Fun with sewage

Yeah! Septic systems. Everyone's favorite subject. The town sure thinks so. You need three permits out here to build your house: one for your house, one for your well, and one for your septic system and tile bed. The town inspector needs to make a special trip just to check the tilebed before it is buried. I guess they don't want your toilet water ending up in the neighbors well.

The first thing done on the house was to do a percolation test where an engineer digs a hole, fills it with water, and calculates how quickly the water disappears. It should disappear quickly, because you don't want liquid manure pooling and stinking up your yard. That gets you your permit.

Image 1 shows the first layer of coarse sand layed after the bulldozer removes the soil and tree roots. After that, add a layer of clear 3/4'' gravel (Image 2). Then, lay down the weeping tile (Image 3). Then, wait for the inspector to check the work, and bury with one layer of crushed stone, more sand, and cover with soil.

The weeping tile is actually the perforated plastic pipes shown here. The liquid fecal matter overflows in the septic tank, flows downhill, and is spread evenly over the bed shown here. The sand and gravel filter out all the crap (literally).

Mmmm. Lunch anyone?

Delivering heating system

Lisa caught me delivering the heating system from Vermont. The solar collectors took up the bulk of space on the truck. The big tall thing is the water tank, which needs to be kept upright (the other one is me). Yes, it's a tall puppy, about 6 feet high, and will keep the plumber on a ladder when he installs the cold water intake and output. I wish I could claim credit for this packing job, but I cannot. The guys at the radiant floor company really know how to pack a truck. I drove extra careful and avoided potholes for fear of damaging the collectors and glass-lined tank.

Finished porch

Finally finished the porch (only the metal roofing covers remain). The porch serves the practical purpose of preventing water from dripping on your head as you exit the door (or worse, getting walloped with snow sliding off the roof), keeping the summer sun from overheating the house, and giving you a nice place to sit, rain or shine. The ends of the porch are flat so that you can leave the porch without getting dripped on the rain.

We went with 6x6 posts which aren't from our woods. I thought we could use 4x4 posts as we have with our current balcony, so I sawed up a bunch of those last summer. However, Will recommended 6x6 posts. Thinking about snow sliding onto the porch from our rather large roof
convinced me to go witht the more solid 6x6 posts. The rest of the porch is straight out of the back of the property. It's hard to see in these pictures, but the wood is unplaned and unsanded. If you click on the imagery, you can see the rough texture. My philosophy on porches is that sitting on them should make you feel like you are in a farm in a western (one with good carpenters). We will eventually sand the floor planks once the project is complete and people are done trekking dirt and construction boots across it. We'll probably seal it to protect it from rain, snow, and sun. Hemlock is somewhat resistant to rot, but it is a soft wood and prone to scuffs.

Here's a detail of the timber ends showing how the rafter rests on the rafter plate . The roof actually overhangs the rafter plate, which in turn overhangs the last post resting on the deck. Also visible are the 1'' planks that act both as roof and ceiling. I thought I'd sand these, but others say they like them rough sawed. Great! Less work!

Leveling the concrete

The concrete is poured directly on the ground and spread using a special rake. It's backbreaking work because the concrete is heavy and the areas involved large. Once evenly distributed, the concrete is smoothed using a special polisher. More bending and back breaking as they check for straightness using levels. You need an eye for a level floor to do a good job. Our floor came out very nicely, thank-you.

Concrete pour for slab

The snow also brought with it our concrete slab. The cement truck backed right up to the door and funneled the cement right into the house. The cement is then funneled to different parts of the floor using an interior chute.

The truck actually ended up making two trips. It couldn't hold enough to do the whole floor. Wish I'd known the capacity. I would have made some adjustments to the floor design and saved some money.

We protected the bottom of the posts and chimney from splatter using newspapers. Apparantly, the concrete stains the wood permanently becuae it is alkaline and corrosive. It's a messy job too. The concrete splatters when it hits the ground.

I was away at work, and Lisa had to go into Montreal to take care of some parental health matters later that morning, so she only got pictures of the beginning of the pour. Fortunately, Papa came buy later and got pictures of the workers finishing the job (to be posted later).

April on the Pinnacle

So after 3 weeks of warm, dry April weather, the month goes out like a lion with 18'' of heavy, wet snow. By the time it ended, our yard looked something like this. The snow did not accumalate directly front of the house (foreground) because the running overflow from our well flows down the hill here (into our basement sump pump).

Here's a picture of one of our pear trees in bloom the day after. Most of the snow had melted by then, but it still makes for an unlikely picture. Fortunately, our trees did not suffer because the temperature never really got enough below freezing to damage the blossoms. I think we'll get pears this year.

Laying down the hydronic tubing

This is not an initiatory ritual of an ancient Greek mystery cult, nor is it a scene from the Lord of the Rings (with Alex starring as a Hobbit and me acting as an Orc). This is Alex and me on April 14 laying the tubing for the hydronic slab. Alex is tying down the tubing to a wire mesh using plastic ties. The tubing is somewhat unwieldy, so you need a second person to hold and unroll the tubing. Also visible is the polyethylene vapor barrier to keep the humidity away from the house interior, and the Styrofoam board used to insulate the outside perimeter of the floor.

The tubing is attached to the slab manifold, shown here. Hot water will be distributed by the manifold from the hot water tank to three loops that snake throughout the concrete floor. Here, only the first loop and the outflow of the second loop is attached to the copper tubing of the manifold.

My Dad has a whole bunch of pictures of the finished layout that I'll post later.