The O-B Book has been a great help for us so far, and we're just getting started with the fun stuff.  We're in month #4 of planning and devoting at least 2-3 ours per day to that. Doug in Cedar Rapids, IA

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No, I haven't abandoned the blog.

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 9/16/2008 8:32:07 PM

I've been just too busy the past four months to take time to update the journal and post photos. In fact, I haven't even taken a lot of photos the past four months!

I promise, I will get an update here before long. We are well into construction with interior framing complete, rough in electrical and plumbing complete, the roof on, and just today completing the spray foam insulation on the underside of the roof. Siding and drywall come along next week. My helper, Tom, and I will do the siding but I'm going to contract out the drywall.

Then comes the finish work!

13 Follow up on earlier post

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/26/2008 9:46:22 PM

One thing I forgot to mention in the earlier post about the foundation walls. Expanded polystyrene shrinks! When we laid down the first course of blocks for the foundation wall we tied them all togther with zip ties. Naturally this pulled the blocks snug to each other. What happened then is the long wall that was supposed to be 46' long ended up being 45' 11" long, a full inch short of the drawing dimension. The 40' 1" long wall ended up at 40' even. In both cases I had to make an adjustment in some room sizes and interior wall locations to adjust for the 1" difference. As it turns out, the 22' and 28' walls ended up pretty close to target dimension. Go figure.

So, if you build with ICF blocks be aware that 12 times 4' may not equal 48'.

12 Completing the walls

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/26/2008 9:37:25 PM

Finally, on Friday May 23, we poured the concrete in the walls, only a week or two behind what I expected a month ago!! The pour went without a hitch, except for concrete quantity. I estimated we needed about 44 yds, so we ordered 46 to be on the safe side. As fate would have it, we were finished at 40 yds. Ouch! 6 yds ordered and delivered that had to go back to the plant. When I reviewed my calculations and refined them down to the inch of wall length minus exact door and window opening sizes, I still ended up with an estimate of 41.5 yds. All I can figure is there is a fair amount of air trapped in the concrete. A check of the areas below the windows and the corners and tees the next day revealed no voids so I'm confident the concrete is solid all around.

Once again we found ourselves under the gun time wise to get ready to pour on Friday. I wanted to do it Friday so that we could take advantage of the long weekend for it to cure before we return to work on Tuesday.

The oversize corner blocks created a problem in getting the top course of blocks in place, particularly on one wall that is 12' long. The two corners tipped in toward each other to the point that the distance between them was 1" less at the top than at the bottom. After forcefully moving the corners back with the alignment braces I got the difference down to 1/4" and was able to force fit the top course of blocks.

When I was checking the height of the walls all around to determine how much we would have to trim to bring them all level we found out the top of wall elevation midway between corners was such that all the pre-cut interior studs would have to be trimmed, or the wall plate made thicker. This was so the truss bottoms would match the outside walls and the tops of the interior walls. What to do? Based on some discusssion on GreenbuildingTalk.com I looked on the web for some metal angles to put on top of the wall. I decided we could set the metal level all around at the correct height and trowel the concrete to that level. After some searching I found that 2 1/2" steel studs exist and the tracks into which they are fastened is a channel 2 1/2" wide, the same as the form foam. We placed the channels all around the top of the wall leveling them with blocks in the top course cut to the exact height needed. Worked good, except they're proving to be a pain to remove now that the concrete has set up! I checked it out on Saturday.

A significant last minute change was the master bath glass block window opening. When we went to install ICFVL connectors in the wall as anchor points for future grab bars around the toilet we discovered a real interference with the window location. After thinking about it overnight I decided to bite the bullet and move the opening 2' to the right. Consumed about 3 hours on Thursday, and we were committed to pouring on Friday!

Photos

Typical view of alignment bracing system in place with scaffold planks. Sure is a good thing OSHA doesn't focus on small DIY projects! The scaffolding would never pass muster!	The 2 1/2" channel installed on top of the forms. This is above the patio door. You can see the rebar system with stirrups, or hairpins, supporting a rebar just above the opening.	View of the SW corner of the house after the pour. There were no leaks, blowouts, or deformed bucks in the openings. All our work getting ready kept disaster at bay.
I attached a block to the top of the story pole for checking the top of wall elevation. I used a form block cut exactly in half with a short piece of channel on top to check the height. I then cut an ICF block the right height to support the channel at the desired elevation. I did this at the ends of the channel and used half size blocks, which were lesser height, in between. This way I could utilize one full form block in two pieces and still have a top of wall level and at the correct elevation. Nearly all of the walls were "bathtub" shaped, high at the corners and up to 1/2" lower midway. Full size forms cut exactly in half did not provide the height needed, so leftover pieces were cut to the right height and placed to support the channel ends and middle.	Before the pour. This is the wall that in an earlier post I discuss how I straightened out the snake curve in the foundation wall portion. Looks good! Don't you agree?	After the pour. The metal channels are turning out to be stuck pretty good between the concrete and foam and ain't comin' out easy!
Garage doors before the bucks and lintel forms are in place. Notice the blue foam on the buck lying on the floor. That's sill seal that we put on the concrete side of all the bucks to keep the concrete away from contacting the wood. Not sure it's fool proof but considering our dry climate I decided it was good enough.	Garage door after the pour. This is typical of how we did the bracing of the bucks. We put both vertical and horizontal braces about every 2' to 3'. There was no sagging or bowing of the bucks anywhere. The two ICFVL connectors above the door are for the door spring center anchor and the anchor for the opener track.	Master bath glass block window opening after moving it 2' to the right. The big OSB scab on the left (there's one on the outside also) is to cover the joint where I simply moved the blocks pieces I cut out from the right over to the left. I wasn't about to dismantle and restack the wall! It all held together during the pour.
The bedroom south wall had a crook in it right above one of the windows and between two upright braces. We fixed up extra bracing to pull the wall in. That's two 2x6s on the inside with all threads going to a peice of LVL board on the outside. We cinched them down real tight and sucked the wall in pretty darn straight. Won't move ever again after the concrete has cured, that's for sure!	Outside view of the brace above.	One of two patches we needed to repair holes in the wall. This was about 4" wide by 10" high. That's a piece of 2x12 with an all thread going through the wall and a 2x4 on the inside. To keep from leaving the all thread in after the concrete cures I sleeved it with 1/2" poly tube. I'll pull it out in a day or two and fill the poly tube with foam.
Another hole repair. This is piece of subflooring covering a 4" by 20" hole. I cut it deliberately to remove some excess canned foam I blew in the wall filling in some gaps between blocks. I guess I was trigger happy with the foam gun.	Inside end of the patch above. The bedroom hole patch was basically the same.	This was the high corner in the garage. I trimmed the inside of the form to the desired elevation and the concrete finisher leveled to it. I'll cut the outer side off before we put the sill plate down.
This is the kitchen/garage wall. You can see how the outer side of the form goes from concrete level to about 1/2" above at the corner. This is in a distance of about 14'. How much of this was caused by the oversized corner blocks, and how much was caused by the footing concrete not being perfectly level, I do not know. Most of the rest of the garage wall was within 1/8" of the reference corner so I did very little trimming elsewhere, except for the other front corner which I trimmed about 1/4" for a couple of feet or so each way from the corner.	Here's the 12' wall I had a struggle with. The corners tilted in toward each other to the tune of 1". This was definitely caused by the oversize corner blocks. By forcing the corners plumb I was able to get the requisite length of blocks in at the top.	To check the straightness of the wall we used a string line up against the vertical alignment braces. In some cases we had to pull the wall back an excess amount and then push the brace against it to keep the brace snug against the form.
Lesson learned! Silicone lube doesn't harm polystyrene, but the carrier it's in sure can! I gave Tom a new can of Liquid Wrench Silicone spray to lube the 3/4" conduit before pushing it down the corner holes in the the forms. We had used a different brand of spray silicone lube in the foundation wall with no problem, but that can was empty now. This time though, the spray lube dissolved the foam down about 8" to 12" before being rubbed off to a harmless level. Checking the can, I discovered there was a fair amount of petroleum distillate in the lube which is not good for foam!

11 Stacking walls

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008 9:34:01 PM

April 29, 2008

Another milestone! We started stacking the walls.

As soon as we started on the wall stacking I realized we had a serious problem with the straightness of the front wall. See my earlier post about the crooked front wall. I just could not bring myself to continue the wall with that kind of 'snake' curve in the wall. What to do? I hit upon the idea of cutting a groove into the bottom of the first course of blocks that would allow me to shift the blocks side to side thus being able to get them into a straight line. It worked.

We made the first change to the plans as I have them drawn that affects the cosmetics of the house. When we installed the side bucks of the master bath glass block window and then laid the top buck on them we could readily see that it just didn't look right. I planned for the bottom of the window to be even with the bottom of the bedroom windows. But because the block window is only 40" high compared to 60" for the bedroom windows the tops were way out of line, too much to look good. We raised the window about 5" to bring it up to about the same elevation as the glass block window we had in our Louisiana house, which we liked the looks of. Now it looks much better.

One difficulty we've encountered is oversize corner blocks. After struggling to get some corners plumb, and trying to figure out why we were having gaps between courses near the corners, we finally discovered that the corner blocks we have are slightly oversize. This causes the corner to be about 1/2" higher than the straight wall after all 6 1/2 courses are laid.

For a complete review of the problem review my thread on GreenBuildingTalk.com.
http://www.greenbuildingtalk.com/Forums/tabid/53/forumid/4/postid/36038/view/topic/Default.aspx

In one corner of the garage when we plumbed the wall we ended up with a gap between the bottom course of blocks and the foundation course. I put canned foam in there to fill in the gap. We'll end up doing much the same thing in every corner. The top course of blocks will be trimmed as necessary to create a level top all around.

Photos

If you look close you can see how the front foundation wall is crooked. I didn't catch it before we poured the foundation wall even though I had taken this photo.	Here's the groove I cut between the two rows of nubbins on the first course of wall blocks.	Here we have a nearly 1/4" offset in the block alignment. The foundation wall was up to 1/4" out of alignment. I will have to do some fudging of the wall plane along the floor but rasping and spacers will take care of it. This area will be covered by baseboard inside and is at ground level outside so in the end it should not be noticeable.
This is on the other side of the doorway from the photo above. I had to shift the blocks here almost a 1/4" the opposite direction.	Much straighter now! Sure makes me feel good how well this fix worked out.	Master bath glass block window opening located per my drawing. It just didn't look right being that low.
Master bath block window in higher position. Looks much better. So far this is the only real cosmetic change from what I have on the drawings.	Two full courses of wall block are in. At this point we installed the bucks for the window sills.	We used 2 x 6s for the window bucks placed inside the form. Because the 2x6 is only 5 1/2" wide and the form space is 6" we need to fill in the gap. I started out using 1/2" Styrofoam but it proved to be more trouble than it's worth to stuff it in the crack.
Here's the gap filled in with canned foam. Lot easier to use and is surprisingly stiff once it's set up. The bucks are fastened with 4" screws and plastic washers spaced 8" apart on both sides. After the concrete has cured the screws on the outside will be removed and used to screw through the flanges of the windows.	We are using Doug Fir for all the bucks. Because this is close to the ground you aren't allowed to have untreated wood in contact with concrete. We have blue sill foam on the back side of the 2x12 to protect it from the concrete in the form. Here you see a 1 1/2" square strip of pressure treat on the bottom of the DF. The OSB is a temporary support flange until the pour is done.	I hate the looks of electrical service conduit on the surface of the wall. The best place for the meter worked out to be right here on the garage wall that is visible from the front. The meter base is flange mounted. I have the conduit inside the ICF with its front surface flush with the foam. Canned foam fills in the gaps. This will be covered by OSB for strength during the concrete pour.
This is where the walls are today, Sunday, May 11, 2008.	Sometimes even the most mundane of material goods will yield a bit of art. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make a little art out of this project!

10 Subflooring

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008 9:32:46 PM

April 24, 2008

The subflooring installation was pretty much straight forward. I used Advantech 3/4" flooring. According to tile guys on John Bridge tile forums Advantech is the best there is. It's priced between OSB and plywood and better and stiffer than either. It also will withstand normal weathering for up to six months without edge swelling.

We did have one problem. On the bedroom wing we started in the bathroom corner with a full sheet. The next sheet was short because it came to the shower. Beyond the shower we should have used a half sheet and that's what I had on my layout sketch. But we laid down a full sheet. Subsequently the next row of sheets ended up with ends lining up with the first row. We had to use some 32" inch long pieces in order to assure staggered joints. Oh well, I guess it's a lot to expect that everything works out according to plan.

Lesson learned:
Pay attention to the plans!

Photos

Subflooring partially completed.	We covered the floor with tar paper to help keep it clean.	Sunlight art. The stripes of sunlight on the crawl space floor caught my attention and I thought they looked a little bit 'artsy' so I took this shot!

8 Garage slab and door thresholds

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008 9:31:52 PM

April 9, 2008

Now we move on to the garage slab and the door thresholds. I want to get the garage into usable condition as soon as possible so we can quit renting the container and toilet. I'm putting a toilet in the corner of the garage. Doesn't cost much and will be convenient. Because some of the plumbing was going to be buried under the garage slab I had to set about getting it done. I'm doing my own plumbing so doing it piecemeal and fitting it in as work progresses makes sense. The only thing the plumbing inspector called me on during a quick visit to check on progress was my failure to use a double clamp were my water supply line was spliced into a stub out from the water meter. I wasn't quite ready for him to inspect the drain lines but he took a quick look at them. The next day when he returned  for the inspection he already had the tag filled in and signed and in his pocket! He verified the existence of the double clamps and no water leaking from the drain plumbing and stuck the sticker on the sewer cleanout!

My approach to the inspectors has been to talk to them well ahead of time, let them review what I'm planning on doing, and ask questions. I then call and let them know where I'm at and ask if they need to come do an inspection. My philosophy is to let the inspector say he doesn't need to come check rather than have him ask later, "Why didn't you call me?"

I don't have a lot of photos for this phase. Kept forgetting to take them!

Photos

The garage concrete will be in three parts, the driveway, door sill, and floor slab. Here you see the form for the door sill. The foam is tapered to avoid sharp corners in the concrete. We added rebar after I took this photo. On the inside of the wall you see a strip of 3/4" Dow Styrofoam. It is positioned to be directly under the door will create a thermal break between the sill and floor slab. The garage will be semi-heated, meaning that it will be well insulated and will have a heater in it. Because of the ICF foundation and main wall I expect the garage to stay close to 50F even without added heat. The thermal break in the doorway will help a lot to achieve this.	Garage entry door threshold. Same idea here with the blue foam thermal break. In the case of the door thresholds the concrete extends about 2" beyond the foam, is sloped to the outside, and overlaps the dimple membrane. Water that gets on it will run down around the front and onto the membrane. The front porch slab and patio slabs will have a 1" to 2" gap between the slab and house wall. This will allow water to drain down around the slab and not puddle up against the wall. I'm doing this because the slabs will be only 1" below the top of the threshold for accessibility. I will be using ADA sills in the doors that span over the thermal break. What this all means is that I won't have a high barrier to prevent water intrusion under the doors so I have to use a different approach. Winter snows may present a problem. We'll find out. Like I always told my kids, "You can't have everything!"	Patio door threshold form. Here the thermal barrier foam strip will be installed when the house floor is installed. All of the thresholds will be finished with something like SpreadStone or SpreadRock so I'm expecting them to look pretty decent. Rock thresholds would have been nice but they're a lot more pricey and more work than concrete.
Freshly placed garage slab. The near doorway is into the kitchen. Because there won't be the temperature difference from one side to the other like the outside doors there is no thermal break foam strip here.

9 Pony walls and crawl space finish

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008 9:31:30 PM

April 15, 2008

While we were waiting for the garage slab to be poured Tom was busy building pony walls, hanging ledger boards on the long walls, and installing sheetrock. We were doing as much work as possible in the crawl space area before we started the floors. Lot easier to do plumbing and hang sheetrock when you can stand up!

Tom started out using the water level to level the ledger boards but after one board was half fastened in place he decided to use the laser to double check things. Turns out the water level wasn't working out near as well as we expected and the board was about 1/8" off in places. He changed to using the laser from then on. Just goes to show the simpler system isn't always better!

Because my heating/cooling system will be moving air through the crawl space it is considered a part of the living space of the house. Therefore there can be no exposed foam insulation according to the International Residential Code. I concluded the easiest and least expensive way to cover the foam was to use sheetrock. But, because we wanted to put it on before the floor was in, and because there was no way to know what the weather would be like, I didn't want to risk using ordinary interior rock. One rainfall and it would have been toast. So we installed exterior sheetrock. Not sure but I think it may be about half again the cost. Later, when I was washing down the rat slab I sprayed water on it with not affect at all.

We also finished the insulation on the footings. We cut and glued a strip on the top side of the footing. I mitered the edges of the side and top strips and covered the corner with aluminum tape. There is no exposed foam insulation in the crawl space at all.

Photos

Insulation and sheet rock around a footing step.	Footing insulation finished with aluminum tape.	Master bathroom toilet drain. Took some doing to get a configuration that would fit and have acceptable venting. The vent goes behind the ledger board and will continue up to the attic space in the foam. The 2 1/2" of foam will cover a 2" vent pipe but fittings do need to be chiseled into the concrete a bit. This is the only place where I had to hack out a bit of structural material to make something fit. I had to cut about a 2" notch in the ledger board, but we have an extra connector here. You also see the second part of the ICFVL connector system. The metal you see is a J piece that wraps around under the beam. There are 8 screws going through the front metal and board into the connector plate that is embedded in the concrete of the wall.
We continued to use the crawl space half of the chicken ladder after backfilling was done.	Pony walls completed. Where there were sharp changes in the contour of the crawl space floor we used headers. These places also provide access points for moving around in the crawl space.	Center beam and post under the bedrooms. Here you can see how much deeper the crawl space is on the low side of the grade.
The two short pony walls are for the showers. In this case the joists hang from the side of the pony wall instead of resting on top. All the joists are 9 1/2" deep, except under the showers. There I used 7 1/4" LVL, the same material as the ledger boards, hung in 9 1/2" joist hangers. This puts the shower floor 2 1/4" below the bathroom floors. This will be adequate for a mud base for the shower tile and will make the shower floor the same level as the bath floor. Here again this is for accessibility. The showers will be curbless thus facilitating wheel chair and walker access.

6 Foundation wall pour

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008 9:27:43 PM

March 26, 2008

Pouring the foundation wall went well with no problems at all. We used a 7 bag pea gravel mix with a slump of about 6". The concrete flowed real well and consolidation was no problem. The contractor used a 2 1/2" grout hose on the pumper which made it easy to keep the concrete dropping into the wall cavity. He dropped very little on the top of the forms. I had laid down 4" wide duct tape on the top edge to keep the nubbins free of concrete but it was hardly needed!

Photos

Concrete pumper. I rented a storage container for equipment and material storage until the garage is complete enough to use for such. I hung a canvas, weighted at the bottom with a chain, in the doorway to cut down on the wind blown dust getting into the shed, as we call it. The wind has been blowing almost constantly right from the get-go. It's getting old!	Concrete contractor, Paul, in red shirt, my ICF supplier in brown, and a representative from Idaho Concrete, doing the pour in a 3 block high section of the wall.	All done! I could hardly believe how little concrete, or water, leaked out from under or through the wall blocks. I must have done a better job of foaming the blocks to the footing than I thought!
Here you see 4 conduit ells that extend from the crawl space up to the surface of the yet to be placed garage slab. These will be used to pass PEX water supply lines from the garage into the crawl. The circle with an X that you see was supposed to be another sleeve for a sanitary drain line. Fortunately, a few days later when I noticed that we had missed putting the sleeve in before the pour, the concrete was still green enough to punch a hole through fairly easily! The octagon metals are Simpson ICFVL connectors to which the ledger board will be attached. Floor joists will be hung from the ledger.	Jake, Paul's son, is placing concrete in the bedroom end of the foundation wall.	There are four of these columns for the porch posts. The pad was poured with the footings and the tube with the foundation wall. This gives you an idea about how much fill there will be in the front of the house. The porch slab will be about 6" above the tube. I don't like walls in the yard, and front yards don't get used much except for looks, so we'll have a sloped front yard from the porch to the street.
This shows what the concrete looks like after it has set inside the form.

7 Waterproofing & backfilling foundation wall

Posted to dmaceld by MacArthur in Nampa, ID on 5/11/2008

April 1, 2008

The next phase of the project was to waterproof the exterior of the foundation wall. There's isn't universal agreement among ICF builders as to how much waterproofing is really needed, and what the best approach to it is. The method used depends on the severity and likelihood of water coming up against the wall. In my case since SW Idaho is pretty arid and most of the water around the house is coming only from sprinklers I decided I didn't need a super duper waterproofing system. The system I chose was to place dimple plastic membrane over the foam with no emulsion or peel & stick on the foam. The foam is quite water resistant but not absolutely water proof. The idea of the dimple membrane is that water that encroaches from the ground to the wall will run down the membrane to the french drain. Whatever water does get past the membrane will readily run down the wall because the dimples keep the plastic away from the foam. The air gap between the membrane and foam prevents water from building up pressure against the foam.

Two lessons learned:
First, the dimensional stability of the dimple membrane is very sensitive to temperature. We installed quite a bit of it in the morni