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Another Wednesday Design Meeting

It seems that Wednesday is our designated day for meetings about the new house. At this stage of the process, the Wednesday meetings happen at our current residence and just include the architect. Soon, however, we will start having Wednesday meetings at the build site, a tradition that will probably continue throughout the build.

Today was about coming to decisions on some remaining issues. The architect comes with a detailed agenda and drawings and samples, which we work through for a couple of hours around the dining room table.

I do not have a list of everything we discussed, but I will cover some of the highlights.

One of the big outstanding questions was how to deal with the siding. The architect brought some mock-ups of the house showing a horizontal placement for the siding boards and a vertical placement, including suggestions where there would be seams (and there will be some seams). After some discussion, we decided to move forward with a vertical orientation, which has fewer seams. But we are now exploring adding panels (instead of just long, thin boards) in some sections of the front as an accent. Hopefully, I will have a drawing in a few days to show you what it may look like.

We talked about selecting a door. They do not make what Daphne wants, which is a door that has panes of glass and yet can stand up to a fire for 20 minutes. For now, we think we are going with a solid fiberglass door, but the actual model has yet to be selected.

We had to pick a new bathtub. The Massachusetts Uniform State Plumbing Code mandates that all products used in plumbing or gas fitting systems must be Product-Approved by the Board, and the tub Daphne selected is not approved. So we reviewed some tub designs that are approved, and we watched as Daphne stood up, bent over, and use a tape measure to determine what she considers to be the optimal length and depth for her lounging plans. Then we picked a tub.

We started discussions about where we will place switches, outlets and lights. I had already worked out a preliminary design, which the architect is using as a base for the actual plans. We discussed some changes during the meeting and we now await a revised plan for further discussion. We are still struggling with the choice of a lighting solution for the game room since it has a sloped ceiling.

While the architect was here, the measuring tape came out. One thing we discovered is that our two bedroom dressers are different lengths. This means that they would not fit in their designated wall by four inches (since the original plans were based on the width of the smaller one). We did realize, however, that we would be removing their side overhangs so they fit together better and that would give us back 3 inches of length. We will manager; at this point, we refuse to redesign the south side of the house over one inch of bedroom dresser width.

There were a lot more decisions, but I will leave you with these pictures instead. This is a physical mock-up that was assembled by the architect to show how the walls would be put together. The left picture is an exterior wall with the siding on the right, pink solid insulation and framing beams. The right picture is the other side, showing among other things the framing that will be used on the porch to hold the screens in place.

A Dumpster Has Appeared

We have been forced to hire an asbestos mitigation firm to remove the asbestos in the house before it is demolished. The asbestos removal is necessary since any material that includes asbestos needs special disposal, and if it was left in place during demolition, not only would there be a risk of releasing a lot of asbestos into the air, but the debris from the entire house would need special disposal.

The asbestos remediation team has been working in the house for over a week. They took two days off while the tree removal was ongoing, but now they are back and they have moved a dumpster into place to hold the removed material.

I guess it was convenient that we removed the trees and rhododendrons to make room for that dumpster. Although, I liked the look of the greenery better than the look of that black box.

The Tree Removal is Complete

Over the course of a day and a half, a local tree removal company came and removed 15 trees that needed to be taken down before demolition and then construction. I have added a new story page here: Goodbye to the Friends We Barely Knew, which includes some pictures and a video of the process.

Meanwhile asbestos removal continues (with a brief break while the tree work was going on). The asbestos has to be removed so it can be safely disposed of before demolition. In some of the pictures, you can see that the old house is sealed with warning signs because of the asbestos removal process.

Next up will be disconnecting the power from the existing house and adding, instead, a construction power panel on site, but off to the north side of the garage. Meanwhile, we wait for the building permit to be granted, which will allow us to move forward with the demolition process and then construction.

The One Inch Air Gap and a Breezeway

There is an existing garage on the property which we will be rebuilding. The garage is currently too close to the road, but because it already exists, we do not need to move the garage back, even if we rebuild it in place. However, because it is non-conforming there are a bunch of zoning laws that constrain what we can do.

Here is a picture of the existing garage, proposed garage extension, part of the deck and a corner of the planned first floor. The deck is in brown (this is actually a screen shot showing the two-tone pattern we will be using for the deck).

In an ideal world, we would connect the garage extension (shed) and the pantry door with a breeze way so we can go from the house to the garage without getting wet if it was raining. The breezeway would just be a roof over the western end of the deck (west is down in the picture).

Unfortunately, connecting the new house to the existing garage violates two different zoning laws. First, since the garage is non-conforming (it is too close to the road), the law says that we can not increase the garage footprint by more than 50% and connecting it to the house would count as increasing its footprint by a lot more. Second, there is another zoning law that says that out buildings (like the garage) can not be closer to the road than the main house.

Originally, when we were just going to refinish and not rebuild the garage, the town building department said that we could not have any breezeway and we had to keep the house at least 10′ from the garage. We then thought that we could connect the garage to the house with a breezeway after 5 years.

However, since we are now planning on completely rebuilding the garage, it seems like different conditions now apply. Based on our latest information, the town says that we need a 1″ gap between the garage and the deck. The two cannot be connected at all. So, it seems like the 10′ gap no longer applies, and we can actually have a breezeway between the house and the garage as long as it stops 1″ from the garage and does not actually connect.

The architect has reworked the foundation for the deck based on the fact that it cannot connect to the garage. We are still working out how we can put in a breezeway with a 1″ gap.

We Applied for a Building Permit

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.

Quick Update on NRC Site Visit

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.

The Silt Barrier is in Place

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).

Rule 52

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.

Those 2 Inches are not Yours to Use

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.

Quick Update on NRC Round Two

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.

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