunately, Sketchup makes it easy, and reduces the trigonometry needed to get it right. And then, once you've laid out and cut the first rafter, you can use it as a template and just trace it onto the other rafters.

Here's a (rare) photo of me, cutting the template rafter:



And, as I was working, the Little Man himself, Harper, came out to help me. He's the two and a half year old son of one of my housemates, and he actually comes out to "help" me quite often, but this is the first photo I have of him, and man does he make pink look snazzy:



After cutting all nine rafters, Chris and I threw them up and attached them with standard hurricane ties:



Then, my friend Meredith came out and helped for two afternoons. Meredith, Chris, Dave, and I cut and attached blocking between the rafters, and then put on the roof decking. First cutting blocking for the ends of the rafters (Meredith cutting and Dave putting it up):



Then, Dave putting the roof decking on with the blocking in place:



I ended up using standard 3/4" tongue and groove plywood for roof decking. I would have preferred to use tongue and groove 2x6 (no formaldehyde offgassing), but that’s a lot of 2x6 to put up, and its pretty expensive stuff. Plus, the plywood was all 3x4 foot remnant sections that we already had lying around from another project, so it was free and wouldn't have been used otherwise. Also, I'm not too worried about that much plywood, since it should vent right to the outside (through the quasi-soffit vents) instead of into the building, and its pretty much the only thing that will offgass in my building.

Here's another photo of Dave putting it up:



That’s all for now, although significant progress has been made on roofing and preparing to attach the siding, but I'll save those photos for later.

17: Walls!

So, this is one of those exciting things where you spend a long time preparing for something, and right up to the end it doesn't look like you've made any progress, and then all of the sudden, BAM! everything happens all at once.

Such is the nature of building the walls in sections, which took most of a week, and then I got three of my housemates together (Chris, Dave SC, and Liz), and in one morning put the whole structure up.

First, the framing. Here's a photo of my friend Dave and my housemate (and friend) Chris putting together the wall section that has the door:



Chris building the box-beam style header (to span the width of the door and support the weight above it):



Another of Chris building the header:



After we finished building all the wall sections, Chris and I carried them over to the building site from where we had built them (maybe 100 feet away). I have no photos of carrying them, since they weigh up to 250 pounds, and it was all the two of us could do just to get them over to the site.

Then, we sorted through them and leaned them up against the trees and the structure surrounding the site, ready to be lifted into place:



And then, just like that, we lifted them all into place on the bottom plates, took the big six-foot level and got them plumb and square, and then screwed them all together. Three walls up and the fourth to go:



After getting them all in place, we had to rack a couple of the walls an inch or so with the big come-along we have, and then while still under tension placed some 2x3 diagonal bracing:



We then attached the top plates (basically a mirror image of the bottom plates), and Bam!, there's the house (with me on top of it):



And finally, a photo of Chris and I at the end of a long and productive day of work:

16: Wall layout

With the plates in place and ready to go, it was time to start thinking hard about the walls. And in order to do that, it meant going back to Sketchup, and working some computer-aided-design.

Right to the point, here's the wall layouts (all layouts are looking at the wall from the inside of the structure):

Overall:



The front end wall (looking out towards the apple tree and the rest of the garden:



The front long wall, with the door in it (the wall is 10 ft. tall):



The back long wall (which is 8 ft tall):



And finally, the back end wall:

15: Plates

After securing the lumber I needed, it was time to put the bottom plates down. The plates are possibly the most important part of the structure, since they are the interaction between the foundation and the superstructure, and they are what make the building seismically stable and strong. Yeah earthquakes.

So, my plan for the plates was to take some of that beefy 2x6 that Jim got me, rip them down to 5.5 inches wide (to match the rest of the 2x6 I have), and then pin them to the earthbags with pieces of #4 rebar. Nothing, however, is quite as simple as it sounds - there were some major considerations that I had to address:

1) Water wicking up from the earthbags and rotting the plates.
2) Termites working their way through the earthbags and eating the plates/rest of the structure.
3) The plates needed to be very firmly attached to the foundation, so that in the case of a large earthquake the whole superstructure wouldn't just hop off the foundation and hop away/fall on me.

So, considerations # 1 and 2 I solved with some sheet metal, in fact 6 pieces of 8 by 1 foot 26 gauge sheet metal:



Why does the sheet metal prevent wicking and termites? Well, after nailing it to the bottom of the plates and wrapping the sides up, cladding 3 out of the 4 sides with unbroken metal, there definitely is no water getting from the earthbags to the wood. And similarly, termites have a hell of a time getting past metal (they can't walk on it, and if they try and build their little tubes past is, they don't stick). Furthermore, I'm going to leave at least 2 inches of the metal exposed on both the inside and outside, so if termites somehow do manage to get past the metal, I'll be able to see them, and hence will be able to treat them. Here's what they look like:



And the corner junction (the sheet metal isn't bent into its final shape yet, so those gaps will go away):



With considerations 1 and 2 addressed, I only had to think about the seismic strength of the junction. My plan was to take 2 foot lengths of #4 (.5 inch in diameter) rebar and drive them through a hole in the plate, through the sheet metal, through the earthbags, through the rubble trench, and about 10-12 inches into the ground. Magic had enough rebar lying around for me to make 18 2 foot sections, so I was going to put 5 on each long side and 4 on each short side (approx 2-2.5 feet on center).

Thinking about it, I figured that for lateral stability the rebar would probably be plenty, especially considering the superstructure was going to be fairly lightweight. My main concern was that with only 2 inches of rebar sticking through the plate, in a really big earthquake the whole superstructure, plate and all, could just hop off the top of the rebar and then pull itself apart. I had several thoughts as to how to affix something to the top of the rebar to help prevent the structure from lifting off the top, but all were less that ideal - bending the tops of the rebar over makes the interaction of the bottom plate with the rest of the wall pretty awkward, and there wasn't any way I could get any sort of washer on unless I welded it, which I didn't want to do.

Then, my housemate Chris, who has started helping me build, came up with the idea to use some sort of epoxy or cement to glue the top section of rebar to the plate. With this idea in mind, off to the hardware store I went, and came back with this stuff called anchoring cement (used for affixing metal bolts/posts into holes).

The holes I had drilled were very snug to the rebar (.5 inches), so I went back and drilled out the top half of each hole with a 7/8 inch bit:



Then I pounded the rebar through the plates and foundation:



With help from my friend David:



And then filled the tops of the holes, where they were wider than the rebar, with the anchoring cement, with help from Chris:



After the anchoring cement cures, it will essentially become a big washer that will prevent the rebar from pulling out the bottom of the holes in the plates.

14: Lumber

Alright, I posted about earthbags and windows yesterday, but I've been kind of behind about posting so here's another one.

I spent a good portion of this past week gathering materials for the next phase of the project - framing in the walls/roof. For the walls I'm doing a combination of traditional balloon framing and then platform framing with rake walls. I'll get more into the layout of the walls in another post, but suffice it to say now that I need a good bit of materials to build said walls and roof, and the key part is that I need a couple pieces of 12 foot 2x6 for the top and bottom plates. The rest of the lumber I need is shorter, and thus easier to come by.

So, there's this guy named Jim Steinmetz who works out of Portola Valley operating a business called Reusable Lumber, where he goes in and salvages/demolishes houses and other buildings, and then sells the useable materials out of those buildings. Very cool. His website is www.reusablelumber.com, if anyone wants to check it out.

Anyway, he will often be able to sell most of a specific type of lumber that he has salvaged out of something, but then have a few pieces (ten or fewer) left over that were not needed for whatever reason. A lot of this lumber just ends up getting stashed away somewhere at one of his storage sites, and often never gets sold. Magic, however, can often use random pieces of lumber, so Jim is often willing to donate lumber to Magic.

Fortunately for me, Jim just happened to have about eight 16 to 18 foot pieces of rough-sawn doug fir 2x6 (actual 2 by actual 6) lying around. I think I remember him saying that they were rafters salvaged out of a pre-1900 farm house, but in any case they are beefy and straight old-growth wood, the kind that you would have to pay a fortune for if you were to go to a lumber yard. Here's what a couple of them look like:



After securing sufficient long 2x6 to make the plates, I also needed a bunch of shorter 2x6 for the wall studs. Unfortunately, Jim didn't have any extra 2x6 lying around other than what I took, so I had to get it from another place. Conveniently enough, there is another salvage building material place that is run out of East Palo Alto called Whole House. They are much more aimed at the consumer level rather than the wholesale level like Jim, so I wasn't going to get anything for free, but at 15 cents a foot for nice straight 2x6, its not a bad deal. They are also super helpful, and for those who are interested their website is: driftwoodsalvage.com

Anyway, I picked up twenty 2x6 between 8 and 10 feet long, and then managed to find a bunch more shorter 2x6 to use for cripples and trimmers in the Magic lumber pile. Here's a photo of all the wood I pulled out/purchased, stacked and ready for the framing to begin:



And finally, this nice period of dry weather we've been having is coming to an end, and now the real rainy season is starting, so I managed to find a 22x15 foot blue tarp lying around at Magic, and strung it up over the foundation to provide some shelter from the rain. I apologize, but this means that for a while at least, most of the photos I post will be kind of blueish and darker, since the tarp also filters out a lot of light. Anyway, here's a photo of the pitched tarp:



Ok, that’s all for now.

13: Earthbags (Part 2), and windows

I haven't posted in a while, but now I've got quite a few photos to put up. First off, I had to finish off the earthbags to complete the foundation. I spent the good part of an afternoon tamping them level and flat, which is kind of tricky. While I have no photos of the actual tamping (I was working alone), here is my attempt at suggesting the activity of tamping:



And checking for level using the big 6-foot level. It’s always nice when you can get it right in the sweet spot like this:



Making sure that the bags are all flat and even the length of the wall:



And, lastly, the final, fully tamped foundation:



I just wanted to make a clarification about what I was doing with the contractors plastic, since Kelly Hart (well-known earthbagger) made a comment about it in my last post. The plastic does not completely wrap the earthbags - it covers a little over half of them. Basically it separates the earthbags from the rubble to prevent wicking, and then comes up the outside and wraps about halfway over the top of the bags, under where the 2x6 plate will go. On the inside it just lays flat and extends out about 5-inches under the gravel. Thus, about half of the earthbags are not covered in plastic and will be able to breathe/dry out if they get wet. In one of the photos from my last post the plastic is pinned up on the inside of the bags, but that was just temporary so that I could clean out the inside a bit before laying the gravel. I unpinned and lay the plastic flat before putting the gravel into the middle. Hopefully this isn't too confusing, but I didn't get a good photo of it before the gravel went in.

Anyway, the next day, my friends Deb and Miko came back over to help for the morning, and we went to the garden supply yard to get some more volcanic gravel. It’s a fun place to go, since the guys who drive the front end loaders are surgical with those things - its really amazing to watch. They load tons and tons of gravel/dirt, and not one grain of it makes its way onto the pavement... This is what one cubic yard of volcanic gravel going into the back of a pickup looks like:



We took the gravel back and wheelbarrowed it to fill in the area enclosed by the earthbags. It will be the subflooring for the polished adobe floor, providing a solid flat surface, good drainage, and a measure of insulation (because of all the air gaps trapped in the volcanic rock). Here's Miko and Deb (looking very serious) after we've finished spreading it:



Deb had to go to class, but then Miko helped me prepare the windows for the rest of the afternoon. The windows were salvaged out of a house nearby where the lady who owned the house decided to replace all her windows, and then just a year later she decided to level the whole house and rebuild from scratch. Some of the Magic folks went and salvaged all the very nice windows, along with a bunch of other materials, and have been storing them for about three years, waiting for an opportunity to use them. Then, I come along, and lucky me get to have my pick of many thousands of dollars worth of essentially brand new double pane windows, which is pretty cool.

I'm going to put in four windows (one for each wall), which is a lot of glass. But when you've got as many big, high r-value windows as you want at your disposal, why not? Here's a photo of the biggest window (4x7ft):



And here's Miko (looking like a sneaky ninja) cleaning up the second biggest window (3x6ft):



The other two windows are both 3x4 feet. Another thing to note is that the are vinly windows, which is a good way to illustrate the difference between green building and healthy/natural building. The windows are about as green as you can get (high r-value, double pane, locally salvaged), but they are not all that healthy/natural, since the frames are made from a plastic that can offgass and leach some pretty nasty stuff (phthlates, vinylic compounds, halogens, etc.). Fortunately for me, however, they have already been sitting around for about 4 years (1 installed, and 3 in the backyard of Magic), so they have probably done most of their offgassing/leaching. There definitely are some tradeoffs, but overall they are pretty sweet windows, and its pretty hard to complain when they are free and in such good condition.