Building My Castle

So far, 2nd floor is progressing much faster than the 1st floor. It took 80 days, 80 days!, to do the 1st floor. My builder things we can do the 2nd floor in 30 days, and so far we’re on schedule, the ICF is definitely going to be done in time (though this very recent cold weather (no school tomorrow for the kids) I hope doesn’t delay things), the question remains the steel. Theoretically the steel can all be done in a couple days, the big question is, will the steel be ready to go when the ICF is done, the light gauge steel gave us a 21 day or so delay on the 1st floor because it wasn’t ready on time.

Every floor is slightly less than the prior floor, but the third floor really drops down from the second floor because the barbican stops at 2 stories. So, if we’re able to execute this 2nd floor in 30 days, then I have no reason to believe we shouldn’t be able to do the third floor in 30 days, and the fourth floor and roof portions as well. Really the fourth floor, which is just the corner towers, should be done in less.

So putting on my prediction hat, at the current pace, we could have our roof around April 1st.

Here are some pictures of the 2nd floor walls, the ICF blocks are basically up and done, except the barbican. There is some fine tuning to be done before the concrete pour. One thing becoming evident is the height of the great room ceilings, 24 feet, and actually the ceiling above the central staircase will be 36 feet (actually possibly as much as 46 feet to the peak of the skylight). Then the rough openings for the 14 foot tall cathedral windows on the side of the great room are done. Some of these pictures are starting to show that scale.

They have been working on the first floor walls, so far the first floor seems to be going much faster than the basement. The big key will be how fast the steel goes in after the walls are poured.

Its starting to get really fun to visit the building site, to be standing in rooms that have only been in my head or on paper for literally years. I am a bit of a liar though I guess. I always said I could visualize things, I could put myself in the space, and I think to a large degree that holds true, I am very good at visualizing things, everything is turning out well with rooms so there is that. But… actually being there I can still be awed and surprised and impressed, so I guess I was not quite visualizing the truth.

For instance, this ginormous window, on paper it fits the space and it makes sense and all that, but I never really appreciated how big it was until I was there on site looking through it. Kids are here for scale, but this window is essentially 12×7…feet. This goes into our “morning room” aka breakfast nook attached to the kitchen. I was worried that the kitchen would be too dark… not anymore. This window is matched by a window almost as big adjacent to it on the corner (just off the left side of the photo). The corner they form is where our breakfast table will be (ya, its that kind of house, a dinner table and a breakfast table). So… natural light, check.

The walls continue to go up, I think they have about a week left until they’re ready to pour the concrete. Theoretically, maybe we’d be having 2nd floor walls going up around Thanksgiving, and 3rd floor walls around New Years. Maybe we could have a roof by Valentines Day.

We have a floor. We still do NOT have the hollowcore concrete slabs installed for the pool deck, so that portion of the 1st floor is not done. But the rest of the first floor subfloor is done, and the 1st floor walls are now being started as I type this. Here are two pictures.

As slow as everything is going I worry that the subfloor will fail from weather exposure, but we’re using Advantec subfloors and I’m told they can stand to months and months of weather.

I also made a photosphere, which you can view below, or here (bigger). This is pretty cool, makes it seem like you’re there. I took this while sitting on a 10 ft sadder on the 1st floor, so my camera position was about where the joists for the 2nd floor would start. The actual view from 2nd floor windows will be 6-8 higher than where I was.

In two separate pours I now have a thick basement concrete slab. Something to walk on, soon it will have something above it too and it’ll feel a bit like a house perhaps.

It is cool though, to go from dirt floor to concrete floor, psychologically it is a big step.

Things still progress slower than I would like, I get really jealous when I see a stick framed house go up in a week with all the framing (decently big houses too). I originally thought we’d have a roof on by now, and instead we don’t even have a first floor. The first floor should be started, started, next week though. it’ll take over a month to finish it. I think it’ll be December before the 2nd floor is started, and I would consider myself lucky at that point.

I’m also very anxiously awaiting the backfill of the foundation, as a gardener I have an intense interest in how the land ends up.

Over last weekend the first structural steel (heavy duty, beams and posts) was installed… finally. I felt like we’ve been spinning our tires since early July. Some things have been happening, we had underslab plumbing and electrical work put in, the holes drilled for our geothermal HVAC system, but actual upward construction was in a holding pattern while some engineering kinks were worked out.

Finally, though things are starting to happen again – but now… now I don’t know when I’ll get to move in, it has been 6 months since we got our loan and we’re still on basement walls. It needs to start moving faster. I wanted the roof to be on by Christmas and I just don’t see that happening now (and that matters, because Winter).

Now though we have this steel stretching into the sky and you can see the height of the…2nd floor. Yes, some of these upright steel posts are supposed to go higher, to the roof, but it wasn’t advisable to have them installed sticking up like that quite yet so they will be put up in sections. This height is only to the 2nd floor floor (or just above it), we’ve got 2 more floors to go. I wanted them to install the final height of the steel, so I could get an appreciation for the final height of the building, but I understand the reasons not to (it just isn’t safe, they get in the way of the concrete boom truck, etc.)

Today, they are pouring the basement slab finally, it will be done in sections, the final section being done on Friday. Next week we should start getting the first floor floor on, then we can backfill the foundation and start putting up the first floor walls.

Up until now we’ve been forming the walls, but now, now they are starting to be poured. That makes them permanent I suppose.

The ICF forms, while up to the final height for the basement, are still being tinkered with, having embeds and other things put in for holding up the floor system. But that will be done soon and they will start to pour those. Yesterday though they started pouring the back pool patio walls. Our entire pool patio, to put it on the same level as the 1st floor, essentially is raised, with our garage underneath it. Here the construction is more like a parking garage, we’re doing plain poured walls (no sense using more expensive insulated ICF walls when you don’t plan to heat or cool the space), and the garage roof/patio floor will be hollowcore concrete planks (precast concrete planks hoisted up by a crane) directly supported by the walls.

In a few days the forms will be pulled down and we’ll be left with large monolithic concrete walls, and they really are large, because they go all the way down to the footings, which are about two feet below the grade of the eventual slab that will make the floor of the garage.

Once all the walls are poured, gravel is placed on top of all the dirt, then the plumbers and electricians do any slab rough-ins they need done, the slab is poured, the 1st floor truss system and patio hollowcore planks are put on, the foundation is backfilled all around, and we start on the 1st floor.

Over the last two weeks the walls have started creeping up toward the sky.

We chose an ICF wall system for the main part of the house. There are lots of options for an energy efficient wall, superinsulated double stick (traditional framing) walls. Structural insulated panels, or SIPs, but I’ve always wanted ICFs, which are insulated concrete forms, because they’re superefficient and still super strong.

We’ve all seem videos of disasters, where home after home is destroyed, but one thing that consistently happens is homes built out of concrete tend to make it. So I’ve always wanted a concrete home, and really, for a castle, I think it fits more the spirit of the building. Real castles had multifoot thick walls filled with rubble, my walls will not be that thick (though the thickest walls will approach 20 inches when the cladding is added), but they will at least be strong.

So an ICF, or insulated concrete form, is just about the most efficient way to do a concrete wall. Normally when building a concrete wall you put up wood or metal forms, pour your concrete between them, then when the concrete dries you take the forms down and voila, a wall. ICFs are forms that you never take down, and they’re made of insulating foam, so essentially you’re building a double walled cooler, foam on the outside of the wall, and foam on the inside of the wall, a complete thermal envelope.

The concrete of course also adds mass, mass sinks heat. Think about how a rock feels in the sun, in the morning, even if the sun is shining strong, that rock will be cold, it will take all day to warm it up, and then, after the sun sets, it will still feel warm for awhile. Or, to say it another way, rock changes temperature slowly. Concrete is the same way. So as the sun and hot outdoor air hits my walls in the summer the stone on the outside will heat up, then the outer foam will heat up (very very slowly, being foam and a poor conductor of heat), then there is the concrete core which will be able to absorb a tremendous about of heat, then the foam on the inside. By the time the concrete warms up enough to transfer heat to the interior of the building the sun will be going down, and the building will start to cool. And of course it works the same way in the winter.

You can also think of it like a freezer, did you know freezers work better when full? The more stuff, the more mass, you have in your freezer the less it needs to work to keep stuff frozen because it has all that frozen mass reducing temperature swings. Mass you add to your house works the same way, concrete adds a lot of mass. Originally we were going to do concrete floors all the way up too for various reasons, including the mass they would add, but that was sacrificed on the altar of the budget. We do however have the concrete exterior wall and a large fully interior concrete feature wall.

Other wall systems can provide great R value, but they don’t have the strength or mass of concrete in an ICF wall system. So it was an easy choice for us.

The ICFs go on like Legos, they get stacked on each other like bricks, they interlock, reinforcing steel rebar goes inside of them where necessary, and then before pouring concrete in the middle you need to brace them so the concrete doesn’t bulge out the sides. After the concrete dries you leave them in the place and work on the next floor up. Of course there is a bit of a break there, once the walls are up, in most cases you do the floor of the level above before you start doing those walls. So in our case it is steel beams and trusses that will go on attaching to the walls to hold up the next floor, and then they’ll start on the next floor of ICFs, and on and on until we have our 3 story (4 with the basement) main area, and our 4 story (5 with the basement) towers.