A House In A Field
The story of a house. In a field. And how it gets there.
Engineering Inspection
We’ve come to appreciate that building a house is really a series of inspections interrupted by brief periods of work.
There are town inspections to ensure that we’re following the appropriate local codes. Bank inspections to make sure our their money is being well spent. Architect inspections to ensure the design is being followed. And yesterday we had the first of another series of important inspection milestones — engineering.
Building engineers aren’t required for residential construction in our part of the country. But as we were were starting Dash Landing, Rob strongly encouraged us to include one in the project. We weren’t planning a particularly complicated structure, but the engineer would be a worthwhile second opinion against his design. The blueprints would be assessed early in the design process by the engineer and then we’d have a series of field checks during construction to make sure things were going as planned..
And after watching our engineer walk around for an hour with a flashlight and ask a series of questions early this morning, we got pretty high grades for our first inspection. Below are the three small requests and photos from his report :
- A carrying beam terminates over a window on the first floor. You’ll notice in the photo that there was only one small stud transferring the load to the header. We were asked to add two more 2x6s. Easy peasy.
- The load of the hip roof over the porch is carried by a laminated beam. We were asked to add an additional 2×8 support below the beam, nailed flush to the wall. Ironically, the framer was already planning to add that support before the inspection — he just hadn’t gotten to it yet.
- We were told not to bother with hangers on the porch roof joists, but asked to add Simpson straps to the dormer on the 2nd floor. Those were also already planned, but just hadn’t been delivered by the lumber company.
These straps are all about “uplift” — hurricane winds so strong that they’d lift the roof off the building. They’re a great idea, but our contractor is pretty convinced that given the number of Simpson straps, laminated beams and steel in this house, our biggest concern during a hurricane should be the neighbor’s house blowing across the field into our own.
All in all, a great inspection. The three requests were done by noon, the decision not to add hangers to the porch got a cheer from the crew and we’re free to move to the next step.
And you’ve got to like any report that ends with “In general, the framing looked really good.”
“It appears that rural electrification is going on, steadily and as rapidly as the market can take it.” Lewiston Evening Journal, December 9, 1935
On August 19th of last year — while we were still trying to decide if we were going to buy the property — a contractor stood on the site and casually mentioned “Have you thought about electricity?”
Which we hadn’t. Frankly, the notion that we’d have to figure out how to get electricity to a building site located less than a mile from one of the busiest shopping areas in Maine never even remotely occurred to us.
We promptly called Central Maine Power the next day and started on a great adventure.
303 days later, a few missed appointments, a wrongly placed pole, a Britney Spears reference and countless Soviet Union GOELRO posts later, we are pleased to announce that Dash Landing is now electrified.
Just to put this feat into perspective :
* In January, a construction firm in China’s Hunan province built this skyscraper in 15 days.
* NASA estimates — depending on planetary positions — that a trip to Mars will take 230 days.
* From conception to delivery, the average human gestation period is 275 days. (Kanye and Kim Kardashian apparently took a little less because their baby is magical.)
* In 1920-1921, a Commission was established in the former Soviet Union to create a plan to electrify the country. Ten months — just over 300 days — later, a five hundred page plan was presented to the 8th Congress of the Soviets in Moscow.*
Nonetheless, it’s a big day on Dash Landing. The house frame is pretty much done, but we’re imagining that electricity will come in handy as they start to build the garage.
And besides, we were running out of Soviet era clip art.
“We must snatch away God’s thunderbolts. We can use all those volts for electrification.” – Vladimir Maiakovskii
* This can’t be a coincidence
We are at a loss for words. (But we’ll come up with some eventually.)
No power yet, but these comrades spent a lovely day on Dash Landing yesterday.
“Oh, my. That’s a LOT of red.”
One of the smaller, but more significant decisions of the week was the approval of our stain samples. Even as we speak, our friends deep in the heart of Quebec have put down their poutine and are hard at work on Dash Landing’s shingles and exterior treatment.
We hope everyone likes red. Lots and lots of red. The garage/barn is going to be “all its glory” Barnstable Red — board, batten, trim — everything but the roof and window mullions. Imagine the tone of a blushing fire truck, but bigger. The house itself is going to be Maibec White shingles. Sure, it’s white, but with some blue and grey tones. And ditto — all the singles and trim will be the exact same color. The only exceptions will be the window mullions which are a bronze color.
And sitting on top of both will be a galvanized “Oh so shiny” silver metal roof. If you’d like a general sense as to what it will look like on the house, take a look here. The Belgrade building has clapboards versus our shingles, but they’re definitely visual cousins. And if you ever drive up thru Livermore Falls, Jay, Farmington and Kingfield, you’ll see a lot of older homes with the same color scheme.
Maibec white, Barnstable red and a piece of aluminum that we found in the basement.
And for a crappy weather week, we’re feeling pretty good about what got accomplished at the site.
- The whole house is now Zip sheathed and all the interior walls are framed. There might be a few HVAC chases and small walls to finish up, but not much. Next week, the crew is going to start on the porch and stairs. The former will be especially fun to watch — that roof line plays a big role in the “overall look” and connects both the house and garage from a visual perspective.
- Hallejulah the basement floor is done. That was the one thing with the potential of seriously mucking up the schedule and Randy’s crew was able to squeeze it in between rain drops in the middle of the week. We’ll see the mason start the chimney this week and — with any luck — the electrician and HVAC folks will follow soon after. They also poured the garage floor and the supports for the porch and garage connector.
- The driveway looks AWESOME. After spending the last couple of weekends cutting brush and performing death defying feats with chainsaws, Elwyn and the Curtis Lawn Care crew visited us with a chipper. They also took out some of the other dead pine and Damien Hirst’s tree down in the field.
Definite progress.
Only one out of the many truckloads of brush and trees that got chipped.
The “new” look up the driveway.
From the kitchen looking towards the house. Straight ahead is the pantry. Living room is on the left. The hallway leads down past the stairs, laundry area and into the master bedroom. Entry and mudroom are to the right.
All we’re missing is the Wonder Bread…
After another rainy week, the framing crew decided to use Saturday as “catch up” and spent the day on site building interior walls.
Given how fondly we feel about interior walls — nevermind the guys giving up a gorgeous weekend to keep us on schedule — we hauled the portable BBQ up to the site, balanced it on a big pile of scrapwood and whipped up some burgers and dogs served on a little pressure-treated sawhorse table. (The table is now the basement stair stringer. Not sure if that counts as upcycling or recycling.)
Because we’re nothing if not classy here on Dash Landing.
This image probably fulfills the nightmares of every neighbor in a five mile radius.
A dog, a pile of scrapwood, a BBQ and a framing crew. Just another day on Dash Landing.
Attic / storage space over the master bedroom.
2nd floor ridge beam and wall. Stairs will be just to the right of the wall and the doorway leads to two bedrooms.
A House In A Field 