Bryan volunteered to travel from Idaho to help us frame the walls. We started out, randomly, on the north side. For the first wall we cut slots into the pressure treated bottom plate lining up with the anchor bolts in the concrete slab, thinking that this would make it easier to stand the walls. Turns out, it was just as easy to take a couple measurements and drill holes for the anchor bolts.
Bryan nails the first board. We should have been using galvanized nails to nail through the treated sill plate, because the treated wood can corrode nails. I went back after the walls were up and toe-nailed the studs into the plate (code approved) with galvanized nails.This is the easy part. Everything looks simple and clean. The beams to carry the second floor framing can be seen. The OSB sheathing panels on the corners will keep the walls square and plumb.
We worked our way around framing the exterior walls. Then we went back and stapled OSB sheathing on the corners to keep everything square. The next phase is laying out the second floor joists and rolling them into place. Holderness Supply in Tucson designed the I-joist floor system and sent the whole package, including beams, hangers, layout drawings and, the 3/4″ sub-floor.
February 2023. Bryan and I built the form work for the slab and we got all the reinforcing steel for the footings in place.
After some major weather inflicted delays, in early March the plumbers installed the ground work (all of the drain pipes and vent pipes for the eventual plumbing fixtures) which will be buried in the ground under the concrete slab.
What a mess!Shit flows downhill and payday’s Friday.
With that work finished, we were able to backfill the trenches and bring in the ABC material for under the slab. ABC means aggregate base course and it is a mixture of course and fine gravel and dirt. It’s called different things in different parts of the country, but it’s used under slabs because it’s easy to get level and smooth, it compacts nicely and it provides drainage.
The ABC fill almost done
At 5000′ elevation it gets cold here during the winter, even though we are 30 minutes from the Mexican border. A heated slab is the most comfortable and quiet way to heat, at least the lower level. We decided on a hydronic system which uses heated water running through loops of pipe buried in the concrete. A propane boiler will heat the water and pump it through the embedded pipes via a manifold system which feeds five circuits and two separate zones. There will be two thermostats regulating the two zones.
Mock up of the manifoldsHydronic layoutDocumenting the position of pipes Manifolds in place and pressure tested
We were lucky to find a good crew to place and finish the concrete slab. Originally I was going to place a 6 mil poly vapor barrier under the slab, which is standard practice in some parts of the country. Luis convinced me that doing that here would create more problems than it solved. Namely, the top of the slab would cure more quickly than the bottom which would result in cracks. All concrete will crack, but we might as well mitigate it as much as possible. He also helped layout the control joints which are tooled into the wet concrete rather than cut in later. The slab will remain exposed in the finished house, so this was an important design element. ( editor’s note: 10 months later the slab still only has one minor crack outside the control joints)
Shit getting real!Hand made!
Getting the slab poured was our goal for this winter, and we barely made it! Now we get to go back to our summer jobs to make some more money so we can carry on in the fall.
I learned from one of the first general contractors I worked for after college that every time you start a new job you are preparing to go to court. I learned to keep a daily diary recording the weather, who was on the job, and what happened. I was never in court (for that) but it’s a practice I try to keep now.
Today is February 22, 2023 and it is starting to snow in southern Arizona, after a night and day of winds at 35 m.p.h. with gusts that might blow a man down. We have the footings excavated and the form boards in place for the slab on grade. The plumber is scheduled for Friday to put in all the drain pipes that need to be under the concrete.
I rented a mini excavator on Saturday the 11th and Russell came and finished the footings Sunday. He makes it look easy, but trust me……it’s not. The outside edge of the footing trench wants to be in line with where the form boards will go for the outside edge of the slab in order to minimize wasting concrete.
Giving new meaning to the word “mini”This is the objective, even though there may be a little bit of hand-work left at the end. These 2×8’s were left over from building the chicken coop and we will be able to re-use them in the house.
Steel was delivered on Thursday, the 16th and we finished the forms, 99% anyway, on Friday. After the plumbing inspection we can lay down the 4″ of gravel sub-base and finish tying the reinforcing steel.
Santa Cruz County has approved our application for a building permit. Bless their hearts. $2000.00 for a house smaller than 1400 square feet seems reasonable.
Because contractors here are either unresponsive or terribly expensive, we will be doing most of the concrete slab work , and, probably, as much as we can after that, ourselves. We know a former general contractor from the area who is very generous with his time and skills. He has another day job now, and does this kind of thing on the weekends, so we are sort of at the mercy of his schedule.
Skid-Steer SavantScraping Off The Organic Material“The First Cut Is The Deepest”
To my surprise, the first couple of feet of soil on this part of the lot were clay, still saturated even though that far below the surface. Last year, when we excavated for the chicken coop and for the septic tank, the soil was more of a granular sand and gravel type, and that’s what I expected.
Montmorillonite, smectite and bentonite, oh my. Expansive clay is bad for supporting any type of structure, because when it gets wet, it expands with a force that can break dreams.
The next morning I reserved a skid-steer tractor from a local rental place. I was able to dig out the cohesive clay material down to a more granular, and more predictable, substrate.
Here we have the batter boards and string lines which define the outer walls of the new house. The strings locate the top of the slab floor. 18″ below that the bottom of the thickened edge resides, well into durable native soil.This corner is the lowest elevation and the control point for the top of the slab and for the excavation of the thickened edges.
Next weekend we hope our guy can dig the thickened edges and interior footings. The week after involves setting the forms for the slab, which we will do. The plumber is on notice, since then it is his turn to put in all the drain and water supply pipes.
It is winter solstice in southern Arizona and the solar panels on our coach don’t get enough sunshine to fully charge the batteries. Additionally, it is so fucking cold (50’s during the day and high 20’s at night) that the furnaces run a lot. The battery voltage has been as low as a little over 11- barely more than dead. Running the generator during the day helps to top them off.
Regardless, we are planning to make the new house totally reliant on solar power. The chicken coop roof is designed to carry 18 solar panels and is oriented to the south with a slope of 25 degrees. We plan on using 48 volt lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries to store the sun’s power. These batteries store tons, or more accurately, kilowatt hours, of power and can be drained to 80 and even 100% of their capacity without damage. A line buried in conduit to a sub-panel will power everything in the house. This will work for two reasons: -because I want it to, and -because in order to run new lines to our property, the utility company wants the same amount of money an off-grid solar system will cost.
After all, we are in southern Arizona and it’s a shame not to use all the sunshine we get. Plus I trust the engineers at Northern Arizona Wind and Sun to provide me with a system which has the ability to power the house even when the sun doesn’t shine for a few days.
The house footprint is staked and I am meeting with excavators and concrete placers to get prices. The first bid for the concrete had me considering buying a mini-excavator and starting my own business. We are still willing and able to put as much sweat equity into the house as possible, but forming and placing and finishing concrete, while it might look simple, requires a lot of practice. And we will hire a pro for that.
Well, we have decided to scrap the house plans we have been working on for the last 6 months in favor of the idea we originally had when we found this property and thought about building.
It was important that the living spaces take advantage of the desert sunsets and of the views of the Santa Rita Mountains. The idea was for a 2 story house consisting of a living room with a western exposure, and a kitchen oriented to the east for the morning sun- all on the 2nd story. The 2 bedrooms would be on the first floor along with the entry.
We were not crazy about the resulting elevations which looked sort of like a fire lookout tower. Not that there’s anything wrong with fire lookout towers, it just seemed out of place.
Then I thought I wanted a sort of “compound” with several buildings of different scales and materials looking as though they were all built at different times. Like some precious old west reproduction. Fuck, I might be a hipster. We already have the shop/carport and thought we could build a casita between that building and the main house that would make a nice transition between the buildings and would create some drama. There were problems with the new plans too. After staking out the footprint, the house didn’t really inhabit the site like I thought it would. And there was some awkwardness with the floor plan. There was also awkwardness with financing and we started discussing building in phases. Those discussions led back to building the simpler, original house.
Those plans are now with the architect and engineer who will provide the information the Santa Cruz county building department needs in order to issue a building permit. The goal is to have the slab on grade poured this winter, the house closed in next winter, and the finish work done the following winter. That’s a ridiculously long time to build a 1400 square foot house, but hey, we’re old folks.
As soon as I typed this title I thought of Christine McVie. R.I.P.
Our chicken coop was built in response to a particular building, but also as an attempt to build something that reflects a history. A long time ago, people would build shelters which fit into the landscape and which provided shelter from elements like wind and sun and at the same time provided some sort of comfort. In the desert southwest there is a ubiquitous form which goes a long ways towards meeting these goals. Mainly as an outbuilding, lean-to sheds proliferate like Blue Grama grass in southern Arizona.
The ubiquitous lean-to shed was the inspiration for our shop and carport building
This particular building captured our attention when we first explored the area. The proportions and colors seem just about right. It may be just a work of art though, since we never see anybody around.
But, more about Christine McVie (Perfect). Really good blues pianist who, in her role in Chicken Shack, a British blues outfit, contributed a rollicking barrelhouse groove. She went on to write and sing for Fleetwood Mac after Peter Green left, which is ironic because Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac was a pretty hardcore blues band, and after he left they started changing direction. When Green left, along with Jeremy Spencer, I think the band sort of lost its way. They put out a couple of good albums but, after the “Future Games” album, Stevie Nicks joined the band and it all went to shite, in my opinion. Christine McVie died in 2022.
I wanted to build something which could be completed by hand, like a ten year old kid building a fort. Can I just bury poles in the ground, nail some supports to them, build a floor platform, bolt on some rafters, put on a metal roof and siding, and call it good? Apparently so.
Establishing rough grade.Big kid’s hole digger.A little hand work from a little brother.These posts weigh a metric shit ton. We set them in the holes, then shoveled dirt and gravel into the holes and compacted it in 6 to 8 inch lifts, all the time trying to keep the posts plumb.
When I was in the fourth grade I took piano lessons from Mrs. Jandt. Hers was a big house on the corner; white clapboard with lilac bushes. Four or five concrete steps up to a small front porch, also concrete. The front door opened into a room- just a room, with no transition from the outside but with an upright piano against the far wall. There might have been other rooms, maybe rooms that I had been in, but I don’t remember them. Once a week after school I would walk to her house for my lesson. It seems like it was always spring. I don’t remember ever walking there in the snow. Considering that this was southwest Montana, my only conclusion is that I didn’t take lessons from her for very long. Her teaching emphasis was on learning to read music, which came relatively easy for me. I remember her placing pennies on the backs of my hands while I was playing, the goal being to not let the pennies fall. Then there were the recitals. Making a mistake was unforgivable. Watching kids freeze, watching myself freeze at the piano still induces nightmares.
My early musical “education” did not focus on music. I didn’t know what a chord progression meant or sounded like and I didn’t know what an interval was until I was 20 years old. In the Music Education curriculum at University I learned how a sonata was constructed and I learned that Bach, and the Baroque period, came before Beethoven, and the Classical period. Again, in music school, the same fucking thing happened; the music history professor, who also taught piano, would see me in the practice cubicle and come in and correct my hand position. Why not show me some music?
Now, in my mid 60’s, I feel as though I am starting from scratch at playing songs on the piano. By “songs” I mean either a solo piece or something I can play with other musicians while actually adding something to the music. Happily, there are many people my age who have musical backgrounds and love to play in jam sessions and who are happy to let me sit in.
Sitting in with other musicians means being able to follow the chord changes, which means reading a “chart” and/or being able to hear the changes and/or being able to see the chords by the shape of the guitar players’ hands. Then one must be able to make the chords and the transitions sound good sonically and rythmically. And one needs to be able to do this on the fly; the music doesn’t wait. I just realized I always want to be able to make the piano part sound full and complete. It’s hard to have the patience to play very basic notes and rhythms while “in the pocket”.
DAW (digital audio workstation) software allows one to import musical tracks and then play along with them while recording the whole thing. An audio interface like this one from Sweetwater.com performs the magic of connecting the instrument or voice microphone to the software. This site has a catalog of hundreds of songs performed in the style of, but not performed by, the artists who made them famous. Most of the songs can be downloaded by separate tracks, so I can get the complete version, the version with vocals (which doesn’t include the piano part) and the piano only version so I can learn that. Then I can put the vocal version in the software and play along while recording.
Sorry if this seems elementary to some, but it took me some time to figure this all out and it’s a lot of fun to use. Here’s one of my favorites to play along with. It’s a song written by James O’Hara and made famous by George Jones. If the reader/listener doesn’t like hard core bad breath honky tonk they may not like this. I think this type of piano, the Hargus “Pig” Robbins sound, is incredible.
West Texas; Chihuahuan Desert, skeleton mountains pushing 9,000 feet above sea level, wind that sculpts solid rock. My co-tourist and I set off from Alpine with a quartering tailwind and make good time up to Davis Mountain State Park, a little over 27 miles away. I imagine western movie gunfights in the rocks on the hillsides, and I wonder if the natives and the soldiers at Ft. Davis actually had similar gunfights.
The highways in West Texas have a great bike lane, called a courtesy lane in Texas. Not something Idaho DOT would understand. No rumble strips!
It’s spring break time in Texas and tough to get reservations; we made this one a few weeks ago. At the first grocery store in Ft. Davis, buying a six pack would require one of the employees making sandwiches over at the deli counter to notice me and to give a shit. So I leave the beer on the counter and we ride to the next store- bonus; they stock one of my favorite Texas beers!
After a fit-full nights sleep (actually, neither one of us had a fit but there was a lot of activity and noise from other happy campers after what I consider to be bedtime) we got up and packed and rode away. That is, after I spent about one hour attempting to get the tree sap out of one of the sleeves into which I pack my hammock. After getting denatured alcohol poisoning through my skin and not fixing the problem I jammed everything into the pannier. Then I realized my sunglasses were in the bottom of the pannier. I rode without sunglasses.
Before leaving the city limits I realized I had a problem. The last time I experienced this feeling was several years ago after eating some Bob’s Red Mill Granola. My throat felt like a vacuum cleaner hose plugged with hair and lint. Inside the bolus was a little demon punching and kicking to get out. My partner becomes smaller and smaller before disappearing around the bend leading to the pass. I stop and try to figure out what is happening; is it Covid-19? Is it really wood alcohol poisoning? Is it just an allergic reaction? Am I going to die here?
Stacy waits at the top of the hill and gives me some of her antihistamines which seem to help. Then we stop at the picnic area and I lay down for ten minutes. My co-tourist leads the way into the howling headwind the last ten miles- until she drops me and I ride slowly into town. If I were to disclose fully, I would say I told her to ride ahead and that I would just “let the legs drop” the rest of the way. Good times.
When times were good and I was sitting at the picnic table drinking my El Chingon, I took some detail photos of our bicycles. Those follow.
Gilles Berthoud himself brazed this little piece of design wonderfulness.Shimano Ultegra seat post. Poetry.no caption neededThe IRD compact double crankset. Both bikes have the same gearing.Gilles Berthoud saddle
Strade Bianche or Strada Bianca is a UCI World Cup professional bike race. First held in 2007 one third of the total race distance is raced on dirt roads, covering 63 km of strade bianche, or “white roads” spread over 11 sectors. A progenitor of one of the dumbest sub-classifications of bike riding ever- the “Gravel Grinder” in which poseurs and hipsters ride (really, they race with no classifications or rewards other than bragging rights on social media) gravel roads on their gravel bikes.
This is a bicycle called Strada Bianca made by Steve Hampsten, brother of Andy. If you don’t know who Andy Hampsten is, he won the 1988 Giro d’Italia and is iconic because of his ride over the Gavia Pass in a blizzard during that race. He rode at the time for the 7-11 Team. The team bikes were branded with the Huffy name but were made by Serotta. Andy bought his own bike made by John Slawta of Land Shark Bicycles and had it painted team colors.
But this post is not about a bike race or bike racer or even bikes. It’s about these tires. Challenge Strada Bianca tires are handmade in Thailand, close to the rubber sources and know-how. The casings are high thread count polyester and the rubber is latex. The casings are very supple, so supple the tire lies flat rather than in a u-shape like other clinchers. Mounting these on the rim is the challenge; hence the name? Getting the first bead on is tight but inserting a tube and getting the second bead mounted without mutilating and pinching the tube is nearly impossible. I went through a couple tubes mounting two tires. I finally ended up getting some latex tubes that come dusted with talc and those went in easily.
I still think these are worth the effort though because of the ride. As with any fine tool or piece of equipment, marginal gains in performance with a fine bicycle become increasingly expensive but the nuanced improvement adds to the enjoyment of the user. And these tires are not cheap- $70.00 to $75.00 for the Pro series clincher. Challenge also makes a clincher with a silk casing for a cool $125.00. Wish I didn’t know that now.
