The builder emailed this picture to me this afternoon. It shows them starting on the footings for the house. Concrete for the footings will be poured on Friday.
This work should all be visible from the construction camera’s new location (which is a tree near the top-center of this picture). I will try to get the memory card this weekend, if there is a break in the rain.
This is just the footprint of the house. The garage will be done much later in the build process since the old garage foundation is being used for access and staging. The deck and porch do not have foundations, just pillars. I assume those can be added later. The part that juts out to the right side is the front stoop.
Very early in the process, before we had even submitted an offer, I visited the Concord building department to ask some questions about the existing septic system. I remember, while I was there, the helpful clerk offered to calculate for me the maximum size house I would be allowed to build on the lot. I suspect she wanted to make sure that there would be no surprises when we designed the house.
Well, she looked up the zoning details and the plot plan and did some calculations. Then she proudly announced that the maximum size house we would be allowed to build would be 17,581 square feet. Well, that added yet one more constraint to our design process.
One of the most common questions I get asked by people when I tell them we are building a house is how big a house are we building. The problem is that there is only one real answer, and that is “it depends”.
The way I think of the house is that we are planning on aging in place and living on one floor. The main floor is around 2,500 square feet, which is generous but not ridiculously large for two people. But we also have a smaller second floor for guests and possibly live in help when we get older. The second floor is around 1,400 square feet. Those are the two numbers that are probably what people think of when they ask.
But that does not tell the full story. We also have an unfinished basement, which will be conditioned space. The basement is, as you would expect, also around 2,500 square feet. And then there is the garage. The main garage is just under 600 square feet, but we are adding a garage extension (“shed”) for another 120 square feet. Since the garage is also conditioned space, that means that we are heating and cooling a total of just over 6,000 square feet (which is now starting to sound like some type of mansion). Then there is a deck and a porch totaling around 820 square feet, but those tend not to get added into the total.
So if you ask how big a house are we building. The answer is it depends. Probably a little too big, but still keeping it comfortably under the 17,581 maximum allowed by the town. (By the way, given the restrictions due to setback and wetlands and height limits, it would probably be impossible to get anywhere close to the maximum. The reason that the maximum is so large is because the town counts the one acre of wetlands in the lot size, and the maximum is only based on the lot size.)
I should also point out that the septic system also establishes limits on the house size, not on the square footage, but on the number of rooms and bedrooms. Our septic system limits us to 3 bedrooms and a 6 other rooms (as defined by the law). As it happens, the house we are building has 3 bedrooms and 5 other rooms (living room, dining room, kitchen, game room, and the second floor family room ).
Over the last few days, the crew has been very busy at our build site. First, they removed the remains of the old house and its foundation. Then the surveyors came in to flag the location for the new house (you can catch them briefly walking around in the middle of the video). And then the shovel got busy digging out the sand for the new foundation. (Yes, the lot is sand, which is good for easy construction.)
They have to dig four feet out from where the basement walls will be to put in the drainage systems. They also dig down since there is complex foundation footings under the basement floor. The builder told me that they need undisturbed soil for the foundation footings, and in two locations, they had to remove footings from the old house which overlapped where the new footings were going to be places, so they needed to dig down further in those two spots.
Here is our sandpit as of mid-Friday morning.
And here is a sped-up construction video showing the work over the last four days. After this video was taken, I moved the construction camera so that it will now show a view more like the picture above. That should avoid blocking the action with big piles of dirt.
So this is all that is left of the original house on our lot. And even this will be gone before tomorrow. The garage platform will stay in place until the main house is framed to provide site access.
That big shovel was cleaning out the foundation of the old house. But it was also playing in the dirt as you can see in this brief video.
The next step is to have the surveyors mark where the foundation will go. Then the shovel will return to dig out the ground, including four feet past where the house goes. Then another round for the surveyors and then the foundation gets built.
As part of our agreement with the Concord Natural Resources Commission, we are required to remove invasive plants on our property. You can see the area in which invasive removal is mandated. (New house is at the bottom.)
Well, this Saturday, Daphne and I had our first hour-long session pulling invasives in a small section. We will be doing this every few weeks until it is done. For now we just piled them up, but in a few weeks the Concord municipal compost site opens up for the season, so we will cart them over at that time.
Meanwhile, there was also time for some bird watching. Here is Daphne at the rivers edge. Notice that the water level is very high, and it may go up some more since rain is in the forecast.
An in progress picture from the demolition this morning. Unfortunately, I suspect the construction cam video will not be as interesting since the camera is on the other side of the house.
We had another Wednesday morning design meeting with our architect. Much of the meeting was a review of the mechanical design, both the heating and cooling ducts and the other duct work for the bathroom fans, dryer vent and stove hood.
Most of it is unlikely to be interesting to the internet audience. But I will point out a few decisions we made. First of all, we were unable to find a ventless dryer that did not have built-in WiFi so we will need a dryer vent. Dryer vents require frequent cleaning to avoid being a fire hazard and the original duct design had the exterior of the dryer vent positioned on the second floor. Having lived in a house with a second floor dryer vent exhaust, I knew that such a location would make cleaning the vent a rare activity.
Instead, we played around with the design and decided to route the dryer vent through the front hall closet (shrinking that closet by a few inches) so that the exterior of the dryer vent comes out near the ground on the first floor, hidden behind the foundation plantings, but easily reached for occasionally cleaning.
Similarly, we redid the routing of the duct work for the bathroom fans to make the ducts shorter to avoid too much inefficiency. The current plan is to route the first floor bathroom fans up to the second floor and vent them through the dormer behind the second floor kitchenette. We may lose a thin cabinet that was planned for storing a broom, but it means that the bathroom fans do not have to push air half the length of the house to vent out the south wall by the game room.
The architect has done a rendering of the front of the house, showing the siding and all the selected colors.
There will be a seam between the first and second floor at the top of the windows that cannot be helped. We also can not add any space between the top of the second floor windows and the siding accent for the same reason — we are already using the maximum length of siding boards.
The rendering does include the breezeway that we are now allowed to have (as long as we leave an inch between the breezeway and the garage, which will be hidden by the overhang). It also shows the old location of the dryer vent — which now will be moved down much closer to the ground. (Can you see it in the rendering?)
We have been picking appliances. We really, really want are appliances without WiFi or at least appliances where the WiFi can be completely turned off. This has limited our choices significantly.
During this process, I had an interesting conversation with an LG chat agent. I was asking whether the WiFi of their washer and dryer could be completely turned off. He replied that it could be turned off through the control panel, but to be really sure it was disabled you needed to use an advanced setting. How do I use that advanced setting, I asked. Well, he answered, you get to the advanced setting through the LG ThinQ app. So, as I pointed out, this means that in order to completely disable the WiFi for a washer or dryer, I first have to install WiFi in the house, download an app to my phone and use that app on my temporary WiFi network to tell the appliances to disable their WiFi. I guess you have to be Korean to understand the logic.
As it happens, we have found a well rated washer and dryer with no WiFi. We also found a dishwasher with no WiFi although it is not as well rated as one that has WiFi, which the manufacturer insists can be disabled. The question is whether to trust them.
Looking ahead, here are the next steps for the site:
Stumps get removed Thursday.
The existing house gets removed on Friday.
The civil engineers come by next Wednesday to mark where the foundation will go.
As soon as that is done, site excavation will happen. They will excavate four feet beyond the foundation in all directions.
Then the civil engineers come back to mark the foundation location again.
Then the foundation can get poured.
I do not have the exact dates of the later steps, but I will keep my construction camera running every weekday.
Its springtime and the river is up. Here is a panorama of our waterfront taken today.
Meanwhile demolition and site preparation continues. First, up is the garage. This is what is left of the garage. It will be rebuilt, although probably after the house is framed since that will give the equipment another angle of site access.
The house itself is a shell of its former self. The walls have been removed (asbestos), the electrical wiring has been removed (and will be recycled), the plumbing has been removed (and will also be recycled). The appliances and the kitchen cabinets have been removed and were taken by a neighbor to be used in a renovation. And the windows have been removed (but not recycled).
Here are two pictures from the house, basement and main level. The rakes and other yard items were in the garage.
Actual demolition of the house will probably happen at the end of next week. After that, I will put up a story page with construction videos (I already have a video of the window removal and the garage demolition).
