The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The box wasn't at the bottom of the driveway Tuesday evening for thirty minutes before our first sightseer stopped and asked, "What is it? Is it a double wide?" Not satisfied with our answer ("A modular."), she wondered, "Which end is the front?"

Well, good news is the house made it fine. No real issues - some minor drywall cracking, a couple of window locks popped during travel that will need to be replaced (not sure exactly what will need to be replaced - Simplex will let me know). Structurally, the house came through great. Window panes are all intact, the loose materials that shipped inside the box didn't do any damage, and no water got in. Many thanks to the drivers who shepharded the box on its long journey. We still need to inventory all the loose materials that came inside. They'll need to come out before we set the house (we'll stage them in the basement).

Bad - the first truck reached the homesite before we did. It was only carrying the panelized wall. Mark, the contractor who is managing the set, didn't want to have to find room for the trailer on site (and we do have a bit of a space crunch at the moment). So he rented a small boom truck to carry the panel from the bottom of the hill to the top. Suffice it to say, the boom truck couldn't handle the panel. By the time we got there, they had already beat up the panel pretty good just getting it off the trailer. So this was the scene upon our arrival:


The only real option at this point was to cut it, which they did. A chainsaw made quick work of the panel and soon it (well, half of it) was on its way up the driveway:


Now there's no question that if he had just left it at the bottom of the hill, as we had planned, we would have just towed it up first thing on set day and had the crane place it. It would have made space even tighter than it already is (for the arriving house, the concrete, and the crane), but would have been feasible. So the first lesson there is to make sure you're present when these pieces arrive so you can say NOOOOOO when necessary. The second lesson, I guess, is about the efficacy of a panel like that when you've got difficult site issues. We already knew access might be tricky, so stick building that panel might have made more sense in hindsight.

Ugly - here are our spacious WV accommodations at the moment:


Not TOO terrible you say. Well, last night around 6 we took a break from our day of sanding cedar (more on that later) to go grab a bite. We ended up at a wonderful cafe in Moorefield (O'Neills) about thirty minutes away. It was bright and sunny when we left the site. Not by the time we finished dinner. As you may have guessed by now (particularly those clever readers who note the absence of a rain fly in the pic of our tent), our plush home away from home suffered a direct hit in the ensuing thunderstorm. Just a mess. We slept for a few hours in the house, but it kept raining and we decided to call it a week and head home. Back out bright and early Tuesday morning for the set.

...finally here

After many hours on the road and seven flat tires, our house arrived at the site in WV a little after 6:30 Wednesday evening. We've been out at the site much of this week and have accomplished quite a bit - more pics up later today.

Almost here...

We had a great visit to the factory today. Some nits to fix, but we're on schedule for delivery of the box to the site on Wednesday. Foundation walls were poured today in my absence and it sounds like all went well. Slab goes in on Thursday. I'll have more tomorrow, but here are some pics:

All dressed up and no place to go

Kinda sad, actually:


And not knowing too much about the nuts and bolts of pouring a foundation, this view is downright scary:


It's straight where the form meets the footer; I think this bowing is just from the 2x4s that are bracing it right now.

UPDATE: Mystery solved? With the help of Res4's engineering consultant (thanks Greg), we guess that the rain at the end of the last week added some pressure/moved the 2x4 braces on the uphill side of the foundation forms, causing the top of the forms to bow. Easy to fix by rebracing on Monday.

Argh

No foundation yet. We've been having some very unusual weather here in the DC area since the beginning of the week - a low pressure system over the Bay of Maine and a high pressure system over the Great Lakes meant that our weather was coming from the northeast, and most of that weather has been showers and thunderstorms. Short version: our road is a muddy mess and the concrete truck can't get to the top of the hill. So right now we're on for Monday to pour the walls. Not the end of the world. But I've got the house coming on Wednesday and no place to put it (concrete won't have cured yet). Set is tentatively rescheduled for Monday, June 23d.

My brother Craig and I were out at the site yesterday (we left home before we heard that the pour was cancelled). We spent some time working on the huge log pile at the top of the hill; we're going to have firewood for YEARS.


I'll be at the Simplex factory this coming Monday morning for our walk-through inspection; I'll take lots of pics.

Weather

Well how's this for a weather delay: a tornado (!) and over an inch of rain have conspired to delay the pouring of the foundation walls until tomorrow. The tornado went through Moorefield, WV, last night, which is the biggest town near our house and where most of the trades are located. Sounds like everybody's ok, at least.

As for the rain, there's no point trying to get a concrete truck up our driveway when it's wet (it hasn't been gravelled yet). So tomorrow...

Pics from Res4's visit to the factory on Friday

Almost there...

Nice Surprise

The well drilling folks called this morning and asked if they could drill our well today. I said yes. Don't know if they did or not, but it sure would be nice to have water when the house gets here (electric too, but that seems like a long shot).

Budget Numbers

I've posted some updated budget numbers over at APrefabProjectBudget (there's a permanent link to that page on the left bar). Let me know if you see any glaring errors or have questions - lostrivermodern AT gmail DOT com.

Schedule, revised

Here's our new (optimistic) schedule - praying it stays dry:

Tomorrow, June 8: Pour footers; Res4 walk-through inspection of finished house in factory;

Wednesday, June 13: Pour walls;

Thursday, June 14: Pour slab;

Monday, June 18: Bring utilities up driveway;

Wednesday, June 20: House delivered;

Thursday, June 21: House set.

Today the concrete guys set the forms for the footers. The forms double as the drain pipes (the perforations let water in and funnel it to away from the foundation). Because we'll have a walk-out basement, the downhill footer is set lower than the other three walls (to get under the frostline). The foundation walls will rise three feet above the uphill grade, and then we'll backfill. The pad to the right (the downhill side) is where the crane will park; it'll be returned to its original grade, so the ground below the walk-out wall will also be about three feet higher at the end of the day than it appears right now.

No Stone Throwing Please

Everybody's got their own design aesthetic, and as they say, there's no accounting for other people's taste. But here's mine:



Don't know if I'm fastidious enough to do it right, but that's my ideal. Probably not til the kids are out of the house, though...

Ninjas fight ALL the time

The videos on Res4's site of the Dwell House have apparently gone viral. And the architecturally savvy ninjas at MyNinjaPlease are impressed.

Jetson Green wonders about the presentation. I think they're great, and I think the music is outrageously cool, but I know something he does not know: Claudia Tanney, the producer of the second and third videos, was about twelve years old when she put them together. I, at 32, just learned how to use blogger.

Contractors

Everybody knows somebody who's had some major house project done by a contractor that turned into a train wreck. We've got a neighbor right now who's going into month thirteen of a six month addition; her stories are just absurd. We knew from the get-go that this was one of the really attractive upsides of prefab for us; particularly because our home site is a couple of hours away, the idea of not having to supervise/nag a GC to get this done was a huge advantage of the Res4 version of prefab (a 95% completed box), even if it hadn't been any cheaper. And having a (little) bit of DIY experience, the idea of finishing as much as we can ourselves really means that we're in control of the timeline and the costs. But there are some things that you just have to have other people do (like build a quarter-mile long driveway and pour the foundation) and that are not in your control. And even when things are going fine there's just a little bit of insecurity about how the next thing's gonna go.

So our working relationship with our contractors (an excavator and a GC, though we're not using him as a GC) has been pretty good so far; I don't have any real complaints. But I am struggling with a creeping anxiety that I'm sure most clients must face at one time or another: that our project is slipping from the consciousnesses of our contractors and that, try as I might, I cannot will them to put our job first. Now in our particular case it's pretty understandable; ours is admittedly a small potatoes kind of job. Our excavator is currently building the road for a 1400 acre subdivision ten minutes or so from our place, and the GC is building million dollar homes in that same subdivision. The excavator worked hard to get our road in; the only thing we're waiting on from him is the utilities ditch and conduits (and electric isn't essential at this point anyway). We haven't yet even engaged the GC to do anything other than the foundation and the set, and he's been available to me for all sorts of questions and coordination issues. But we're two weeks out from the set and I don't have total confidence that we're going to be ready (and really all that entails is the foundation being poured properly). I'm sure all modular projects, by their nature, have a ratcheting of anxiety as the set date nears, and mine will increase accordingly.

This anxiety is not really grounded in anything in particular at the moment; it's just that feeling of not being in control of a process that I'm not real savvy about in the first place that gnaws at me (as much as you read and learn, how confident can you be that your foundation's concrete doesn't have too much air/water in it?). And I'm not even a control freak. But like everybody else I want to get precise answers to my questions and have calls returned promptly and have people show up when they say they're going to. And of course it's a reality of working with contractors and trades that those things don't always happen. One thing prefab means, for me, is that there's much less of this anxiety than there could otherwise be.

Rough Schedule

So this is what we look like right now:

Week of June 4: Dig footers, excavate utility trench, order cedar siding; factory finishes box;

Week of June 11: Pour foundation, walk-through inspection of box at factory, my brother Craig arrives for the summer to help the finishing of the basement;

Week of June 18: Box arrives and is set. Anybody want to come?

We'll see how close we can stick to this. I've got a lot to blog about the prep process that's going on right now for the rest of the work we have to do, and some of the difficult parts of this process and managing it ourselves. But more on that later.

Utilities

We knew all along that we wanted to have our utilities buried if it was feasible as opposed to having power poles run up through the property to the house. We had no idea what it would cost. But the power company got back to us last week and we seem to be all set. Because the nearest existing pole is across the street behind the neighbors house, we had to get an easement from her to bring the line from her backyard to the street and the entrance of our driveway, which she generously granted us (thank you, Mrs. Gates!). Then our excavator will run a ditch up the middle of the driveway, burying two conduits - one for electric and one for telephone - at opposite sides of the ditch a couple of feet apart. The conduits have a nylon cable in them already, so when the electric company is all set they simply attach their electric cable to the nylon rope at the bottom and then go up to the top and pull it up. Because our driveway is so long, they actually can only pull it about halfway at one time, so they do it in stages. The total distance of the new utility line will be about 1600'; the power company gives us the first 600' free and then we pay $1.50/ft the rest of the way. That's another 1000' for us to get up to the transformer location, so the bill from the electric company (which came in the mail already!) is about $1500. That's in addition to the cost of the ditch and the conduit from the excavator, so all together we're at about $7500 for the underground utilities. Seems like a lot just to avoid having poles going up through the property. But the power company wouldn't go up the driveway; they'd only do a straight line to the house, so that would've meant another big clearing of the trees and we didn't want that. And it also means that should we ever subdivide or build more houses, we can run a shorter underground conduit to the next site for a pretty modest marginal cost.