Insulating the foundation

Here's a picture of my lovely wife and assistant cutting 2'' Styrofoam SM boards for the foundation. She's very crafty with a knife. We are installing 4'' on the outside and 2'' on the inside. Today we nailed it to the sill on the outside. We'll need to nail into the concrete on the inside. Hello power drill.

This gives us R-30 insulation value. Overkill? Not with a radiant slab. The temperature of the slab will be maintained at 75 C (22 C) whereas the temperature of the air will be closer to 65 F ( 18 C) (for very toasty toes). If you want to keep the heat in, you need to insulate the slab. Moreover, with a solar system you want to store solar heat from the day and summer through the night and winter. You need to insulate below the slab as well.

Installing Electricity

We had the temporary power supply for the workers installed on Tuesday. As soon as the house is enclosed, we're taking this puppy inside into the utility room once the house is enclosed. We still haven't decided whether to take the main power line (seen snaking into the panel at left) into the house through the frame wall or to drill a hole into the foundation wall (seen at right). Decisions, decisions. The piles of 1/2" clear, crushed stone in the background were delivered today
and will eventually fill the foundation and act as a bed for the hydronic slab.

The electrician actually had to come back on Wednesday to install our new address on the private pole shown here. Had to call town hall at Frelighsburg to find out what it was; they gave me all the permits, but not the adress! If you look carefully at the top of the pole you will see it.

The excavator and electrician cooperated very nicely to install the hydro pole. A few tense moment ensued when we found rock ledge a foot under the ground where the pole was supposed to go. Had to move it about 12 feet away from the drive (it was supposed to be inline with the oak tree shown at right). Fortunately, the electric line reached the pole.

Installing the drains

Martin (the plumber)of Plomberie Gilbert and his helper Ben arrived from Knowlton today on short notice (Alex told me this morning that he was coming to install the interior drains). Much to his relief, our foundation was not yet filled with crushed stone, making the work much easier.

The first order of business was to install the coil for the solar heat dump. The solar heat dump keeps the tank and solar collectors from overheating in the summertime when the need for heat is low and the supply of sun abundant. Martin pulled it out into a boingy slinky shape to help dissipate the heat even more. I'll be adding insulation above the coil to assure that the heat goes into the ground instead of to the slab, and to isolate .

Bill Northey and the technicians at Radiant Floor Heating Company customized the coil by adding two elbows and 42'' tubes to bring the cooling fluid from the ledge to the slab. He recommended burying in sand (instead of crushed stone) to maximize the thermal contact with the ground. The heat dump itself is pictured in the second image at lower right. We used it to measure out the position of the coil relative to the other plumbing.

Also shown here are the sewage drains under construction and, in the third image, completed. The main sewage drain runs out the hole in the foundation wall at back. You can actually see the top of the septic tank too. The floor drains runs out int he corner at left. The cruched stone supports the toilet drain. The whole foundation will eventually be filled with the stuff.

Great work by Martin and Ben.

Electric line and septic tank

Another busy, grey day on he house site. I got up early to cut down a few trees that were in the way of the power line.

Today, we installed the electrical line. This runs from a private poll installed by Normand (the excavator) and Camille the electrician. Bell contractors came along to install the public pole (in Frelighsburg, it's Bell and not Hydro that installs the poll). The private poll holds the meter and is where the line runs into the ground. It then goes across the driveway and up the hill along with the phone line and the line between the septic tank and tile bed.

Normand also trucked in generous amounts of sand to bury the septic tank, to make a bed for the French drains, bury the power line (need 2 feet of sand around power line), and just clean up the site. It covers up a lot of the mud.

The electrician also set up a temporary electric panel for the builders. Hopefully, it will be switched on by Hydro by the end of the month. I had orignally wanted the power cable to enter through the foundation, but the electrician figured it would be better to go through the wall above ground. A vistit from Alex the builder/carpenter changed that. He preferred the foundation option. I'm now considering renting a drill to bore through the foundation.

The naked foundation

Here it is folks: the foundation, "tous nu"! We're about to install the weeping tile around the footings tomorrow, and will backfill some tomorrow, so I figured I better get a few pictures. Normand the excavator was in the neighborhood with the backhoe and bulldozer, so he kept it at our place over the weekend. He'll be installing the septic tank The electrician will be installing the buried power line and private pole on Tuesday. Hopefully Bell will show up to put in the hydro pole (they were supposed to do it last Thursday).

Here's a detail of the anchor system. These anchors will hold the posts in place with bolts. Should be good for up to F2 tornadoes.Looks like the frost took a toll on the corner of the foundation. Other than this, the foundation is straight and smooth.

I've posted a panorama of the house site. Not only is the house progressing, the seasons are too. Hope the snow holds out.

Foundation done

Removing the forms.

Setting up foundation forms

One of the fun things about hiring contractors and being on site is that you get to watch people do the stuff they really know how to do. The tools of the trade arrived on flatbed trucks. These racks of wooden concrete forms were hoisted onto the site using a crane. Because this foundation has pilasters, it required a lot of pieces not used on most building sites.

When I saw them, I realized why a lot of foundation contractors prefer these to styrofoam forms. These are 1 inch thick plywood with cast iron links. That's a little more sturdy than styrofoam and less likely to collapse when you climb over them or during a pour.

I caught Roger Laroche looking at the camera as he assembled them. This was the only time. He's in and out pretty quickly with his team, and watching what he's doing during that time. He came yesterday with one worker to set up the forms. Either the plans I gave him had a miscalculation, or I had given him an older version of the plans. With all the wonky post positions and the calculations for styrofoam forms, something just didn't add up. Instead of trying to figure it out, we went back to the timber framers plans and wall system to figure out the positioning of the pilasters and that the exterior of the foundation wall needed to be 5 inches out from the posts.

Lessons 1 - Burn all old versions of your plans
Lesson 2 - Make sure your contractors know what they're building.

This morning I checked the measurements and it all checked out, but the interior post footings were off; fixed it. Roger and I double checked the post positions together before the pour: measuring tape was flying everywhere. Roger used string wrapped to nails on top of the forms to line up the post positions to make sure they'd be resting on pilasters. Roger then used them to position the post anchors into the concrete. Double checked these after. One was half an inch off.

No pictures of finished pour today. Camera was out of batteries, and I was too busy measuring to take pictures.