Isaac laying in a sonotube for the pier

The first problem we had in building this house is that we had absolutely no facilities to make building a house in the least bit easy.  We had no water, no power and no flat land.  I studied A LOT before charging head-long into house building and among foundations, it seemed that the post and pier foundation required the least amount of concrete to be mixed and would be the most straightforward for a building neophyte to pull together.  All of the concrete for this place had to be hand mixed as there is no driveway or road for a mix truck to deliver concrete.

Really helpful advice on working with concrete

Mixing concrete by hand for the post and pier foundation

I figured that pouring one pier at a time would be slow enough to do (unlike dealing with an entire load of concrete on a truck) that I could take the time to make sure that stuff was plumb and level and fixable if I screwed up.  It turns out that it is a slow process but definitely not simple.  I learned how to tie rebar and how to mix concrete that was not too wet and not too dry and I learned how to keep a sonotube (cylindrical concrete  form) plumb even when pouring shovels full of concrete into them.

Pouring concrete in the tubes by hand

Concrete form tubes for our post and pier foundation

Our soil is red sticky clay with very little rock.  I read a lot about soil types and found that if there isn’t a sufficient base under a pier, the cylinder that is the pier will push down into the soft clay like a pin through butter when the weight of the house is added.  Most recommendations suggest that a larger footprint cylinder will prevent the sinking.  They make a flared base that expands the footprint of a typical 8 inch sonotube to prevent sinking but I didn’t have those handy.  The other option is to use a bigger tube.  Twelve inch piers seemed to be the consensus for size and they were readily for sale.  Let me tell you, for simple cardboard tubes, the folks that make the forms are pretty proud of their product.  Anyhow, in addition to the size of the base, the depth is important.  In addition to needing to dig the piers deeper than the frost line, deeper piers provide more contact between concrete and soil.  That friction also prevents sinking as well.

Anyone still with me?  Yeah Mom, you don’t really count here.  Anyone else?  Ok, well just in case…we connected 6x6s to the pier with a metal post base which was bolted to a J-bolt embedded in the concrete.  In some ways, I would have preferred to pour taller concrete piers rather than add a wooden post but my back wouldn’t take it.  I also did not know if I could lift that much concrete over my head to pour it into the forms.  Anyhow, the only reason it matters is that the joint between the concrete and wood is a hinge point…a point of weakness.  Solid concrete to the base of the house would have eliminated that hinge point.

The bolt embedded in the concrete pier

A 6x6 post base that attaches the post to the pier

My goal is to minimize hinging by making good connections, by making things plumb/level/square and by using geometry.  I connected 2×6 boards from the top of one pier to the bottom of adjacent piers.  By making triangles with the boards, the weaker tops of the 6x6s are connected to the more stable lower portions preventing movement.

Cross-bracing the posts using geometry!

So, once all of that is done, I have a pretty stable base on which to build everything else.  I am not sure that I made a compelling case for building a post and pier foundation but I have no regrets  and it definitely raises eyebrows.  Initially, I had hoped to be able to ignore the space underneath but I will definitely have to do something to protect the area beneath our deluxe shed.  The wind really howls up there and I have no interest in a Dorothy/Kansas/Toto deal where my house gets carried away by the wind!

See all of the progress on the cabin

The window view...not framed in yet

Progress

That's a long ways down!

The dastardly weatherman called for snow and rain to thwart the attempts of our heroes to get the place weathered in before the snow  ruined all of the hard work and industrial glue used to hold together the over-priced plywood and OSB used throughout.  Ok, I can’t stand the wait…no cliff-hanger here.  We got the sheathing up and put  house wrap up on about half of the place the last two weekends!

One gable end framed in!

The high parts are done!

Red Riding Hood

House wrap, it turns out, is some weird stuff.  It blocks water from the outside.  Water vapor can freely escape the other direction though so moisture from inside the house can get out.  The problem is that if larger water particles get behind the wrap, they are held in place…only water vapor can escape.  Sometimes that makes things rot as water usually does.  I read a bunch of stuff on the internets about whether house wrap was a good idea or whether old fashioned tar paper was better.  It seemed like I found a pretty mixed story about it.  Most people said tar paper was really good and that it lasted forever and has been used successfully for a long time.  House wrap is only popular because it goes up fast which is important to home builder.   That fact is also popular with my wife so we (she) finally decided to use house wrap.

The first of the house wrap

About half of the house wrap is up!

We have about 4 months to get the house wrap covered with siding before UV rays from the sun start to ruin it.  If anyone remembers my other remodeling experiences, you will recall that a 4 month deadline is pretty tight for me!  The kids have really enjoyed hanging out with their great-grandparents as we do this final push to get things done though.  Another few months would suit them just fine I think.  Great-grandparents, it turns out, really like to spoil great-grandkids.  Apparently it is in the Constitution or something.  Anyhow, as this year (and probably the nice weather) wraps up, I really owe a lot to all of the family and friends who have helped in various ways to get this place under cover!  I am so tired of wrapping so your Christmas presents are in the mail!

See all of the progress on the cabin

Bears don't read very well...

Not much will really stop a hungry bear, but the official recommendation is to enclose all “country bees” in an electric fence.  When a bear attacks a hive, the bees always come out in great number to ward off the attack.  Bear fur is typically too thick to present a problem.  The only sensitive place on a bear is apparently their nose/mouth area.  While my electric fence is a little more “juiced” than a bee sting, most folks agree that a bear has to learn about the fence with their mouth or nose.  I’ll talk more about that another time, but it makes sense that an electric fence properly set up should deter all the Poohs out there.

So, you may be wondering how solar power can deliver enough juice to make a bear even notice it was there.  It turns out that the people who make electric fence controllers make a version that runs on DC (i.e. deep cycle batteries, not house current which is AC).  The controller I bought is designed to power up to 25 miles of fence.  All told, I have maybe 1000 feet of wire strung on a few poles, so the charger will deliver a good shot when it fires.  I won’t bore you with the calculations about the capacity of the battery but it is roughly the size of a car battery just for perspective (a car’s starter battery would not work here though…this application needs a long continuous  draw on the battery rather than the quick hit when you start a car)

The battery, fence controller, and charge controller

The instructions show that the fence will run for 2 weeks on a fully charged battery of the proper specs but I do not want to have to worry about whether the battery is still charged if I don’t make it out there for a few weeks.  Instead, I bought a solar panel and a charge controller to keep the battery full.

See? It's pointed south

I pointed my solar panel south and angled it to the optimal angle to get direct sun.  Output wires from the panel go into the charge controller which regulates the power going into the battery.  The charge controller makes sure the power is the proper voltage and that the battery does not get over or under charged. The charge controller also has a “load” connection so I connected the fence controller to that connection and we’re off and running!  All of the charging/controlling/shocky-shocky stuff is inside a beehive surrounded by my other beehives as a sort of a theft deterrent.

Oh, by the way, without thinking I tried to use a regular household switch at the gate to turn the power on and off.  Of course, the fence controller pushes somewhere around 10,000 volts which didn’t even slow down for the switch rated for household current of 110 volts.  If you want a switch, make sure you get one rated properly…same with any wire you may need to use (I only used fencing wire which handles the charge nicely)

So, I hope some of that makes sense.  So far it is alive and well.  Let me know if you want more details…

We didn’t talk about anything in particular, but I so loved sitting there, relaxing and just talking with Isaac.  Middle school is going to be ok…

Anyhow, I am happy to say thanks to the folks at Very Best Sites. Check out the post and especially take a look at the other WV sites that are listed there!

Emily opened hers on Christmas morning and sort of gave a scowl…much like when I gave her a frying pan for Valentine’s day.  Rats…I blew it again.  Still, she turned it on and started reading the book that I had bought and installed.  She came out of hiding a day and a half later!  Maybe a kindle was better than a frying pan!  Isaac did the exact same thing so I knew his gift was a hit too!

Before Abigail had a chance to even turn hers on, I commandeered it and downloaded a bunch of books and hid from her while I read.  She finally tracked me down and insisted that I return her kindle so she could use her Christmas present.

Dang kids who read…well, I had to order my own.  Yesterday I received my kindle from the kind UPS driver and moved all of my stuff to it.  Of course, I had to take all of my stuff off of Abigail’s kindle.  She finally got it back right before bed last night.  Was that mean?  I think it will make her appreciate being able to use her Christmas present even more today!

Well, we do read a lot and I guess you could say we are 100% kindle enabled finally.  Thank you great bookstore in the sky.  Thank you for giving us cheaper books at the touch of a button.  But please great bookstore, please make it just a little harder to buy a book…we are becoming addicted and the credit card on file doesn’t seem to know how to say stop!

Anyhow, my web server machine was fine but the program stopped for some reason.  It’s not supposed to do that.  It rarely does that.  I was bummed that hundreds of spammers could not assault my machine all night long as I slept.  I hate to let those folks down, but alas, software is fickle.

Well friends, the web server is back up and running so let’s hope the spammers can catch up to meet their quotas!

Emily went on down to the West Virginia Parkways Authority and bought our transponder.  Basically we just had to load a $20 credit on our device (which required a $5 refundable deposit).  The device hangs on the windshield behind the mirror and is out of sight.  Now get this, it took Emily mere minutes to fill out the paperwork (at a government agency) and walk out of the building with our very own you-can-use-the-empty-lane-on-the-toll-roads transponder.  Instead of the typical $2 per stop, with the E-Z Pass system, the toll is only $1.30…so on our trip, we saved$4.20 which almost covered my recommended daily allowance of Mountain Dew for the trip down.

Do you ever feel that special happy feeling down in your belly when you get to do something cool that puts you in front of other cars, saves you some money and speeds you on to the beach faster than normal?  Yeah, me too.  We took pictures of cars around us and the empty lanes each time we came upon a toll booth…I was like a kid in a toll booth shop!

The most recent patent was just awarded last week and I have since been inundated with mail from companies ready and willing to help me bring my new invention to market.  Though I am very appreciative of these folks trying to take a cut of whatever money I might make from it, I would prefer that they stop sending me mail.  They say, “hurry, you need to get <insert your invention here> to market as soon as possible!”

The funny thing is that it has taken four and a half years for this most recent patent to be awarded.  I wonder how many things are out there that could be saving lives or cleaning up oil spills, etc that are stuck in the big patent machine.  There are tons of silly patents and mean patents and patents that will have a profound impact on people’s lives.  I can’t imagine patenting human genes (which is quite a scary mess).  Seeds are patented and patent owners may do all sorts of evil enforcing those patents.

My patents are not evil and will not ever make me a single cent but I often wonder why some patents are awarded and who in the world thinks it is ok to patent some stuff. I am pretty proud to have been awarded these patents but I can’t imagine being so proud of a bit of work I might do that I would be willing to withhold treatment for someone’s illness because I own a patent on some gene. I cannot imagine forcing third-world farmers to buy my genetically modified seed (or suing them if their seed crosses with someone else’s seed for which I owned a patent).  I just can’t imagine!

I guess I am rambling as usual…of course, maybe if I owned a patent on a gene, I could afford to buy one of the plaques that the aforementioned “take your product to market” companies was selling and I might actually have something to take a picture of so I could do a proper picture-filled post. Until then, I will be content with having my name buried in the records of the US patent office.

By the way, if anyone is interested in tattooing my patent numbers on their bodies, I am willing to sell the rights to the numbers for a small fee…

(oh yeah, none of the pics are my patents…though I wish!)