3R Home and Barn Project

[3RRL]

After all those threads about our camp life on our rural property and the solar shed project, http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/81392-my-solar-shed.html
and then building the solar power system itself
http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/86406-solar-power-shed-project.html
we finally got started in April this year on our home and barn up there.
I'd like to share some of the highlights with you.

I will bring you up to date about the construction of our home in Three Rivers since last April.
In another thread I had told you about firing the first General Contractor and also how we decided to switch to building a log cabin home instead of the elaborate house we had designed. That meant hiring another contractor and throwing away the already designed architectural drawings. We had gone as far as to pull permits on that other house. The cost for the drawings is down the drain but part of the fees are salvageable such as school fees etc. It cost us a lot to do that, but the price of the new log cabin home with the new contractor is substantially less. We have a really good feeling about this man and his company.
Here is a picture of what our log cabin will look like. It will be very similar to this one he built.
It is a view type home and has the look and feeling of a small resort lodge.

 

[3RRL]

Besides being a completely different home, one of the reasons for the price difference is that I agreed to do all the grading work for the house, garage and barn. That is a lot of work considering I'm only there on weekends and I had to get it finished by the end of April. Not only that, I had all this work at home I'm swamped with, so I couldn't really go up during the week if I had to.

Anyway, my deal was to clear off the homesite area. That means getting rid of all the vegetation where the house and garage will be and also the surrounding area. I don't have to grade that area level, but I have to clear and remove trees, rocks and boulders and then the surrounding area including in front of the rock bluff down a very steep grade. This is required by the Fire department.
So I started into the homesite...





And quickly disappeared in the vegetation!

 

[johnk]

Thats going to be one beautiful home in a pretty location. Good luck 3r and keep the pics a coming.

 

[KentT]

Beautiful home! Is it going to be a machined, pre-cut "kit", built on-site from machined logs, or a true hand-crafted log home? Here, east of the Mississippi, most are built of machined logs (in part due to transport costs), but California and Montana (especially) have a lot of hand-crafted ones, with many of the logs coming south from Canada...

 

[EddieWalker]

Rob,

Sure will be exiting to see this come to life!!!!!

There are a few types of homes that I'd love to have, and a log home is right near the top of that list. Unfortunately, I live in an area of high humidity and heavy rains. As a contractor, I've done a fair number of repairs to log homes built by a company called Satterwhite. They seem like good homes, but they are the D type milled logs with the flat tops, bottoms and inside. The outside is round and the corners overlap. The problem that I've seen the most is the logs are flat on to and will hold water. Over the years, the logs begin to rot and then other issues start to happen that lead to my being called in. Nobody has had a clue that water had been sitting on the tops of there logs for all those years.

This probably wont apply to you, but it's always good to keep in mind that log homes are not like stick built ones. Water never quits attacking exposed wood and usualy it's something silly that causes the most damage.

Eddie

 

[3RRL]

Glad you guys like the look of it. Loretta and I fell in love when we saw the other one he built. It is a log package with pre-cut milled logs. I know there are plus and minuses with just about any kind of construction, but we just had to have this one.

The log home will be energy efficient too. The new design on these things are completely different then the early log cabin homes most people think of. Everything is sealed off tight with Ø10" diameter logs all around. Windows are super energy efficient gas filled etc. With a wood burning stove and circulating air vents, we need to "pre heat" the home to get it to temperature, but once it gets there, only maintain it with little more stove heat to keep it at temperature. Same procedure for keeping it cool during the Summer.

Inside you can get a choice of round log or modified look. So the dips between the logs on the interior is not so drastic as the outside. That's what we are going to get. They even have a smooth finish interior if you want. And the wood smell is predominant on the inside. They are awesome. I don't know why we didn't get one in the first place? Must be Loretta's fault? All this time there have been a couple of really neat looking log cabin homes that we drive by and we spent all that money on the first design only to change our minds. Better late than never, I guess.
I'll bet you guys probably know more about these new log homes than I do.

 

[3RRL]

One of the first things I had to do was pull this giant Oak stump which would be in the front living room. Matt, my son helped me cut it down last year so now I got the backhoe and dug a giant hole all around it. You know how big the Kama is, so figure how big that hole is. From these pictures it looks like you can almost put the whole 8,000 pound tractor in it.



That is where I used the backhoe with the thumb and saw it was tearing the metal out of the dipper stick. The Oak was right up against the rock formation so you guessed it ... tons of rocks to dig out. Plus, this thing had some 6" diameter roots as big as branches! The Nardi Backhoe cut through some of them but I had to swing the ax to cut some too. I finally got enough cut and dug where I could pull it over and out of the hole with the 554 Kama. This is also where I found that huge grub I posted back then.



Man, that thing is BIG and HEAVY! But Huge Kama ate it up with the dual grapple set up. Here is a perfect example of how the two grapple jaws clamp down independent on an odd shaped object. A big one at that.

 

[3RRL]

I still need to go in there and scrape/clear all that vegetation off, but I thought I better get busy with grading the barn pad next. Since I was responsible for building it up and getting it all level, I new there would tons of dirt to move and compact.
I started down by the solar shed first. I had used the backhoe to excavate near one end of it. Then used the fel bucket to move dirt out of there to the barn pad.



There was a pretty good size ledge there before and I wanted to cut it down to a more gradual slope as well cut another service road in there so a truck can get down to the shed and propane tank. The road will be on the left of where the tractor is in this picture below. Also, where you see the green grass in the left corner, that will be the end of the barn pad nearest the shed. That part has to be built up about 4 or 5 feet from where it is now, and slope to the left. The service road will be in between. The barn will end up about 200' from the house, with the solar shed in between them.

 

[flusher]

After all those threads about our camp life on our rural property and the solar shed project, http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/81392-my-solar-shed.html
and then building the solar power system itself
http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/86406-solar-power-shed-project.html
we finally got started in April this year on our home and barn up there.
I'd like to share some of the highlights with you.

I will bring you up to date about the construction of our home in Three Rivers since last April.
In another thread I had told you about firing the first General Contractor and also how we decided to switch to building a log cabin home instead of the elaborate house we had designed. That meant hiring another contractor and throwing away the already designed architectural drawings. We had gone as far as to pull permits on that other house. The cost for the drawings is down the drain but part of the fees are salvageable such as school fees etc. It cost us a lot to do that, but the price of the new log cabin home with the new contractor is substantially less. We have a really good feeling about this man and his company.
Here is a picture of what our log cabin will look like. It will be very similar to this one he built.
It is a view type home and has the look and feeling of a small resort lodge.

Sounds familiar. I planned to be my own GC on the new stick-built house here in the North Valley in 2005. Bought a set of drawings, made mods, had the drawings checked by the Building Dept and was ready to pay the fees and pull the building permit.

I had to do some shopping in Chico CA and while there noticed some nice manufactured homes on one of the lots. Got real interested in that technology and, to make a long story short, decided that I could get the same square footage and the same construction features at a lower cost going with the manufactured option. So instead of a 2-year construction project with me as GC, I was in my new house on a permanent concrete foundation in about 7 months after signing the contract.

I ate the cost of the drawings and the fee for an energy analysis on the stick built design, but figure I still am way ahead by avoiding both the inevitable mistakes I would have made during construction and the many headaches I would have faced being my own GC.

 

[3RRL]

I have talked many times about how much I use the boxblade bulldozing in reverse and how useful the hydraulic side links are when wanting to cut a tilted or banked road. That is also why I built up my drag links so I wouldn't bend them into pretzels (again )
Here is a good view of the size cut and shaping you can do using this method. I had to cut several areas through hard decomposed granite and the cuts looked like they were through marble. It was really awesome to see the result.



This next one really shows how you can bank the road. The tractor then follows the contour of the cut. It is true and clean.



After cutting the service road, I took all that dirt and DG (decomposed granite) to an area where I could layer, water and compact it for the barn pad.