I'm ready for my turn at the Not-So-Big concept. A couple of years ago my wife and I decided we were ready to lose the big house, the big yard, the big minivan and the big daily commute. The goal is to spend less time and money maintaining a large property and more time doing something else

First complication was on agreeing on how small to go. I wanted the house to be around 1800 sqft, My wife wanted about 2400. We compromised at 2000 with a not-so-big indoor pool(swim spa). Secondly we wanted to maintain a traditional look that compliments the architecture in our area while at the same time calling attention to itself.

I bought Sarah's "The Not so big house" and "Creating the Not So Big House" The books were a huge help in convincing my wife we could go smaller. At first I looked at purchasing and adapting one of Sarah's designs to our situation but nothing worked for what we wanted to do. Instead I spent a couple of months reviewing both her books over and over while looking at sketches and pictures of my previous work from the last 23 years
(I am a carpenter )

Finally one day I put away Sarah's books,sat down and starting drawing. After a couple of weeks I had a sketch that my wife and I could agree on. I sent the sketches to my PE and his designer to clean up and make sure it all works.

Below is what the final plans look like, What was interesting to me was going back through Sarah's books and seeing the influences from her books that ended up on my plans. The entry and garage reminds me of her original NSB house and the overall layout of the front reminds me of "A river runs below it"

Finding a lot actually wasn't difficult,we bought a 100 x 180 lot close in town that cuts my wife's commute by 30 mins and is right in the same area as 70% of my client base.

We are planning to start as soon as the ground thaws enough (mid-late March) Cost should be under $210K including the pool

One of the ways we are reducing cost and increasing quality is by buying quality materials and fixtures that are left over, mistakes or reclaimed from older structures. I'll post more about those items in the next few days.

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As mentioned in my previous post we have been buying damaged, salvaged and surplus material to save money and add quality. Here are a few of the notable finds.

One of the first items I scored was 6000' of clear beveled cedar siding that currently sells for over .90 a lineal foot. I bought 6000 lin ft of 3', 5', and 7' long bundles from a lumber yard that had a huge contract to supply only 8' and longer lengths for a government project( cedar siding is normally sold in random lengths from 3' to 20'). I paid .29 a foot for the shorts thus saving about $3600.00. I spaced many openings at distances to make best use of the lengths, Additionally I will break up some long runs of siding with vertical trim in a post and beam effect especially on the back of the garage and the pool. The house will require approx 7500 lineal feet of siding. The remaining 1500 feet I need should include enough long lengths for the few long runs I have.

I frequently visit the "screw-up" section of another local home center that often has mis-ordered or damaged windows and doors, I recently found a large Marvin casement window with a broken sill that will become the garden window in the kitchen. New the window is $790 I bought it for $150 and spent about 3 hours and $20 replacing the sill. I am using Marvin Windows anyway so it was a very good find.

Front Door. We wanted something to create a unique entry but found few choices for front doors without going $2k and above for a custom. I can and do on rare occasions make entry doors but it is very time consuming plus beveled or etched glass work is expensive to have done by local glaziers.
Christmas I was cruising Ebay and found an auction for a 3'6 x 7'0" early 1900's Mission style fir door with 1/4" beveled glass that was salvage from a Texas courthouse. It included an unusual solid brass mortise lock set. The same seller had another auction for two interior pocket doors the same size from the same building.(I'm using the pocket doors in the library). I was the high bidder for both auctions and got all 3 doors for $400 plus $200 in travel expenses to pick them up in Wisconsin.







One of the unexpected benefits of the front door was that it gave us the idea to duplicate the door's lite pattern for the SDL grids on all of the front facing windows.

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I stripped the front door over the weekend, Nothing fancy done to remove the paint,just a good heat gun and a stiff 1" putty knife with the corners slightly radiused to avoid gouging the wood . Also because the door very likely had lead in it's paint, I used a respirator and worked with the shop exhaust set on high. It took about 6 hours to remove the glass, strip the paint and sand once. I discarded the glass stops since it takes less time to make new ones than to strip the old ones ( a sample of the old stop is seen taped to a muntin)

Note the bottom rail of the door, it isn't a glue-up. It is 20" wide quarter sawn ( vertical grain) fir, That means the tree it came from was over 4' in diameter. The door is 1 7/8 thick



I still need to treat the dark water stains on the bottom with Oxalic acid. In the meantime The door will be stored until after the fir garage doors are installed so stain can be matched

2 Days for a new home building permit! That has to be a world record!

Two years ago this same town made me wait for 3 1/2 weeks to issue a permit for a gate and arbor.

The tree crew starts on Friday removing trees. There were about 20 very large white pines I wanted to keep, but within one year a fast spreading disease has killed all of them.

I'm trying to get the foundation dug and the footings poured in the next 2-3 weeks before the ground completely thaws and turns into mud.

great plan and i'll be interested to see how your project goes. Thanks for contributing.

Redrock thanks for the kind words.


Up Date:

Tree cutting is being delayed a bit. The tree crew has been busy with the wide spread damage left from the ice storms this winter. They dropped off their big log skidder and a chipper on Sunday. They had intended to start this morning but we are catching some of the winter storm that is moving up through New England today. Winds are gusting over 30 mph it isn't a good day for tree cutting on a narrow lot surrounded by houses. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is also forecast as windy and very cold. They may have to wait until Wednesday to start. I still have several small jobs to finish before I can devote my full attention to the new house, so the weather delay is not entirely unwelcome.

Got most of the subcontractors lined up. Many of them I work with on a regular basis, that along with the fact this is going to be a slow year for most of them meant I didn't have to arm bend, haggle or kiss their a--es to get them on board. The only wild cards so far are the framer and roofer.

We have been shopping Ebay a lot. Found a NOS Kohler whirlpool corner tub for the master bath ,it had several scuffs and a chip on the non visible side of the rim. It saved me about $900 over local wholesale, The scuffs buffed out easily with a car buffer and polish.

We have also been buying Arts & Craft lighting fixtures. We are paying about the same and in some cases less for antique fixtures compared to new reproductions.

We decided on natural cherry for the kitchen cabinets. I love the look of mission style oak cabinetry,but the open grain attracts grease and grime. Cherry is easier to shape and easier to finish. The only snag to making cherry cabinets in mission style is finding cherry plywood with 2 "A" side veneers for the panels. I finally found a supplier a couple of hours away that has it.

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Tree guys were here today, On one hand I was elated to get started a bit early in the building season but kinda sad to see all of those trees get cut. At least the trees aren't going to waste, most of the timber is headed to a local saw mill,the rest will be firewood, The wood chips will go to a mulching operation.



The last tree to be cut was this Horse Chestnut. We originally tried to design the house around the tree but it just ended up being to close to the house. I did manage to get two seedlings started in a nursery last fall. The tree may yet live again!

An GIS aerial view from a couple of years ago , You can see the horse chestnut in the front center, off to both sides of the property are mature maples that we have saved along with a stand of oak and ash trees on the left rear corner. The 3 large spruces in the right rear corner were also preserved.

Across the road is a town park with a bike path that is part of the 340 mile long Erie Canalway Trail(I have ridden the full 340 miles several times). The bike trail also goes to downtown Schenectady about 3 miles away. The bike path is one of the primary reasons we bought this property

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An Update



Spring came quick or at least the thaw did turning the home site into a big mud hole. March is always a gamble for a house start here in NY. I was hoping to get the footings in before the thaw. Rather than fight the mud and spend a couple of thousand $ more trying to dry the site enough to dig,I decided to wait a couple of weeks for the water table to drop and the ground to firm up. Maybe next week it will be dry enough to dig.

In the mean time. My wife and I consulted on exterior house colors, kitchen layout, privacy fence and garage doors.

I have always used Sherwin Williams exterior paints with excellent results so we stuck with what works. Colors are: Siding= Ruskin Room Green SW0042 Trim=Craftsman Brown SW2835, Window sashes and accents= Rembrandt Ruby SW0033, Cornice and brackets = Portrait Tone SW0039


Kitchen is Mission Cherry, traditional built-in.(no boxes)I saw an ad on Craigslist selling FAS grade Cherry for $4.25 a BDFT. Big surprise was that the wood was actually FAS grade at that price. I bought 200 bdft. More than enough for cabinets and kitchen trim. I like to have my raw cabinet and trim materials a couple months ahead of time so that I can acclimate the wood to an indoor environment before making cabinets, it minimizes any shrinkage or warping that may later occur.

Privacy Fence, I built a privacy fence 10 years ago for a client about a mile away from the home site using rough sawn hemlock. It is still beautiful so we are doing a similar fence though simpler. Hemlock planks are usually cut green and need to dry 2-3 months before edging and rabbeting. Materials for a 360' privacy fence: $2388.



Garage doors, There has been an explosion the last few years of both big and small millwork shops offering custom garage doors. They are relatively easy to make, the materials relatively cheap and the markup is huge. SOoooo I guess I'm making garage doors, I hope the money I save will be credited to my boat-building fund (after the house)by my wife.

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This is great -- I love following along with this.
Your design for the entry complex is wonderful. What is the "gallery" for? do you have paintings to hang there?
this isn't advice, just a comment: when I have a house I've designed, the entry to the master bath will be positioned so that light shining out of the bathroom door can't hit the eyes of the person still in bed. We get up at different times, and light bothers me a lot, so I think of things like that. I also get up at 5:30 some days. My spouse gets up early different days.
I'm a kitchen designer. I like that you're putting two sinks in the kitchen -- I think it's a good idea to separate dish cleanup from food prep when possible.

Hi Kim
Thanks for your input. The "Gallery" description was included as an inside joke. The PE who reviewed and sealed my plans, his wife is an architect. She joked to me once while I was working on a remodeling project for her about calling any space that has no specfic purpose or use a Gallery, She says it sounds real cool,no one knows what it means and they are afraid to ask anyway.

Truth is we haven't figured out what to do there yet. WWSD? Originally I planned a switch back staircase with a window seat and book shelves on the landing. Then the swim spa came along and just took over the whole wall leaving only space for 1'8" high awning windows at the top. So I reconfigured the stairs to occupy less space and moved the laundry to the second floor. So far only my upright piano is going along the stairway wall.

Good point about the bathroom, I hadn't considered that. On the other hand my wife and I prefer our own sleeping spaces(22 years) So bedroom #2 is actually mine. Our bedrooms tend to be our "away rooms" I'm in mine tonight listening to Jazz and doodling on the internet, She is in her room reading something thick and listening to Piano solos. It works great for us.

Started digging the foundation on Friday, The Volvo excavator broke down in the afternoon It didn't bother me since I own two Volvo automobiles and can relate .

Later my wife is reading the local paper and finds out that the swim spa manufacturer had a fire;
http://www.dailygazette.com/ne...9/mar/27/0327_brush/
This could be a hassle since the pool has to go in before the garage/pool wall.

I'm meeting the excavator at 7 am this morning (Saturday) morning to finish the digging and so I can endear myself to the neighbors.

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UpDate:

Finished digging the foundation Saturday. Soil is a clay sand gravel mix. Not terrible for a foundation but not great either ( not to mention a mess when wet). I'll increase the footings to 12x24 and add 4 laterals of #4 rebar to the foundation walls just to be safe. about an extra $1000 in materials and labor. We also ran into shale which in this area often means higher radon concentrations.

I asked our next door neighbor if he had tested for radon when he bought his house. He had to install a Radon evac system to get a mortgage. But his home is also 55 years old with a concrete block foundation.

I will take extra steps to seal the basement such as extending a 6 mil vapor barrier up under the footings and sealing the weep trough between the floor and walls and sealing the sump pit.

I'm also installing a passive radon ventilation system regardless of whether I suspect radon gas or not. It costs me less than $300 for labor and materials to install the venting before the slab is poured and the walls are finished. Cheap insurance.

Here is a EPA provided PDF of a simple but effective passive radon system ; http://www.epa.gov/radon/pdfs/archdraw.pdf
Besides radon there are other ground gases such as methane that are potential health hazards. You can't go wrong by venting the slab.

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I hate starting a house in the spring! Getting footings poured is the worst headache of building for me.

Still fighting the mud. Today I had the excavator lower my small tractor/loader into the hole and I managed to back blade out all of the muck. I barely got the muck pulled out into the middle before it began to float the tractor and I was just spinning the wheels.

Tomorrow at 7am we start placing and tamping in a 4"sub-base of #57 crusher-run for the footings. Probably unnecessary since I finally have firm dry ground. Fortunately it is a small foundation and will only take us a few hours.
Vince, my foundation dude says we can pour on Thursday

I hate starting a house in the spring!

We poured the footings yesterday (Thursday) and I finally got a good night's sleep! It has been a week of dodging weather and struggling to orchestrate a footing pour between all of the subs and suppliers involved.

Thursday went like this:

4:30am; Rise and Shine! Brush teeth and rub Ben-Gay on anything that hurts from yesterday.

5:20 am; In the truck and off to Dunkin Donuts for 2 extra large coffees. 1 to chase the 3 Advil while on the way to the site and 1 to sip once I'm there.

5:30am; I'm unloading the pump and generator. I roll out a 100 foot hose and get ready to start the pump. No lights on at the neighbors homes so I sit in the truck and listen to NPR.

5:50am; Neighbor's lights start coming on. I fire up the generator. no water coming from pump hose, Spend next 15 mins diagnosing problem. Chunk of mud stuck in hose.

6:15am; I set up my Transit to mark and verify our required setback from the street and side yard. I notice something wrong with the back wall of the garage and pool... Damn! the jog between the garage and pool wasn't dug right. My fault since I marked the excavation. On phone with excavator to come over and dig out what I missed.

6:30am; foundation sub right on time, but short one man and he also has a rookie. 280' of footings to form in time for 2 pm inspection and a 3pm pour. This is gonna be tight!

6:40am; Excavator digs jog for footing. $20 tip to the employee who came straight from home early to dig for me

8:00am; Foundation guys are making progress but struggling, I help the rookie get all of the footing forms in the hole and in the proper locations.

9:05am; Steel rebar order is late. Supplier calls says truck broke down but will have order on site by noon.

10:00am; forms for basement footings are nailed together and ready to square. I help square, not only to be helpful but to verify that everything is correct.

10:30; Place concrete order for 3pm delivery, 19 yards of 2500 psi
hot ( hot water is added to speed up setting time, rain forecast the next morning)

10:40; Foundation guys have pins driven in to secure forms on basement section but they need the rebar in before shooting elevations and banding. They move on to the garage and pool room footings..... I'm on phone trying to get an update on the steel delivery.

11:00; steel on way

11:15; steel company calls, driver lost, needs directions again

11:30; Foundation guy scratching head and looking confused. I stay away. I would never embarrass a sub in front of his help. He sends his helpers out to take a short break while he mulls over the foundation plan.

11:40am; I'm now helping foundation guy with confusion about the unusual 6" change in footing elevation and another 12" step down which the engineer could have done a better job of indicating. The engineer also drew the elevation detail in 3/16=1' scale. WTF? he couldn't spare another sheet of paper to draw in 1/4"?
(most of us in the trades don't carry an architect's scale because we forget and leave them on the seat of our trucks or in our back pockets. When we get in and sit on them they break at a cost of $8-9 each! So please, either draw in 1/8", 1/4" or 1/2" scale or tell Staedtler to start making unbreakable scales!)

11:45am; While helping foundation guy, the steel delivery guy shows up. No time to count the order I told him to roll it off the truck onto shoulder of road.

11:50am; I go to look at the rebar and to begin carrying it from the road. This looks weird, I ordered 80 #4 rebar and 26 #5 however there appears to be about 400 pieces of rebar here. The 400 pieces of rebar are also laying across the driveway blocking our trucks in. I call steel supplier they say "oops" and say they will send driver back. I break the bands and begin picking out the rebar I ordered

12:15pm; Steel supplier calls to say that truck has broke down yet again! and they would have to pick up later. I pulled two guys off another job and interrupted their lunch break to come help drag the rebar out of the way.

12:30pm; Marvin Window rep calls and wants to discuss the window order that he can't seem to get right even after rewriting the order 4 times. Apparently to him "Oil Rubbed bronze" and "Stone white" is the same color. I lose my patience and chew him out.I'll have to apologize..... next week.

12:35pm; Less than 90 minutes until inspection I'm getting antsy. elevations ,rebar, banding and backfill done on basement forms but garage/pool is not right. On most houses in this climate, most garage footings step up 4' from an 8' basement . This house steps up only 3'6". He is b-tching that the excavator cut the trench 6" too deep. I said don't worry about it just put the form in 6" low. That was much simpler that trying to explain it yet a third time.

12:40pm; I grab a cutoff saw and start cutting rebar for the vertical reinforcements (dowels).

1:35pm; No way will there be time to set the piers we will do those when we pour the walls. I pump the water one last time to make sure there the footings stay dry.

1:50; yet another frigging problem with the garage footing! The excavator left a corner 5 inches too high. We will need to hand dig 10-12 feet from each side of the corner to repair. The rookie and I dig in earnest while everyone else works on elevations and banding.

2:18; I hear a car door slam, building inspector! sh-t we are still digging! But he sees that we are fixing the problem and gives us the go ahead to pour.

2:45; Everything is in place, phone rings, Concrete Pump Truck is lost!

3:04; pm first concrete truck, but no pumper yet!

3:05; pumper arrives and quickly gets setup.

3:10; pouring begins as does rush hour traffic,concrete truck partially blocks lane of road, I'm now directing angry motorists who are being delayed at most 30 seconds.

3:25; Steel delivery truck (tractor trailer) shows up to collect his rebar. Two guys about the size of NFL linebackers get out and start loading the rebar. now a full lane of the road is blocked. A lady at least 70 years old flips me off.

3:26; second concrete truck arrives as first truck leaves

3:45; Steel truck leaves just as the pour is finished. It's all over

4:30; checks for everyone and we all go home.

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Friday April 3

I slept like a baby last night, No worries Mon'!

Excavator wanted to get stone in the footings before the foundation walls are poured and also to put in the perimeter drains. Rain was forecast to begin before noon. so everyone was motivated to start early and get done quickly. Foundation guy was 20 mins late and gravel trucks were waiting in the road. I ask the next door neighbor as he was leaving to borrow his driveway to park the foundation guys trailer while the forms were loaded on.

Everyone including the excavator and his laborers jumped in to strip forms and load them on the trailer. 20 mins later we were putting in gravel. Because the track-hoe can't reach very far with the gravel I used my little loader to move the gravel to the far reaches. leaving the piers out made it much easier to move the stone. Meanwhile the laborers worked on the footing drains.
By 10:30 am we were done and heading home.

10 mins later it began to rain, let it rain!

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" If it ain't stormin',Son you aint formin' ! "

Tuesday the concrete sub erected the wall forms. As typical with April in this area, over a seven hour period we had temperatures ranging between 31 and 55 deg with a blinding snow squall, a steady rain and bright sunshine.

All of the basement and most of garage went together fairly quickly. I specified 6 lateral rebar on the two longest walls since I decided I want a partial back fill of the native clay soil to promote water runoff instead of absorption and pumping.

A minor issue with the porch footing. 3 rebar dowels were placed wrong and had to be cut and then holes drilled in the footing to place them correctly.

Wednesday, Concrete guy finished up the forms and began pouring at noon. When we were done I had 3 yards of concrete ( $270 worth) left over. On a footing pour it can be hard to judge exactly how much concrete you need so having an extra yard or even two isn't a big deal especially when you are paying $400-500 an hour for a concrete pumper.You are better off dumping a yard on the ground than trying to get 1 yard delivered while the concrete pump is waiting (they don't wait for free).

However having 3 yards left on a wall pour for a small house is unacceptable and pisses me off big time. The concrete guy should be able to figure within a yard of what is needed for a wall pour. It isn't a money issue it is a workmanship issue. This is not a mistake a guy with 30 years experience makes. But years of doing this has taught me to bite my tongue and save the drama for the next day,not when everyone is busting their butts to get the concrete placed.

I sat down this morning and calculated for myself the amount needed vs the amount of concrete I paid for. I calculated 45.5 yards without deducting for the 2 windows.I paid for 46 yards. Hmmm,so each of the 5 trucks must have had about 1/2 yard or more material than was billed. If my temper/mouth had gotten the better of me yesterday I could have jeopardized a 20 year working relationship with Vince and his family because the concrete company was being generous or has a bad scale.

So April 8th we are "out of the ground" I was shooting for April 1 but that was unrealistic for the weather and site conditions.

For the next 2-3 weeks I get to take a break while the concrete cures. It typically takes about 28 days to cure to about 70% of it's full strength but the amount of rebar I used reinforces the wall enough to let me back fill a little earlier. I also have the remaining customer work to catch up on before devoting all of my time to the new house.

Yesterday was also my wife's birthday so the foundation was a nice present.I guess you could call it a not-so-big birthday since I also bought her a Dell Mini 9 net-book and a copy of "The not so big life". My wife hasn't been a fan of Sarah's only because my wife has no interest in architects or architecture.

BTW My wife was up until 1 am reading
"The not so big life"

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An Update:

The concrete guy had a few days between jobs and with the weather being amazingly dry for April. I let him pour the basement a couple of weeks ago. I soon afterward framed and sheeted the first floor deck. For the first time in 20 years I had a concrete floor to work from instead of gravel. It was almost heaven! (most basement floors in this area are poured after the house is framed)


Excavator came back last Tuesday after my mandatory 21 day wait for back fill. Within an hour his track hoe burst a hose and the machine was down the rest of the day. The next day he had an emergency on another job and it snowballed into other problems through the week.

I went by the site today (Saturday) and saw the Excavator's crew out taking dirt away from the site. Orginally I was giving the dirt to the neighbors who wanted the extra. However after checking with the town two problems came up. One was that a permit is required to do any fill work, Secondly the neighbor's land adjoins a wetland and clay soils are not allowed for fill in those locations due to potential leaching. I wasn't anticipating the additional cost,this will probably add $2000+ to the excavator's bill.

I'm suddenly having a framer problem, The guy I was gonna use just gave up, he couldn't get enough work to keep his crew so he folded.
So I'm out searching for another crew. not that hard to find framers, but it is hard right now to find framers with more than a crew of 3. Small crews take too long to finish and I'm still trying to catch up customer work so I don't have the time to lend them any of my help. At the worst I may have to wait 3 weeks and then go in with my own crew and do the framing.

An army of one..

I couldn't line up a framer I wanted to work with that wasn't busy until June. Everyone else is busy on other projects so I started framing the first floor walls while I waited for someone to get free. I used a wall jack (Qual-Craft) to stand the heavy walls and in 3 days I had the first floor done.

The second floor deck is all TJI ( engineered lumber) which are light weight and easy to handle alone. My supplier delivered the TJI's and Plywood deck with a boom truck, so no lifting either. The wall jack also lifts beams so the big microlams were no problem. with the second floor deck done, I framed the second exterior floor walls.

Now I'm ready for trusses tomorrow morning. Instead of hiring a boom truck as I would normally do, I'm using a little redneck engineering an utilizing an electric winch and ladder($99 at Harbor Freight) to lift the trusses so I can erect them at my own pace. I got the idea from this YouTube Video

This will probably put me about 2 to 3 weeks behind, but the upside is that it saves us about $8000.

My wife is so impressed with the savings and progress, she is allocating $2500 for me to buy a "Not-so-big" sailboat Sunday.

That may seem generous of her but it is all part of her carefully planned agenda. The deal with the new house is that I would build her (us) a house of the same quality as I build for my customers. In return she would let me build a sailboat in the back yard. I found a fiberglass sailboat( 17' slipper) that has everything I want in a sailboat. So she gets the new house without the noise and dust of a boat being built. Dang! I have been foiled again!

A few Pics...

This is a front view from about a week ago. Interesting thing happened to the trusses between the original sketch ,the final drawing and the actual production. When I sent the sketches for the engineer and his draftsman to work from ,the eaves had an overhang of 18" when he got done with it was 1'8" to the longest point (roof /fascia). when the trusses arrived they were 1'9" to the short point (fascia/soffit). I had my doubts about how it might look but once some of the trusses were up ,we decided it looked really good so we let it go.



Here is my rig for lifting trusses, it was much more convenient than hiring a crane to set them since we could work at our own pace and not have to stack them on top of the walls.

The hoist is attached to the ladder via saddle clamps and a piece of 1" Iron pipe. the top pulley is hooked to a chain that is looped around the top of the ladder