Week of 1-21-07

This week we moved all of our walls to site, the second floor joists were installed along with the entire floor sheathing for the second floor. One of our joists was in the incorrect spot but that was remedied. We also incorrectly located our second floor window that looks onto the stair landing. We noticed that after the entire wall assembly had been put together with lots of caulk, nails, and sheathing. A tear-apart remedied that problem but it took us about 45 minutes, and of course we all ended up wearing lots of caulk.

Thanks a million to our menter Phil for leading the sheathing crew on the second floor deck.

Also thanks to Greg F., Kathy D., Josh L., Steve S. and Craig B. our community volunteers who came out to help. Our first parent, Megan's dad came out to help for the entire day too. He did really well and we hope to see him again.

Our first faculty member, Ms. Abbott came out to support the students. She probably thought that she would come out and just support us, but she was spotted helping to lift the large wall sections. L or R: Will, Ms. Abbott, Alex, Vinnie, Tom, Megan, Mr. Beck.



Thank you Contract Lumber and Framing www.contractlumber.com for putting in the second level floor joists for us. That saved us a week's time.

The Righter Company http://www.rightercompany.com sent Mike out with the lowboy trailer and we loaded all of our second floor walls onto it and they were transported to site. The day was very cold but we got all of our walls to site so if we put the floor deck on Saturday, we could start with the walls.
Click on the two videos below to see how we install floor decking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-MDzgVruzk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjGjKeoYpg



If you want to see the high tech. way we put the walls up on our second floor deck, click on the link below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H33-5xMknHw

The link above shows how the walls get to the second floor. The picture to the left shows the wall sections assembled, straightened, squared, ready for sealant and wall sheathing to be followed by lots of nailing. Besides the large amount of energy saving because of the extra insulation, we find the 2 x 6 stud construction at 24 inches between studs nails up a lot more quickly than conventional framing. By looking in the background, one can really tell we are up on the second floor.

Week of January 15, 2007

The entire first floor has it's interior and exterior walls framed and is now ready for the second floor deck.

A correction and omission from last week's blog and good news about a former student.

1. The company that graciously donates their resources to move our walls is the Righter Company:
http://www.rightercompany.com/
Our apologies for misspelling their name in last week's blog. They have helped move our walls for two years, donated hard hats to the entire class, and also donated a job box were we store all of our power tools. Thank you Righter Company!
2. We forgot to put "D's" picture last week. D stopped by last week and helped us a bit and even "gave it all for Home B.A.S.E." by getting getting construction adhesive on his brand new Contract Lumber coat. He has a tremendous amount of experience in construction and anytime he is with us, he makes what we do better. Below is Don "D" McClary III of Contract Lumber and Framing.

3. Two weeks ago, Mike Rigo Home B.A.S.E. 2000, was diagnosed with a tumor on his brain stem and underwent surgery on Friday the 19th. He was under ten hours of anesthesia. An after site visit to Mike on Saturday showed that he was doing better than expected after just coming out of the intensive care unit. He only took two aspirin for pain in the 24 hours after the surgery and the prognosis is encouraging. Mike, this is something duct tape can't fix so you will be in all of our thoughts and prayers :)

On Friday, some students came in on their day off and assembled and stood up the north wall (on the left). Our mentor Jim came was with us too on this day when we had to scrape snow off of our floor deck. After site, we all went out to have a bite to eat together at a local cafe that uses local and organic ingredients. Eating at locally owned restaurants keeps 43 cents of every dollar in the community as compared to 19 cents for a chain restaurant located outside of our community. More money in the local Columbus economy helps more families be able to afford their own homes.


Above left: We are framing the first floor wall with recycled sheathing.
Above right: Notice the caulk around the window and on the top and bottom plate which will help keep our house weather tight and dry. We also put constuction adhesive below on the floor deck under the walls which help stop air infiltration. Air moving through a wall or house is the same as moisture and heat moving. We used the Cold Climate Builder's Guide from our partner, the Building Science Corporation.
http://www.buildingscience.com/
Just a note though, when there is caulk or construction adhesive on site, we usually end up wearing either or both.

We have used Titebond polyurethane construction adhesive donated from Franklin International which we really like because it is much more pliable than the traditional construction adhesive. We also use Franklin polyurethane caulk. http://www.titebond.com/

Left above: Standing up the
front wall. From left to right you'll see Craig, Tom, Megan, and Phil our mentor.

Above right: the front wall is up.

Week of 1-8-2007

A big week for us as we are finally on site and the house can start to take shape. We ended the week with an all day field trip on site where we sheathed the floor deck and assembled, sheathed, and stood up our first wall.

A television crew came out on Friday the 12th to tape us for the local news.

Scholastic Magazine will be taking pictures of the build this week to feature us on their cover and with a story in their nationally distributed magazine.

An update will be sent on when both of these media pieces can be seen.




Sawing the concrete floor so if it does crack, the cracks will be controlled to crack along these cuts.







Because of Contract Framing,
http://www.contractlumber.com/
part of the Contract Lumber Group, our floor has it's structural floor joists installed.





Floor joists at the end of the day. Enlarge the picture by clicking on it and the caulk that was put on to seal the house is very visible.




An unavoidable gap between the bottom of the band board and the sill plate. If you click to enlarge the picture, you can see the large air gap and the garage two lots away. We put a sealant underneath the entire band board to keep out the leaks and to help insure a high performance house. This detailing is not done in conventional construction.




Typical view of our sealed band board.









Sheathing the floor deck.






Finally our walls are on site. This picture shows the walls being unloaded from a truck whose services were donated by the Reighter Company. The driver, Waldo, was our driver last year when he delivered our garage walls to us from school. See last year's blog at the bottom of the following link. Waldo is on the left.
http://06homebase.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_06homebase_archive.html



Sheathing our first wall after the floor was sheathed.








Lunch!









Group shot at the end of the day of those who stayed late to finish and stand up our first wall.







Long shot of the finished wall on the finished floor deck.

Week of January 1-5, 2007

Our concrete finisher came in this week and the concrete slab is now in our basement.

We placed two inches of polystyrene foam underneath our slab before the concrete was placed on top. This is another of our high performance building techniques. This foam is very, very important to keep mold from growing. What the foam does is insulate the bottom of the slab and keep it warm. If the bottom surface of the slab is cold and the humidity underneath the slab is at a certain temperature, water will condense on the underside of that slab. Concrete can wick water vertically upt to 400 feet. If there is free water on the underside of the slab, it will be wicked into the basement through the four inch slab. Edwards, Mooney and Moses supplied the foam. Among building scientists, this is one of the most important things builders and homeowners can do when building a house with a basement.

We'll have more pictures in a bit as soon as they come in from several different sources.




Finishing the slab.

Week of December 25-29, 2006

This was winter break for us but we kept the project moving by putting in the outside and interior perimeter drain tiles. Usually builders put in weep holes in the bottom of the walls to let in water from the outside of the building run underneath the basement concrete slab. The Building Science Corporation however thinks it's a bad idea to introduce water underneath the house which makes sense. We also ran on interior drain around the entire inside of our basement. The idea is to capture the water outside the house and have that water be transferred to the interior piping and to the sump well to pumped out. In this manner, we hope to eliminate most of the "free" water under our house.

Another feature of our house build is that we put in a filter fabric on top of the gravel to keep the soil from filtering down and clogging the gravel and thus not letting water reach our drain pipes to be piped away from the house.

We also use polyethylene piping from Advanced Drainage Systems. A lot of times, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) piping is used. The manufacture of PVC is very bad for the environment so we are working to keep our house as PVC free and and "green" as possible.

Putting in the piping was very muddy and wet. Randy, our plumber, also hooked up our water tap.


Excavating the cave-ins around the bottom of the footer where our exterior drain pipes will be placed.








This is a view which shows the excellent water proofing done by Edwards, Mooney, and Moses. Without any prompting, they came by and checked the job and noticed that some of the waterproofing got a little thin because of the rain. They came by without being asked and reapplied the waterproofing.

Also shown is the filter fabric which will help filter out the pipe clogging mud.





Here is the backfilling taking place. In the background is a "slinger" truck. This truck can carry soil or rock and can "throw" the stone right where you want it. Since our house is on a typically narrow turn of the last century city lot, we couldn't get any heavy machinery in to backfill every side of our house so we used a slinger truck to shoot the material in where it was needed.

In the foreground shows our water service pipe coming out in a white sleeve. The water service pipe goes to the street and connects to what is called the water box where the city water comes off of the water main and connects to our water service pipe.

Week of December 18-22, 2006

This project started late in October 2005 and there has been a tremendous amount of work to get this project off the ground. Now our efforts are finally showing as we are now out of the ground which is fantastic!!

With the footers put in place last week, our concrete walls went up.


The concrete wall forms being put up for the walls. The ones that haven't been used are in bunched together in the middle.








Our beautiful finished walls - finally!







The first class scrapes off concrete form ties on a very cold morning.










Alex is down in the "hole" scraping off the footer top in preparation for the water proofing spray which will be applied by Edwards, Mooney and Moses. We spray the top of the footer not just the wall to add to our chances of keeping our basement dry.

Week of December 11, 2006

Work was being done on site this week in preparation for us to begin.

The sewer line was connected to the tap. Our excavator didn't have to go into the alley to make the connection so we saved about thirteen hundred dollars.

Steve Hoy surveying came out again and set our surveying stakes because the machinery for the excavation destroyed the old ones. http://www.hoysurveying.com/ It seems like the excavation machinery including trucks, are really "surveying stake seeking missiles" in disguise.

We made our first trip to site on Thursday and saw the excavation of our basement and we could see that a trace of the original 1917 house. Ray Prendeville gave a very good talk on the history and mission of the Columbus Housing Partnership and we also toured two homes. One home was a rehab across the street and the other was a house almost exactly like ours will be.

On Friday the footers were formed and the concrete was placed in them. Notice the plastic around the footers which is part of our green, high performance building strategy(Nathan Yost of 3-D Building Solutions who is also a consultant to this project http://www.3-d-buildingsolutions.com/projects/default.htm) . Nobody in Columbus has done such a thing. Later we will cut the plastic away from the sides and leave the plastic only on the bottom of the footer. Water can wick up about 1000 feet in concrete and the plastic will help prevent the walls from being moist and help prevent mold. According to Betsy Pettit from The Building Science Corporation who is a consultant to this project, http://www.buildingscience.com/ located in Massachusetts, "Implementing strategies like this is actually about reducing probability." This should make sense to people in construction because managing commercial construction is about managing the probability of risk.

Our building partnership believes that managing that risk should reduce the probability of: being hurt financially by rising energy prices, not being able to afford the aggregate cost of the home over the life of the mortgage, building failures, unhealthy buildings which adversely affect the health of the occupants, and the effect of our consumption on our planet.

Implementing proven, high performance building strategies that are being used in other parts of the country but that are new to an area is both exciting and exhausting. We will keep you informed about those strategies as we progress with the build.

On Friday, we had a very low key groundbreaking. Just great people getting together with a picture or too and no speeches. Many people were at the groundbreaking including former students from a long time ago, city officials, CHP (Columbus Housing Partnership) officials, friends, Green Energy Ohio members, our mentors http://homebaseadults.blogspot.com/ Columbus Green Building Forum members and a lot of others. Tom Wymore and "D" were there from Contract Lumber and Framing and made it a point to work out the some framing details with us and we greatly thank them for that! http://www.contractlumber.com/

Week of December 4, 2006

For the coming week, our sewer tap will happen on Tuesday and Wednesday and the substructure consisting of the footers and basement walls will be started on Thursday.

We have scheduled a very low key ground breaking for Friday December 15, 2006 at 12 noon. even though the excavation machinery should be doing that on Thursday. It will be more of a gathering because we are starting on site rather than a true ground breaking. We are not putting out any invitations but if anyone wants to be there, feel free to attend. There will be nothing to eat or drink. I'll put in the time for this on this blog later in the week so check again. Our formal red carpet start will happen in January when our floor deck is on and we raise up our first wall.

This week we finished framing the side walls of our garage. That makes for only the back wall of the garage left for us to modify a bit. We initially thought that we could move 22' walls if we had enough people to help move them. Experience in framing the back wall all in one piece showed us that this really couldn't be done so we need to separate the back wall and make it into two sections.

Squaring the wall using tape measures and equal length diagonals.








After squaring using tape measures, the wall is also squared with the sheathing as it is nailed on providing for a second check for wall squareness.

We thank Phil, our mentor for helping us.

Week of November 27, 2006

We took a big step forward this week when:

1. We Signed the contracts that will finally allow us to begin the utility and foundation work for our building. The picture to the left shows the surveyed and staked lot done by Hoy Surveying this week that locates the house and garage on our lot.

2. Lisa F. and Meera P. of the Columbus Green Building Forum, Home B.A.S.E. students, and a Home B.A.S.E. teacher met on Saturday to work on the interior details of the house. We want to make this 1,500 square foot house a handmade jewel with exquisite interior design detailing to showcase outstanding green, energy efficient, and high performance affordable housing.

3. We received confirmation from American Electrical Power (AEP) that our application for the electrical grid tie-in for our solar panels was approved. That means that the electrical output that is generated from the solar cells on this house will be sold back to AEP to reduce the cost of the energy consumption for our home.

This is the second class framing some of the last interior walls of the house.

Click on the picture to enlarge it so see the quality we are building into our walls.

Some studs were a bit too long in the bathroom plumbing walls of our house. Here is Megan helping Anne cut them to the correct size to re-frame the entire wall. Learning how to spot an error, understanding that these are only errors and not mistakes, figuring out a strategy to fix it, fixing, and moving forward is tremendous internal strength to develop. Some Home B.A.S.E. students who commit to the class learn to understand, internalize, and practice that character trait in a supportive learning community during the course of the year.

We are very proud of the work we have done so far. Behind these students, except for just a few walls, is an entire panelized house ready to be taken by truck to our site when our foundation is complete.

Phil is our really wonderful mentor that helps us be successful beyond our current abilities http://homebaseadults.blogspot.com/2005/09/phil-starting-his-first-build-with-us.html

We are keeping all of our short scraps to be either mulched and returned back to the earth as compost or used in our house somewhere thus keeping our environmental footprint as small as possible

Week of November 20

We continued framing our interior walls and have approximately fifty percent of those completed.

Alex, Anne, and Megan came in on Saturday over Thanksgiving to frame the particularly difficult bedroom # 3 closet.

On the same day, core team members Josh, Meera, and Stacey, met to finalize some details of the home before on-site construction began.

Week of November 13 - 17

We continued on the framing of the interior walls.

Week of November 6-10


We received the delivery of the lumber for the interior walls of the house from Contract Lumber. This is the first time we had framed walls (exterior) using advanced framing techniques and 24" on center framing. For the interior walls, we went back to conventional 16" on center framing and found out how much easier it was to frame with the 24 inch module.

Lynden of Contract Lumber puts the material right where we need it. Our school is a fantastic place to build because we can even store our materials where they won't get wet.


On Saturday the eleventh of November, the girls basketball team came in and with the help of some of the Home B.A.S.E. students and Phil, they framed the garage.


The photo. to the left shows the completed garage standing up in our school ready to be trucked to site. When the garage foundation walls are finished, the garage will be trucked out to site stood up and attached to each other.

Week of October 30 - November 3

We finished framing all of our exterior walls. The picture shows the precision of the student framing. Notice all of the studs aligning at 24 inches on center which allows for one truss to fit exactly on each stud. By doing so, we can eliminate the the top plate in the entire house for both the exterior and exterior walls. We think wood is a tremendous building material and this helps us extend this wonderful renewable material.

Week of October 23

We continued to frame our exterior walls. We are almost finished with those.

Week of October 16

We continued to frame the exterior walls.

Week of October 9, 2006

We continued to layout and build our walls at school. At the end of the week all of long, 34' walls have been built in smaller pieces and the window and door framing framing were also built and installed. Phil, a new mentor for this year was out with us again.

Laying out the walls.













The long exterior walls.






Saturday, 10/14
CW starting on the left. Mrs. Seymore, Lisa, Katie, and Meera decide colors, finishes, and floor covering for the house.

Week of October 2-6, 2006

This week at school we started to frame the exterior walls of our house . All of the framing material is provided by the Contract Lumber Company. Once we build the walls, the Righter Company will send a large "low-boy" trailer out and will transport the walls to site for us. We have two of the four longest walls framed excluding the window framing which we will do starting on Tuesday.