fresh home build coming soon

[iRONic]

Watching someone dowse for water freaks me out!

 

[skyking]

yes it gets an as-built, and also locate tape, and a blue stranded copper locate wire that will come up at my end and I will poke up next to the manhole adjacent to the saddle tie in.
This trench will serve double duty for the cable conduit too. You could not have a handier coincidence. This box is the end of a CATV run.
I'll tuck some HDPE right up in that thing.


More locate tape. LOL.
The development will do a half-width road improvement all the way to our property corner, not the half of the easment that this stuff is on. It will remain undisturbed.

 

[herm0016]

Watching someone dowse for water freaks me out!

yea... we knew sorta where that line must be logically, but damn if our flags were not within a couple inches! I'm not usually a believer in that sorta thing either, even when I was a kid. I had those rods in my own hands and was doing it right with him. I was maybe 12 or 14.

 

[skyking]

After speaking with the developer's representative, there is a possibility of getting a gravity sewer connection.
He'll bring it up at the office and see.
They are bringing in new fiber and I'd see about getting that in the same easement.
They are tearing it up all over, here they are stripping the sod off. My truck is sitting where our house will be. It's nice dirt several feet deep.



The lower part of the property is old river bottom with not much soil. The daffodills like it OK.


I had shifted the house 10' farther away from the development. I put a ladder in the truck to see what the views from our bedroom are like. We can't see any nearby homes, we do have a peek at the closest of the Olympic Mts.

 

[BoomerD]

Watching someone dowse for water freaks me out!

I worked for an irrigation district in NorCal for several years. We had a couple of people who were good with dowsing...but the guy who ran the pump department was a fckn wizard with it. He could use tree branches in a pinch...but did his best work with a couple of welding rods. In 7 years, I never saw him miss once. He even found a couple of underground springs that no one even knew existed. Black magic, I tell ya.

 

[skyking]

I went up today and the young fellow tracked over from his stockpile, and touched the blade of the 850 to the lath I put by the silt fence. I marked under the blade and VIOLA! I have a benchmark.
Look what being nice and a couple of dozen donuts will get you



I spoke to the developer's rep, and he will get me a price next week for the sewer, and I hit him up for everything. Sewer, water, power, fiber.
Why not? As much as I know how to dig all those awful long trenches and do all that work, I would lay down some coin to minimize that action.
I need to email him a sketch of the proposed work. I'll revise my site plans with the actual elevation rather than my WAG, and shoot him a sketch of the utilities and where they can cross onto our lot.

 

[skyking]

The civil engineer got a first draft to me of

STORMWATER SITE PLAN
FOR:
Skyking Residence

It is 60 pages of boilerplate and maps and drawings and pictures and descriptions and more boilerplate out of the 1000 page state manual.
I tried to read it through, until my eyes sorta glazed over.
I knew I was looking at a masterpiece. His words , " I papered over nearly all of the stuff, you won't have to infiltrate anything".
It will have a similar intended effect on the city engineers and inspectors. They'll get about 45 pages in and start to lose focus on life in general, nod and stamp it approved.

 

[skyking]

The latest major design change is solar heating.
Rather than another heat pump for hydronic heat, I will install (4) duda vacuum tube collectors, and pump excess heat into an insulated soil storage mass for seasonal storage and also daily buffering.
I am splitting the mass in two so I can chase the best delta T for the hot summer and shoulder month temperatures.
This will be fun!
https://www.dudadiesel.com/choose_item.php?id=DS-SC5814-25T

Link to the SRCC certification for that panel.
https://www.dudadiesel.com/files/SRCC-DS5825.pdf

I can roll out all the math for you, or you can play with it.
Our average insolation is 4.08 kwh/m squared/day.
That puts it between medium and low insolation values in that certification spec.
The mass will operate between 40C and 65C.

 

[iRONic]

If my wife saw that I’d have to explain why it wouldn’t work for the AG pool.

I will put a single on my planned metal roof though. 👍

 

[skyking]

I have a price for the side sewer of 8500 plus the easement. That is doable! It remains to be seen of the water and power can come that direction. It is all about the timing.

 

[skyking]

The civil engineer emailed the final stamped stormwater plan yesterday. I have to do a few edits of elevations on the print and draw in the new side sewer. Just a quick sketch and I will shoot that off to a Dropbox file I share with the lady in the city office.
Send her an email and then the ball is in their court again.
I have about 10 days of work, and then the big machine and the dump truck will be idle and not too far from the homestead. I'll ask the boss about using them and hopefully get a permit with the right timing.

 

[skyking]

some excerpts from the plan






I'll self-perform all that work. The plan is to colorize and stamp those driveway runners to look like a couple of roman road strips.
A pair of these with grass in-between and on the sides.

 

[skyking]

The building inspector emailed me and suggested a phone call, then did not answer for a few days 🤣

When we finally touched base he needed different header information, and to clear up some things on the Braced Wall Lines (BWL).
He had already annotated the Rev A drawings so I pulled out a few sheets from Rev B, made the changes with Acrobat Pro and got them back to him today.
Example of the header blocks I put in:



My draftsman had drawn a wall short for the BWL requirements, even though he had drawn it properly on the BWL sheet.
I figured out how to draw a straight line in Acrobat and that was good enough.

 

[skyking]

DP

 

[skyking]

The permit is still playing hard to get. Today I went up and made an appearance at the permit desk. They said " "They will work on it tomorrow, check back Thursday". I will drive right back up there.
I took the truck so I could start clearing the driveway path by hand while I wait for a permit.
Here it is parked on the edge of the dropoff, and the center of the road is the right side of the truck as pictured. I am standing at the top of the cut, it will gradually slope down from there.

There is a farm road that crosses the proposed driveway here. It will be the balance point of the driveway. Cuts to the right under the truck and beyond, fills to the left.


My brother is coming with me on Thurdsay to cut that brush to the left in the picture above.
Gives some perspective of the dropoff.


The goal is to get the centerline staked and be able to set a laser there and do the balancing. My work laser can find the percentage of grade across a distance like that and set it for you.
I stomped the truck down about 4 times and paid the price for that, it did not want to come back out.
Thursday I will put the rack boards on it and bring Pete's trailer so I don't have to get medieval on it.

 

[skyking]

I took the sledding hill in and out today. The daisies replaced the daffodils later in the summer.




I'd like to get the place next door with the barn. They have some nice flowers volunteering there.

 

[Micrornd]

When this thread first started, the pictures looked like you were building on a nice piece of ground in the boonies.
But the more this thread progresses and the more photos of the surroundings you give us, it seems like you are on the far edge of suburbia and will be surrounded by it in about 10 years.
Am I right or wrong?

 

[skyking]

There are 3 houses behind to the south on 1/3rd acre lots.
There are 215 houses going in to the east and north on 45 acres.
We will have the park in the middle. the house is ~550' from the road to the west, the nearest house in that direction is ~600'

 

[Micrornd]

There are 3 houses behind to the south on 1/3rd acre lots.
There are 215 houses going in to the east and north on 45 acres.
We will have the park in the middle. the house is ~550' from the road to the west, the nearest house in that direction is ~600'

Mmm, good luck to you.
I'm a little jaded, when I settled where I'm at on a 3/4 acre plot I had to pay to have telephone service run in and would have had to pay for power to be run in, except that another poor soul 5 miles past me was picking up the tab to have power run to his property. My nearest neighbor was 1/2 mile away and it was 6 miles to the city limits.
Then the developers showed up, now my nearest neighbor is 40' from my bedroom and it is 1 mile to the city limits.
All that happened within the first 6 years on the property.

 

[skyking]

We don't need luck. We have a plan.
We are not on 3/4 acre and can pick and choose our view and setbacks.

 

[skyking]

My brother and I went up to continue clearing out the brush in the driveway route.
I had a triangle blade for the weed eater for this woody stuff and starting in to the bigger stuff, the seafoam and hazelnut.


We got back to the big cedar and had a load on.

The driveway will be the classic batcave going up the hill. I'll clear out a 12' path for subgrade, for 10' wide base rock and a 9' wide concrete pair of runners.
I am hoping to bend it round the junior cedar on the right here. it's about 8" ~10", the big one is 2' plus at the butt.

 

[skyking]

I went in to the office today to make some scans and copies of 11x17 drawings for the lot stormwater plans. I found it closed but the boss was there working, so we had a nice visit about things and I designed the downspout drainage system to send to the engineer. I studied the state stormwater manual and used the elevations and measurements I made, and made a command decision about how to proceed.
During our visit I asked about using the equipment at the new home site and he said "yes, of course".
I did not want to assume anything, and he was happy to just let me use it gratis. I am not happy with that and offered to trade some of my time on jobs to be fair about it. Having my own big tool kit is priceless.
I need ~15 loads of big rock for the driveway subgrade, a couple loads of crushed for the foundations, a couple of loads of drain rock for this downspout dispersion.


I can rough in the road with the excavator OK.
The preferred tool is a rental Cat D3, but I can make do.
Preferred @ ~$1300 for a single day rental over the weekend, including delivery and pickup.
I'd have from Friday afternoon till Monday morning to use the 8 hours.




The bummer with that is I can get the subgrade all roughed in and tuned up, but I can't use it to pound in the 15 loads of 3-4" base rock. I can do that with the excavator and hoe pack on that subgrade though.
The rock is probably a Mon~Fri gig and two days of hauling.
I can probably get a roller on the same lowboy from Cat for another ~$450 or so. If I go that route I'll do that.

 

[Greenman]

Pretty handy to have access to that equipment at no cost. Even handier to know how to operate it.

 

[BoomerD]

Pretty handy to have access to that equipment at no cost. Even handier to know how to operate it.

It’s all bout knowin what them two levers do…if you aren’t sure what lever A does, lever B.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Is all this taking place near Sequim?