ADVENTURES OF THE CANADIAN FAMILY ROBINSON

Concrete Bondbeam Poured!

Vision — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:51:41 +0000

Sorry I have been a bit slack on posting this past week!
Here are some pictures of the framed in bond beam and the pour with the 50 M concrete truck. You can see the aircraft cable loops that are under the bond beam, these are embedded into the concrete now and will be tied into the foundation ones to help “earthquake proof” our home. As far as poring concrete, we calculated how long it would take us to do it by hand (at least 5 days) so cost wise it was worth having the pump truck come. It didn’t take long to get the 3m of concrete into the bond beam. We will be tarping the walls overnight tonight since the forecast is for rain. Tomorrow we will let it set for the day then forms will come off the concrete on Wed. Then onto the 2×6 framing which will take somewhere between 3 and 5 days, then onto roof trusses!! They will be delivered early next week so will start going up a week from now! It is starting to feel like a house and the reality is sinking in that in a matter of a few weeks we will have a roof over the house , (thank goodness with the rains coming!) And be onto the final cob and then the interior!
I also added some pictures of our shrinking clay pile and wood shavings pile!!
Today it has been 2 years to the day since we moved into our 5th wheel. What an amazing two years it has been, we have grown way stronger as a family and are so excited to be living our dream and be closer each day to finishing our home!

Cob, Cob, Cob

Vision — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:23:55 +0000

We are ALMOST done our cob up to where the concrete bond beam will be poured!! We are so excited!! We have Kris Dick our awesome engineer coming by in the morning tomorrow for a quick visit, we are going to check with him about making a change above the bond beam. We have not been 100% set of doing the double framed walls up there with light clay woodchip infill. So we are hoping to switch it to 2 x 6 framing on the center above the bond beam embedded in the 20 inches wide of cob. We are having a blast building with cob and it is going up super fast for us. With our amazing crew of Curtis, Gord, Eric, Ben and Daylon working the past two days.. 12 yards of cob have gone up a day. Crazy.. We are so happy with the progress we are making and will keep posting pics as we can. We are about 3 weeks away from having a roof on!!!!! Here are some pictures and also some of the goats enjoying eating the hay off the scaffolding and trying to figure out how to climb on it! And a pic of our test patch of plaster on our north infill wall, (it is sticking AMAZING! And a picture of me working on the lathe on Curts infill studio. We will start the cob floor and plaster on it this weekend..

Many Hands Cob Day

Vision — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:20:42 +0000

Thanks friends who came out to cob with us today xoxo Wish I took the camera out earlier and also brought it to the river for the swim afterwards too!

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Infill Wall

Vision — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 05:04:03 +0000

I need to take a few more pics of the north wall infill but it is ALMOST done being filled with infill! We have another few batches or so and it will be full! It put quite the dent in our 50 yard pile of shavings! Early this week we will start the first layer of plastering on the exterior (north) side of the infill wall.

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August Cob

Vision — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:12:37 +0000

Here are some pictures of our most recent progress…

Few More Pics..

Vision — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:13:29 +0000

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East Wall Cob

Vision — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:03:18 +0000

Gord and Eric put up over 8 yards of cob in the past 4 days, you guys are amazing and we love you!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! More pics coming tomorrow

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Cob Progress

Vision — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:47:31 +0000

We have been mixing up Bobcat cob it speeds the mixing progress about 6 times from that of the rototiller.. The cob we are getting is amazing!! Very High straw with excellent clay, low sand needed in this mix! Gord and Eric have been here this week working like mad-men on the cob. Here are some updated pictures! It is so so so good to be making progress!!

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Cob begins

Vision — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:47:00 +0000

It is hard to have time to sit down and update the blog these days!! But here is a quick update! We have been working on infilling the north wall and also starting cob on the east and west walls alongside the ICFs to bring it up to level with the floor and south side. We have had Eric and Chris out here doing some cob with us which has been great! Curt is away now on a film shoot for a documentary for the next 10 days so Gord, Eric and Chris will be here cobbing some of the time. The kids are going to Nana and Papa camp at the lake so I will also get a chance to work on the house too
We have installed a Type 1 Gravity flow septic system now as well… We mixed our cob up with the bobcat and that went well and mixed fast! You can do a big batch really quick!
Here are a few pics

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Our Woodchip Clay Infill North Wall

Vision — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 05:26:17 +0000

Our North wall is our framed infill wall. The two walls sit 20 inches apart and are filled with a mix of Clay and Wood shavings giving us a R value of over 35.. This wall may have a fairly long drying time so we wanted to get it up and filled first before we got to far along with our cob. First step was to frame in the outer wall which is the load bearing wall, we had a awesome friend over from Squamish who is really experienced and FAST with framing, he helped to get that wall up in a day with the help of another great friend who lives around the corner (Thanks Andreas and Cam!)! Then we had to get the floor filled, level and compacted before we could frame the inner wall. We had a local Adam come out to help frame that wall and he was such a great guy and a joy to have around! It went up in a day too! So we were ready to put lath up on the walls to start filling them! Some friends the Andre’s came out for the day to help us get the lath up and mix going! We were not sure how we would do the mix the most efficient way in large batches. So we hydrated and mixed the clay and water in my Grandpas cement mixer, it worked great! We then poured that into a old bathtub to let in hydrate more into a clay slip. We then lay out a layer of wood shavings on a tarp, bucketed the slip on top and hosed it down, then drove the bobcat over it for about 10 minutes to mix it up, then delivered it up to the building site. I haven’t taken pics of that part of the process yet but will soon. We waited until the cooler evening to start filling the wall and the kids and I had a blast doing that! Off to bed now so we can get up early to mix more infill and our first batch of cob too!! Here are some pics and also some of the grey water and septic pipes out, we went with a 4 inch standard septic out and a 2 inch greywater so we can install a diverter valve outside the home. Also a pic of our green house tomatoes

Recovery and Backfilling

Vision — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 05:02:05 +0000

Curt had two weeks where he was very sick and has had a rough recovery from it, building was basically on hold as was mostly everything! Anyone one who is close family and friends you know what was going on and we appreciate all your support and love! When he was able to get back up and at it he was not able to do anything but drive the bobcat at first. But we had ALOT of backfilling to do, luckily we have fill sand on our land because it would have been insane $$ to have all that brought in by truck! It probably took a total of 10 dump trucks of our sand to fill the foundation up to floor level where we can soon lay our insulation, hydronic tubes and earthen floor. We ran our electrical lines, cable and internet and water line through under the fill so those are in!

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ICF pour

Vision — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:20:40 +0000

Its time for me to play “catch up” on the blog. I need to get some recent pics of where we are today as well! Lots has changed!
Here are some pictures from our ICF concrete pour. It all went quite well the Quadlock held out with the reinforcement on the ends.. There was one part where it bowed out a bit but it was on the cob wall not framed wall so no problems there! The pumper company felt bad that they sent the wrong truck last time and we all had to work so hard so this time they sent the huge 50 M pump truck! Cedar thought that was pretty cool Curt ran the hose, Papa was here helping running the pencil vibrator and I did the trowelling.. The ICFs run along the North wall which is our framed in Wood chip Clay Infill wall, and along the East and West on the North end to bring the floor up level and so cob walls would not have so much weight of backfill on them..

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Happy Solstice..

Vision — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 06:19:38 +0000

I haven’t been on here much lately to update! Life has been a little busy
So here is a quick update..
The well is all hooked up now that the ground dried enough to get the crane in there and waterlines are run up to the house to the pressure tank etc. We went with a really good Grundfos pump system for our 400 foot + well and have 9gpm of clean fresh water pumping out now! We have the ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) in and inspected and will be poured tomorrow afternoon. It took us a bit longer than planned to get them up due to a few issues and also Curt spent about a week back on the computer working. Next step will be to backfill the foundation, we will be using our bobcat to do that, we have about 10 dumptrucks of material needed to fill in the foundation, glad we were able to pull some clean fill off the back of our farm! After backfilling floor will be finished up to the point of insulation..The interior framed North wall sits on our finished floor so we need to get it up to that point and level. Then we have a friend coming over to frame our North wall with us on the weekend. North wall will be a light clay-woodchip giving us a high insulation value a great addition to our passive solar design! The infill will take a while to dry so will be the first to go up. Cob will begin right after that. We have had lots of media interest on our project which is great! Also to our friends and family wanting to help out, We appreciate you all! And to those of you who warned us 75% of people who live in a small space or try to build a house together get a divorce, you are SO WRONG, we have lived in our 5th wheel for 2 years in August and we are way happier than we were in a big house with a big mortgage.
Garden is growing well, canning season will be busy! We have fresh kale, lettuce, spinach, baby potatoes, radish, cilantro, parsley, beets and peas coming off daily. Tomatoes in the greenhouse are doing great, with our 20 tomato plants we should have alot to can, make sauce, freeze, sun-dry etc . The kids have been working on their secret forts and fairy village daily, they are all doing well and loving farm life!

Foundation Pour

Vision — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:10:33 +0000

We got the go ahead to pour yesterday after inspection from our engineer and building inspector.. The weather here has been horrible, unbelievable amounts of rain coming down!! Today the weather cleared up during the pour to a very light drizzle and by the early afternoon the sun and wind was out! Hope it sticks around for a bit! For our concrete we went with a local company here and our mix is 25% flyash..
The pumper truck arrived and unfortunatley they sent the wrong size truck, the boom did not quite reach with the shorter hose on the end, so they had to put on the 25 foot hose that is HEAVY when full of concrete. Gord and Curt ran the hose and Ian and I (for some of it) did the tamping. We thought we may be just short on concrete part way through the pour but we had enough! It was gut wrenching watching the forms and fabric form flex under the weight of the concrete but it all held just beautiful! The North wall corners had some fairly deep sections! We will start taking the forms off in the next few days and have some QuadLock ICFs going in on the stepped sections of the North, East and West walls. These should go up fairly fast and they will be inspected before we pour them..
Thanks again Gord for all his hard work, sticking it out camping in the rain and always great conversations!!
Thanks Ian for the help and support, we appreciate it!
and thanks Curt for your amazing ability to balance being a Dad, husband, money maker and home-builder, we LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!

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Black sheep

Vision — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:38:52 +0000

Every family has one they say..

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