Category: RIVER HOUSE (Page 1 of 4)

Over the weekend, we applied for a building permit. The town now takes a month to respond, and we hope, grant us the permit (with one exception, see below). The packet we submitted includes detailed plans for the house. Here is the table of contents from the permit set.

I am not going to post all the drawings to this site. They are mostly either repeats of what I have posted before, or boring details about how the foundation, drainage, insulation, structural beams, septic system, etc. will be built.

There is, however, an interesting small note on on the first floor plan in the kitchen area.

The design calls for 2 gas (actually propane) burners. This is, unfortunately, not currently allowed under the fossil fuel infrastructure law. What we expect is that the building inspector will reject the two gas burners, but grant a building permit without that feature. Then we will be the first test case of the exemption granting process for the relatively new law. The inspector was warned so I doubt that he will completely miss that design point, but I can always hope.

Coming up soon: tree removal (next week) and asbestos removal (within a few weeks). With luck, I will capture some of the tree removal on the construction camera.

The head of the Concord Natural Resources Commission met me and the builder at the property this morning for an inspection.

It went fine. However, the NRC has asked us to start invasive plant removal this year, and not wait until after we move in. And, if possible, put in some of the trees that were in the landscaping plan (and far away from the house). Daphne suggests that we can start this in the spring and spend a few hours every few weeks working on it.

Next step is tree removal, and unfortunately, removal of a lot of the rhododendrons, both next to the road but also on the south side of the planned house. Although not in the plans, we will try to replant the section of the property next to the road to restore a sound barrier.

So there has been a bunch of activity since my last post. The oil tank has been removed from the basement (although we are still waiting for fire department inspection). Then the silt barrier was installed. Here is a photograph of a section of that barrier.

This morning I had to go to the Registry of Deeds to get the latest Natural Resource Commission Order of Conditions filed. Here is the proof that it has been filed, which I had to show to the NRC today.

Now for the bad news. I screwed up getting the construction camera started and did not get any movies from this week. Oh well. I will work on studying the controls and try to get it working for the next step.

Speaking of the next steps. Before we do anything else, we need to have a NRC site visit. Hopefully, the builder gets that scheduled for next week. Once that is done, we can do the tree and brush removal. We can also get the asbestos in the house removed (although I think that the asbestos removal is not contingent on the NRC site inspection).

Now that the Orders of Conditions (amended) has been registered, nothing is preventing us from filing for our building permit. Currently that is planned for February 18th (it was going to be February 17th, but that is a holiday).

I went to the site to satisfy rule 52 of the Orders of Conditions.

Here is the box, which I attached to the tree protection fence near the sign. Inside that box are the Orders of Conditions, the NRC filing, and the site plans.

While I was there, I noticed this new sign on the garage. So I assume that DigSafe has certified that there are no gas lines. (I can not figure out how to look up that file number).

Finally, Ben and I mounted the construction camera with a view of the back yard. We should catch them installation the siltration barrier later in the week. I will retrieve the camera next weekend and see if we got anything.

If you have been following the blog posts, you may remember that our house design is height challenged. Because of the zone that the house is located in, there is a maximum height for the house measured from the lowest point of the ground at the basement wall to the highest point of the peak of the roof. Our lot is sloped, so while at the front of the house the basement is almost completely below ground, at the back of the house, the basement is not underground at all.

Because of the height limitation, we have been forced to have the roof lower than optimal, which means that most of the rooms on the second floor have places where the ceiling slopes down. For example, this is the second floor family room.

We have recently decided that we were not going to extend the basement under the porch. The ground under the porch will be crushed gravel and open to the back yard. We will probably put a kayak rack there and store our boats under the porch. Well, by not enclosing this area, the lowest point on the basement actually moved to the West and uphill a little. This ground level at this new lowest point is now 2 inches higher then the at previous lowest point, which means we can raise the roof by 2 inches.

But before we got too excited by idea of reducing the encroachment of the roof into the second floor rooms, we got the results of our HERS (Home Energy Rating System) score, and the architect realized that we need to add an extra 2 inches of insulation to the roof. So no interior change at all.

The regulatory gods giveth and the regulatory gods taketh away.

Last night was another Natural Resources Committee meeting featuring our project. We were last on the agenda and had to sit through a lot of discussion of other projects, but after 90 minutes, they got to our request for changes (rebuilding instead of renovating the garage and removal of one additional tree, which was found to be unhealthy).

I am happy to say that after almost no discussion, our changes were approved with no additional conditions.

Meanwhile, we met with the architect again and reviewed the design of mechanical systems (heating/cooling and vents) and also the changes needed based on the assessment of the structural engineer. I will probably be writing up a post or story page on those topics once I get a copy of the drawings.

We have an arborist on the team who has been managing the processes of getting approval for tree removal. During his last visit, he identified a tree that was not scheduled to be removed, but was, in his opinion, in moderate to high risk of failing and falling on the neighbor’s house.

Unfortunately, this tree is within the jurisdiction of the Natural Resources Commission, so we need their permission to remove it. And more unfortunately, we failed to ask for their permission by the deadline for submitting items for the the January 29th NRC meeting.

However, today we got some good news. The NRC will allow us to amend our currently outstanding submission for the January 29th meeting. This is important since we want to do the tree removal soon, and it is best if we do all the trees together and not leave one outlier for a later date.

We were on site today planning for the tree removal, which we hope to schedule in early February. The tree removal will give me the first chance to test my construction camera, although I probably will want to choose a different location for the tree removal since my planned location does not look at most of the trees being removed.

Here is a short time lapse test of the construction camera. Next time, I need to adjust the frame so I see less on the right side and more on the left side, since the new house will extend significantly past the left edge of this frame.

This image is taken with 2 seconds between frames. I will probably switch to 30 seconds between frames when I use the camera for real. That should get me a 30 second time lapse movie each day.

Here is a still panorama of the river view from today as well.

I want to the site this morning to scout out a location for my construction camera. The tree I was going to use is too large for the strap I had, so if I decide to use that tree, I will need a second strap to go around the circumference. I will make that decision soon.

Meanwhile, while I was on site I saw that the arborist has put up the tree fencing. Here is a picture of one of the fenced areas. Any tree with red flagging tape around is marked for removal (you can see some beyond the fencing).

When I was making reference calls during the builder selection process, I talked to one couple and asked a few questions about how they interacted with the builder and they mentioned that a lot of the decisions were handled by their designer. They had a designer. We didn’t have a designer. We had an architect, a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, an arborist, a landscape designer, a builder, an EMF specialist, an electrician, etc. but no designer.

But then I realized that we did have a designer for this project, its just that I had not been paying them. Daphne has been handling the role of designer for our Sudbury River house. With some guidance from the architect, Daphne has been making all the decisions that a professional designer would handle.

So that leads me to Daphne’s latest design vision. The proposal is to add woodwork accents to the living room (and also the dining room although I do not have a picture of that). Here is Daphne’s hand drawing of the proposal, which I annotated with labels.

In this sketch, it is as if we are standing between the dining room and the living room, looking South towards the living room wall where the entertainment system will be located. The idea is to have wood slats that go up the South wall and across the ceiling, meeting somewhere over the reclining loveseat (not shown).

It should look very pretty but will also provide some level of sound dampening and maybe also break up some of the EMF standing waves that would otherwise bounce off the flat surfaces. Daphne would also like cove lighting around the outside of the living room ceiling, but we are not sure can make that work since it requires a significant drop ceiling.

If you do not know what cove lighting is, here are two pictures from the internet.