baubilt

Cedar Shakes and Woodpeckers

KTU — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:17:52 +0000

On the main cabin we have had woodpecker problems over the years. Apparently the woodpeckers like to nest up high with a vantage point of the meadow. The gable end of the main cabin was perfect and they had made a mess of the tongue-and-groove cedar siding. We had patched with metal, but finally had to take drastic measures. My father-in-law had a guy apply galvanized steel sheet to the walls and then apply cedar shakes over that. This has mostly worked. Occasionally a wood pecker will attack, but after 1/2 inch of progress will give up. So on the pavilion, we’re taking the galvanized-plus-shakes approach from the get go.

Galvanized sheet steel then cedar shakes...woodpecker proof.

Barnboard Siding Installation

KTU — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:59:51 +0000

Jose and gang started installing barnboard siding this week. It looks excellent. The barnwood comes from Trestlewood. They provided edged wood in random lengths and in widths of 4″, 6″, 8″, and 10″. By taking shorter lengths and a fair bit of narrow material, the material ended up costing just a bit more than virgin cedar siding. (A consistent irony of building green, is that reclaimed materials usually cost more than those cut fresh from the forest.) My cost for the barnwood ended up being about $3/sq-ft delivered, while #3 cedar siding currently costs about $2/SF, but usually requires staining, which would probably be another $1/SF. (You could leave the cedar to weather naturally, though, in which case it would be cheaper.) Incidentally, bids for the installation labor for this kind of board-to-board barnwood in Park City came in pretty consistently around $2.75-$3.00/SF including the labor to apply the Tyvek. This is probably on the low side because I have no window trim to install, although there are some fussy blocking details between the rafter tails.

Jorge nailing up barnwood siding. This is "rough gray" from Trestlewood.

Having the material edged (both edges ripped so the board is a consistent width) dramatically improves the ease of installation. The boards fit up nice and tight against each other. Some people don’t like the bright wood edge revealed when boards of different thicknesses are adjacent. It doesn’t bother me a bit and those bright bits will go away within a year or so. Edged wood is somewhat less expensive than wood with a weathered edge, presumably because it allows greater utilization of the reclaimed material, but I prefer it.

Most people install black building felt under the barnwood so that white Tyvek doesn’t show through. I noticed that black felt fades after a couple of years. So, I used professional grade landscaping fabric. It’s really cheap, easy to install, and has excellent UV protection.

We agreed on a strategy for lining up boards at windows which comes out nice and clean. By selecting the assortment of random-width boards across the width of a window, you can avoid cutting out notches in the boards along the sides of the windows, which for some reason annoys me.

I love the look, but this is definitely funky stuff. Some of these boards had some orange spray paint on them (for leftmost board)...that's just more "character." There will be an 8 ft. high band of steel panels above this wood, which is why this first row of siding is just 9 ft. high.

We put 3 inch rigid foam insulation on the outside of the foundation wall. So, we ran a Z-flashing over the insulation and down below the finished grade. (This is the same cold-rolled steel, so it will rust reddish/brown.) The Tyvek is taped over the flashing, and the barnwood is installed over everything.

Traffic Jam in the Joist Bays

KTU — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:50:19 +0000

We mostly passed our “four way” inspection on Thursday. The four-way includes structure, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing. We were still waiting on some ducting to be finished, but the inspectors were impressed and gave us the go-ahead to insulate.

The traffic in the joist bays has been just awful the past week; a bunch of trades trying to fit conduits of various kinds into too little space between and across the floor joists. The traffic is especially bad just upstream of the mechanical room.

Here are a few pix.

Power, ground, heat, water, alarm, thermostats, ventilation...all trying to fit in the same space. Near the mechanical room they basically have no choice but to drop down below the joists, which will require some "drops" (soffits) in some little-used areas.

The Fantech 2400 heat-recovery ventilator, which substitutes for bathroom fans. It recovers a significant fraction of the energy in the air when ventilating a warm house in winter.

Oh yeah...fire sprinklers too...the orange pipe with the protruding red cap covering the sprinkler head.

Roof Finished

KTU — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:41:06 +0000

The roofers have been on site the past week and finished up the main roofs on Thursday. Here are some pix. In a prior post, I detailed the roof design.

Installing panels...pretty straightforward except that the steel is oiled and the back side of the roof is 35 ft. off the ground. You can see the tidy little steel caps the roofer had made to put over the double 2x12 rafters...a nice touch in my opinion.

The roof is corrugated cold-rolled steel over a Hunter cool-vent panel over OSB sheathing. 4x4 purlins extend out beyond the main footprint of the house.

The finished roof. Note that this shiny steel surface will turn to a red rusted patina within a few weeks.

The back side. We got away with just two roof penetrations near the ridge; one for the waste vent and the other for a future radon vent (just in case). See also the snow bars above the hot tub...an avalanche from 30 ft. above would spoil a nice soak in the tub.

Dry-In

KTU — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:26:47 +0000

As soon as the framers got the roof decking on, the roofers came by to do the “dry in.” Normally, this step would comprise laying down “ice shield” (a self-stick membrane) at the eaves of the roof and then “underlayment” (30 lb. asphalt impregnated felt paper or Feltex, a modern polymer equivalent). In our case, we laid down ice shield on the whole roof. It cost about $1000 more in materials, but is another layer of insurance against ice damming. Once the ice shield (or ice shield and underlayment) is put down, the house is dry. It can survive several months of weather with no problems. I’ll be happy to get the real roof on in a week or two, but it’s nice to know that weather is no longer an obstacle to progress on the job.

The house from the front after dry-in was completed.

The house from the back side after dry in. The framers were also still fussing with a couple of windows, but basically the house is now weather tight.

Pre-Staining Rafter Tails

KTU — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:16:40 +0000

My framer’s 15-year-old son has been on the site this Summer. I proposed a win-win arrangement in which he pre-stained all the rafter tails and purlins for the roof before his dad and crew put them up. This mostly worked well. (In a few cases, one of the framers had to go up and brush a timber or end of a cut rafter.) I paid him $500, which I consider a screaming deal for both of us. This is the only exterior finish that will have to be done on this house, because we’re using reclaimed barn board siding. I used Cabot semi-transparent oil-based siding stain (Slate Gray). I think it looks excellent and matches the barn board very well. I never plan to restain…I’m hoping that even with stain applied, these rafter tails and purlins will weather gracefully.

These rafters, timbers, and purlins are the only exterior surfaces that require any finish.

The framer's teenage son stained all this material before it was installed, which worked very well.

Steel Stair

KTU — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:08:34 +0000

I love the steel stair. The architects designed it conceptually. I worked out a bunch of structural details. The detailer at the steel company created the detailed design. We iterated three or four times to get it right. This stair cost about $3000 for the steel. Waaay less than having some fancy pants stair company do the design and installation. We’re going to use big, chunky treads (3-1/2″ x 11-1/2″), probably out of reclaimed douglas fir (although they were dimensioned such that pieces of a glulam beam turned on their sides would also work).

The railing still needs to be welded in place…but I love it, even in its rough state.

Steel stair with open wood treads (temporary treads in place now).

One detail I really like is that we set the steel side stringers on 3/4″ spacers so that we can slip the drywall behind them. The stringers will serve as the baseboard and we’ll get a nice clean interface to the drywall.

The landing will also float like a big tread. It will be made from 3-1/2" thick doug fir.

My Steel House

KTU — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:02 +0000

When the project is completed, I’ll give a more nuanced reflection on the use of steel in residential construction. At this point, I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome, but the process was pretty painful. The short version of the process is (a) the architects create a beautiful form, (b) the structural engineers are asked to make it work, (c) they have to use lots of steel to realize the vision because of things like seismic requirements and snow loads, (d) a steel company “details” each part from what can only be characterized as a suggestive design by the structural engineers, (e) someone checks it carefully (me, in this case), (f) the steel shows up, (g) the framers integrate it into the structure, and (sometimes) (h) the welder comes out to fix mistakes on site.

We had only a few mistakes, and they were the supplier’s errors, so were fixed at no cost to me. What’s challenging about steel is all the coordination and the inability to adapt much during the process. On the other hand, the stuff is remarkably inexpensive, really strong, and looks nice when exposed (in my opinion).

In the interests of completeness, I should also add that a lot of the steel in this house is architectural in addition to structural. We are using tie rods, beams, and channels as aesthetic features. They’re really nice features, and worth the cost. I have no reservations about our use of steel in this way. My main regret is that we didn’t do a bit more creative problem solving in steps (a) through (c) to find design solutions that did not require as much hidden steel…which is expensive with no visual pay off. (The structural engineers point out that having the house survive a heavy snow fall or an earthquake is a pretty important design requirement. Agreed. But, in some cases with a bit more coordination, the architects could move a window three inches to fit two more 2×6s in the wall and thus eliminate an expensive, tricky piece of steel.)

Some of the visual steel. Loft beam, channels girding the top of the wall, tie rods.

View of the channels at the top of the great room walls, integrating with the tie rods and rafter trusses. See all the hidden steel around that window?

Detail of tie rod pin. This is cool, no? But all that stuff up in the rafter bays will be hidden. See the 12 3/4 inch bolts. The framers had to install these in 12 places. Yikes.

Window Installation

KTU — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:39:13 +0000

I am using Windsor Pinnacle windows. They are very nice and about 25% less expensive than Pella, which is the other brand I’ve used recently with good results. These are aluminum-clad wood windows, with double Low-E glass. I picked one of the six stock colors (black). The interior is clear pine, which we’ll finish to match the color of the trim as closely as possible.

A shout out to Tim Snyder at Contractors’ Window Supply. He really knows his stuff and made the whole process go very smoothly.

These are big windows…but only one of them has to be field mulled (put together on site). If you can handle the windows during installation, having these big windows mulled at the factory is great.

To calibrate on costs…There are 65 distinct panes of glass on this house. The total cost of these windows was right around $30,000. So, a good rule of thumb for these windows is to budget $450 per pane. Again, these are big…and that includes three patio doors as well. That cost is everything (tax, delivery, hardware, screens).

Window delivery. They usually go right in the garage. The window guys unload.

I can't imagine doing this installation without the lift.

Guys on both sides...and lots of barking of instructions in Spanish.

The first two windows in place. They did the whole house in a few hours.

Roof Decking

KTU — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:27:01 +0000

The roof decking went on in what seemed like about an hour. Incredible.

Roof decking almost finished.

One of the reasons it goes so fast is that framers have lots of tricks. Here are a few.

Using the lift to put a stack of decking onto the temporary platform on the roof.

Cutting panels on the ground...three layers at a time.

Do this only in low-wind conditions.