Building update - 10 feet tall!

Sorry for the radio silence - we've been pretty focused on the stonework for a while now.

When we last left the story, we were at 2 feet tall.  As we were enjoying the first 2 feet of stonework, we started working out how we were going to move our forms up the wall.  We quickly realized that the easiest thing to do would be to make another set of forms (so 2 complete sets) so that we could always stack the new form on top of the one we just filled.  Since each layer is wired into the wall, as soon as the concrete sets up it is locked in place.  That way we don't have to create some kind of stilts to prop up the forms while we lock them in.  So, we stopped and spent a week building a second set of forms.

This time, we made almost all of them without the plywood face.  All of the new forms then went on the inside of the building where we have garage doors to stop the concrete from coming in.  This saves a TON of weight when moving the forms up and made assembling the new forms go much faster.  Then we had to re-set the original forms around the stonework we had just completed so that we could stack the new set on top of them.  From there, we have been leap frogging forms up the wall!

Setting up the second lift

We have found that we can do approximately 1 linear feet of stonework per person working per hour..  That means that one 2 foot lift around the 104' of perimeter wall for the house takes about 100 person-hours of work to complete.   It takes an additional 60ish hours to cut the garage doors, move the forms up, level them and lock them in place.  That brings the total labor required per lift to around 160 hours.  There are 7 full lifts in the house, so you start to get an idea of how much of a time commitment it is.

You can see the stones sitting over the forms where we finished the first corner to 4 feet tall.

The first couple of forms set up for the third lift

The inside of the house set up for the third lift.  You can see the open front forms here.

Our amazing friend, Doug Dubois, came out to help us get to 6 feet tall!

Jeremy carefully lays out every stone on the ground before it goes in the wall.  We call it the county's biggest game of tetris.

Forms up for the 4th lift

We put steel headers over every door and window to help support the stonework.  Here they are primed and ready.

Setting forms for the 5th lift.

Inside of the house at 10 feet tall.  You can see the stones sticking up where we've already filled the forms for this lift.

Moving forms up for the 6th lift!

Another amazing friend, Matt Jolley, came out to help us get the first wall to 12 feet tall.

We were profoundly fortunate to have scaffolding loaned to us first by a neighbor and then by Jeremy's grandparents.  I hate to think how much harder it would have been without the platforms!  We currently have use of both sets and that is making the work go well, although it still gets harder the higher we go.  We currently have about half of the wall up to 12 feet tall and we hope to get the rest of it done this weekend.  Then we can start setting up for the last full lift!  Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Slipform Stone Masonry - finishing the lift

I posted a bit ago about how we set up the forms and fill them for the slip form walls of the house.  Since we just completed the first lift and took off the first forms, I thought I'd update with a little more detail about how filling the forms goes.

After you have the forms braced and tied together, you have to put a layer of sand along the front of the wall to keep the concrete from flowing all the way to the rock face.  This makes pointing much easier later.

Then you fill the bottom up to the level of the sand with concrete.  This is the mortar bed that the rocks will sit on.  The first line of rocks is next.  Once they're in place, we go back along the wall and put sand in between them and along the face above them so the concrete stays back and doesn't flow over the face of the stones.


With the sand in place, we fill up the form with concrete to the height of the rocks plus the sand on top.  This step takes a lot of concrete!  Thankfully, the kids have gotten really good at mixing concrete.

Then you continue with that pattern - sand, concrete, stone, sand concrete, stone - until the form is full!  The concrete needs to set for 24 hours before you can take the forms off and look at your hard work.  We did that today and this is what it looks like!

We learned a lot from this first lift.  We didn't put sand between all the rocks at first and got too much concrete around the faces.  We also learned a lot about placing wire ties in the wall so that they don't interfere with the rocks.  We had to cut several of our initial wire ties because they were in the way of the stone work.  Bit by bit, we get better.

On the positive side, we discovered that the 4 of us can do about half a lift in a day of work.  That's not too bad!

Catching up - Joinery!

I'm going to try and catch up a few of the bigger things that have happened in the last couple of years (LOL) relating to the farm and building the house.  Today, I'm going to talk about doing the joinery. 

As some of you may know, we have been working on the house for going on 3 years now.  One of the many challenges we faced once we got all the timbers to Kansas was how to protect them from the weather while we worked on them.  Naturally, last summer was one of the wettest we've seen which means having to move and re-level every beam every time Jeremy wanted to work on it.  Progress was exceedingly slow and we clearly needed a better solution. 

Luckily, we have an extra hoop house laying around!  We put up about half of the 30'x96' hoop house over the slab and covered it with an old piece of plastic from our other hoop house.  This gave a sheltered place for Jeremy to work where the beams could stay out as long as he needed them to.  Progress accelerated dramatically! 

Over the course of the fall, winter and into the early spring, Jeremy completed all the beams for the house, an addition and a barn!  Go Jeremy!  Here are a few of the pictures we took along the way.

Checking fit on the top post

Timber splice in the ridge pole.

Part of the second floor test fit before sanding

 Sanding the floor joists

Tools of the trade!  Wooden mallet and hearing protection.

One of the rafter beams assembled with collar tie

First floor post with summer beam

Jeremy admiring his handiwork in the hoop house

Once the joinery was done, we had to get ready to actually build the house, so the hoops had to come back down.  That took a couple of days to do. 

First, we pulled the plastic off and folded it up

Then we started taking apart the poles

Then everything gets loaded on the trailer

And then it gets unloaded in a new place

And here it will rest until we need it again!

Then we had to move all the beams off the slab so that we could start setting up concrete forms.  Thank goodness for good friends!  We managed to move them all in a day and get them stacked up by type near the building site.  I can't wait until we're digging them back out to put in the house!

Started with piles on the slab

Then the piles moved here!

And every one was picked up by hand.

And moved, stacked, stickered and leveled.

The moving crew (minus me - I took the picture)!

 

 

Then we were ready to start building door and window bucks and setting up forms.  I'll save that for a different post. 

Starting the stone!

It has been a very long time since we updated anything here, but we did cross a major milestone this week - we laid the first stones in the wall!  For anyone who doesn't yet know, the future farmhouse is has a stone and concrete exterior with a traditional timber frame interior.  To do the stone work, we are using a process called slipforming which does not require us to be fully trained stonemasons (thank goodness!).  The process goes something like this:

1.  Set up forms that are the width of the wall apart.  In our case, we also cut and fit 2" thick sections of insulated garage door panels on the interior of the form to be our insulation.  You can see the roofing screws we imbedded in them so that they would hold in the wall.

2.  Place wooden spacers at the top and bottom of the forms to set the width of the wall.


3.  Drill holes at the top and bottom and run wire through both sets of forms.  Then tighten the wire ties by twisting them with a nail.  This cinches the forms snug around the spacers and the wire will hold the forms the right distance apart once we pull the spacers out.


4.  Cut and bend rebar to run horizontally and vertically in the wall.  Our vertical rebar is tied to bolts in the foundation.  Each lift of the forms (2') gets a layer of horizontal rebar.  Thank goodness we picked up a rebar sheer and bender years ago at a yard sale!  I can't imagine doing this work without it!

5.  Lay out the stone.  Since we are working with fairly large stones, we can't just start placing them in the wall and find the right rock as we go.  Instead, we play really heavy tetris all the way around the building.  We took the time to put some nice, long stones around each doorway and plan to do the same around the windows.  We are also picking larger stones in a pattern for the corners so that they look "keyed" when we're done.  That's the plan anyway.

6.  Start mixing concrete!  We are using shredded Styrofoam in place of the gravel in a normal concrete mix.  The recipe is 1 part Portland: 2 parts sand: 3 parts shredded EPS.  It mixes up to a pretty reasonable mix that should have around R 1 per inch.  That plus the R13-17 of the garage door panel gives us an R25 or so wall with no air gaps as long as we finish the windows and doors well. 

7.  Put down a bed of concrete and start placing stones.  This is what the first section of forms looks like now that it is full.  We'll see what the faces look like once we take the forms off. 




It feels amazing to finally be working on the walls!  It has been 3 years of prep work to get to this point as we work around our regular lives.  Here's hoping it doesn't take us 3 more years to move in!

Swales!

We have taken advantage of the nice weather in January to build some swales.  The first one was to both clean out the catchment area at the bottom of our driveway ditch and to redirect water that was flowing across the bottom of our driveway into the road.  It went something like this...

We had created a wide, shallow drainage area after the culvert under out driveway.  This allows any sediment to settle out before the water flows on which keeps valuable topsoil on our property and not in our neighbor's pond.  The catchment area had completely filled up, so we dug out this valuable resource.

Kids and Jeremy filling the wheelbarrow

Then we moved the soil and created a berm/swale along the south side of our driveway to redirect water into the roadside ditch instead of across our driveway.

Catherine by the completed ditch

Jeremy did some additional swale digging this week also.  He dug out the next 2 grape swales behind the hoop house so that we can move our grapes from their temporary bed in the garden up to their permanent homes.  That will free up some valuable planting space in the garden and will give the vines a chance to really grow.  Eventually, this hillside will be a small vineyard.

Swales on contour to catch water for the grapes.

Jeremy's been busy on some other fun projects, but I haven't gotten around to getting pictures of them yet.  It will have to wait for another post.  ;-)

We also have a ton of little herbs and onions growing on the seed stand now.  They're coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to starting this year's cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower soon.  Spring is coming...

New year begins on the farm

I don't care what the calendar says, the year doesn't start on the farm until the first seeds go in the ground.  That started last weekend with the first round of onion seed getting planted in flats for (eventual) transplanting into garden beds.  The first of them are just now starting to poke their heads up.

Onions sprouting!

Currently, I have 5 flats of onions planted and 2 flats of various herbs (thyme, lavender, stevia, yarrow and parsley).  As soon as the seed arrives, I'll have another flat of herbs to plant (oregano, wormwood and a couple of other things).  Here in another couple of weeks I'll start the coles (cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower).  It is wonderful to have veggies growing already!  There's a little bit of spring in our living room now.  :D

Seed stand and lights

On the goat front, we traded bucks with some country neighbors who also have la mancha dairy goats.  The loaner buck, Bucky, has successfully accomplished his mission despite a less than auspicious beginning. 

Upon meeting their new boyfriend, the girls unanimously ask, "Who is this guy?!?!" 

The girls spent most of the first week or so running away from him.  Luckily he was predictably persistent and they eventually decided he wasn't so bad after all.  LOL.  We are expecting baby goats sometime in April or early May.

I don't have pictures of it, but we have been busy recently cutting firewood and getting practice splitting wood.  It has been nice to have some not-quite-frigid days to be out in the winter sunshine.  We hope to do a little lumber milling in the next couple of weeks also.  There's a nice downed oak tree in our woods that looks straight enough to make nice timbers, so we're going to give it a shot. 

In preparation for winter, we assembled a section of our second hoop house over the house slab.  It makes a nice, mostly wind free, space that stays a bit warmer than outside.  It should let us work when it isn't completely frigid out this winter and it will let us leave the work out once we get started.  That will save a ton of time spent uncovering and re-covering the timbers. 

Hoop house over the slab

I have yet to do the final tally of garden produce, but I think ended up close to 1000 lbs.  The bio-char trial definitely proved that the char made for healthier plants and higher yields in our tomato trials.  It didn't seem to make a difference for the dry beans we grew or the cabbage and broccoli.  It also didn't hurt either of those crops, so over all it seems to be a beneficial treatment.  We plant to use the remainder of the char we bought last year on our tomato beds for this year and we will likely purchase more to add to our remaining garden beds.

On tap for this Spring's projects (other than the house, of course) are some re-working of our catchment swales by the garden, creating a mini-chinampas bed for watermelon, finishing the grape swales and planting the grapes and (finally!) getting the front hedge row planted.  It will be another busy year for us, but at this point we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if it wasn't!