2007_08_15 Septic field done- Electricity in- More decking

Alabama Power trucks came today and put in a transformer on our power pole and hooked up the power to a temporary pole beside it. It has electrical outlets on it that the construction crew can plug their saw, nail guns, etc into so they won't have to use the gas generators so much. They were happy today! It was a lot quieter after that.

Below you can see the transformer and the temporary pole at the bottom right corner of the photo.


Below is a view from the front again. You can see that they now have "doors" where some of the doors will go. The front door is in the middle. The one to the left is an entrance from the outside to the laundry/mud room/pantry combination that is just between the front porch and the kitchen. Further to the back right you can see where the French doors in the bedroom will open onto the screened room on the back. What you cannot see from here, but will later, is the door that will open from the side of the great room onto the screened room so that you can get to the screened room without having to go through the master bedroom.

The septic system was completed, inspected, and the dirt put back over it Monday after I left, so today (Wednesday) it was already done. The view below is from where the French doors in the great room will be down the hill where the septic system was installed. The deck will eventually go on here so you won't be able to see straight down to the ground. You'll be looking further out toward the cleared area.

Below I'm standing down the hill looking up toward the house. You can see that the septic guys finished their work and covered up the Infiltrator system and smoothed out the dirt that had been piled up on Monday.

They also continue to make progress on the decking. Since the septic guys had removed their heavy equipment they were able to put in the remaining concrete footers for the deck support posts in the rear of the house so that the rest of the deck should be clear sailing now. They may finish it as early as Friday afternoon at this rate if things go well.

The shot below is standing in the end of the great room looking west toward the screened room. Now you can see the door that will be there. Before someone asks, the angled boards are just braces to hold them in place for now.

Steve is getting the 2 x 10 deck floor joist aligned before nailing it with a nail gun. They are gradually getting closer to the back of the house. It's hard to see him, but Roberto is standing below Steve.

This little short log has the strips of rubbery material on the bottom log to help provide a better seal and insulation between it and the log that will fit onto it. One of the 6' French doors will go to the right of this log.

Can you see the green marks in the picture below? No? Make an appointment to get your eyes checked. Oh, you can? OK. Stay with me now because this is explained after the picture below.

The bottom logs have (underneath them) a threaded metal baseplate that is fastened into their bottom surface. and go up slightly in a hole. These holes go through all the logs all the way from the bottom of the wall to the top.

Once the wall of logs is complete, a very large threaded metal rod is placed through the log wall through those holes and it screws into the baseplate that is on the bottom logs. Then a large spring is put over the rod and a flat 2 x 4 is put on top of the top log with big washers and a nut that screws down onto the threaded metal rod. It is tightened until there is no space left between any of the coils of the spring. It is fastened in that tightened condition. Since all wood shrinks as it dries out over the years (and logs are ... well ... wood and lots of it) they will shrink some as time goes by. As they shrink and settle as a result, the giant springs keep enough downward pressure on the log wall to keep all the log joints held tightly together without having to require any attention from the owner or builder.

Now, remember the green lines? No? OK, either remind me to give less detail or make an appointment to get your memory checked. If yes, then you've been waiting for this:

The green lines mark where the metal baseplates are located. There are some other holes too, but the green ones are where the metal rods will end up going.

Below Brandon is in a prone position so he can put pressure on the deck board with his feet while Randy nails it down with the nail gun. They make sure that they are all tight together. Again, as they shrink there will be some small gap between them so I guess they want to start out with them being tight.

It was only 105 degrees today. Not as bad as the 108 yesterday according to the guys. Whenever a small cloud would give a few moments of shade it was a reason for celebration.

They hope to finish the decking by the time they get through on Friday, but that is just a guess at this point.

Kathy and I have plans tomorrow so I probably won't go back till Friday.

2007_08_13 Base layer of Logs and Septic Inspected

Two basic things happened today. The crew that wanted to be working on the deck had to stop work on it to wait for the septic system work to be finished, inspected, and the machinery they were using out of the back of the house so they could pour more concrete footers for the support posts for the deck in the back of the house.

Below you can see what they decided to work on while they waited. They decided to put down the base layer of the logs in a few places. They put down a 6" wide type of foam insulation strip first and the first logs go on that. The very first one they put down is a smaller one in height (i.e. not the 6" x 12" type). I don't really know how to explain it well, but you can't put down the 1st row and have all the logs be 12" tall because if you did then they could not go one over the other in the dovetail fashion. So, you'll see in some of the corners that they did today that the adjoining corner logs (although they are very short due to 2 sets of 6' French doors going in there) are the full 12" in height.

They attach the first ones to the 2 x 10s that are already around the perimeter of the sub-floor with long screws. The rest of the logs will be connnected to these with long thru-bolts that will go through all the logs and also keep pressure on them with a large spring to make sure that as the logs shrink due to aging that they all stay pressed together tightly.

Then they put the next log end to end (with a type of insert that goes into a groove on the end of each log from top to bottom), toe-nailed it into the end of the other log to keep it from moving away from it, and then screwed it down like the first one.

Below you see one of the workers holding one of the small logs that mates with the shorter one on the side. It is short since one of the French doors will start where it stops.

Now that short log is attached at the corner. You can see that it is taller and from here on up the logs will alternate one on top of the other and the dovetail ends will fit together.

Below you can see 2 of the 3 rows of the Infiltrator system that is the drain field for the septic tank. From the septic tank there is a long 6" (I think) pipe that runs down the hill for about 30 or 40 feet to the 1st of 3 rows of the Infiltrator system. They run perpendicular to the pipe going down the hill. The 1st row of the Infiltrator system is 68 feet from one end to the other, the 2nd is also 68 feet, and the 3rd row is 64 feet long. So, there is lineal 200 feet of it.

Here is a view along one of the lines. They are all kept level from one end to the other (within a 2" tolerance from one end to the other).

Below you can see the filter that goes into the septic tank between the stuff in the tank and what goes into the pipe and down to the Infiltrator system. You can't tell it from this photo, but the long red thing has very small slits in it so that it will not permit anything but liquified effluent to go into the drain field. Solids are not to go into the drain field.

If there should ever be a problem with the tank not draining properly (now get ready for this) you can remove the green tank cover, remove the round concrete top which has a nice metal handle on it to make it easier, pull out this filter, and use a hose to rinse it off, then put it back in the same way you took it out. It has an arrow on the top of it that points toward the exit pipe to show you which way to insert it. I guess we need to make sure that we always have some rubber gloves handy, huh? :-)

Jerry said that there probably won't be a problem, but we need to know! He said that with only 2 people living there the tank probably won't need to be pumped out for maybe 10 years. He confirmed that there should be no need to use anything like Rid-X to add bacteria since there should be plenty naturally. The written material also says that.

Below you can see where the pipe from the septic tank has a 90 degree angle joint that directs the liquid from the septic tank into the Infiltrator.

Here one of the guys from Bailey Environmental Services, Inc is showing me why the pipe that connects the 2nd row to the 3rd row goes UP from the one in front of him before going DOWN to the next row. The bottom of the pipe at the top of the little "hump" needs to be just slightly higher than the top of the one down the hill. That is so that the entire length of the row above needs to fill up before sending any overflow to the row below it. I would have thought that it would have been just the opposite (i.e. that they would all run downhill so that the liquid would tend to go all the way to the one at the bottom of the hill, but that's wrong). I guess it's a good thing I don't install these things!

I stuck the camera down into the opening of the septic tank to show you what it looks like inside. It surprised me that they have these dividers in them from one half of it to the other and I have no idea why the little squares on each side at the bottom. It is a 1,000 gallon tank.

Below you see Jerry Bailey (the company owner) at the left. The woman is the inspector from the St. Clair County Health Department. She drew out a diagram of the entire system and checked everything to make sure that it was installed properly. She had them show her (with their laser surveyor-type equipment that there was no more than the 2" difference between the height of the lines from one end to another, etc. She checked the tank and the Infiltrator system. She signed off on it and gave the paperwork to Jerry. She'll file a copy with the Health Department and Jerry will eventually send the pink copy of it to our builder or to us (I'm not sure which now).

2007_08_11 Deck started - Septic tank in - field to follow

We didn't go to the log home on Thursday or Friday since we got our Jeep detailed (it'd been years since the last wax job) on Thursday and Kathy had to get her new glasses lenses on Friday in B'ham. So, today (Saturday) we drove up there to see what had happened in our absence.

The deck is going up slowly. It will eventually go all the way around the house so Kathy can drive all the way around in her power chair if she want to do so.

Here's Kathy sitting on the front porch deck.

Wave to Kathy!!!

The septic tank is installed. The thing looks wider than I expected, but I guess that's good. The drain field has been delayed some. The Infiltrator system has not yet been done. I'd guess it will be on Monday. The pieces of it are down there in the woods by one of the bulldozers ready for next week. I suspect that Jerry's wife's surgery may have kept him busy longer than he originally thought.

Below you can see where the sewer pipe comes out of the house and goes down to the septic tank.

This was shot from up on the sub-floor looking down nearly 20 feet to see the entire septic tank and where the pipes come out to start down the hill further to the drain field.

Here is a picture of the deck in progress. The 6" x 6" pressure treated pine posts that support it are resting on the concrete footers that they poured the other day.

We had a problem getting Kathy back to the Jeep after this visit. We parked the Jeep up on the road and I helped her get down the hill to the house so she could sit on her front porch for the first time. With me on one side and her cane on the other we made it down fairly well.

Then she spent about 15 minutes walking around letting her look at things from the first floor. When we started back to the Jeep things started to get scary. It was hot today (102 degrees when we left home to drive up there) as it has been for the last week or more and it was still hot since it was only about 4:00 or so.

Almost immediately her legs ceased to function. At first she just couldn't tell where they were going and then it got worse. Before we got 20 feet away from the deck she became almost completely unable to use her legs. I was trying to hold her up and help pull her up the hill, but she wasn't able to use her legs at all and slowly collapsed on me. I tried to keep her from going to the ground, but she insisted that she just had to lie down and rest.

Well, that was the beginning of what was almost the end! Rather than walk she tried to crawl up the hill. However, she couldn't keep herself up on her hands and also couldn't get her legs raised up to get a knee on the ground. You can see that this is getting serious quickly!

I tried to pick her up, but she couldn't help at all and the days when I could pick her up and carry her over the threshhold are long gone (with my back disc problems and spinal stenosis and also that pesky loss of muscle!) and getting her up that hill with loose dirt was not really going to happen.

Well, it ended up with her having to lie face down in the dirt a couple of times to try to rest and a couple of times on her back and once on her side. This is with her with her hair down in the dirt, sweating, breathing hard and telling me multiple times that she couldn't help at all and she just needed to rest!

I kept telling her that she couldn't just stay there on the ground because it was just going to get worse rather than better and if we couldn't figure how to get her to the car soon I was going to have to either go get a neighbor to help or call 911 and see if the volunteer firemen could help us.

I kept trying to grab her under the arms and pull her up into a standing position, but she couldn't use her legs to remain there so down she'd go again.

Eventually, she had managed to skin up both her knees and burn her hands on the hot rocks. I decided that the only way we were going to get up the hill was for me to just grab both arms and pull her up the hill on her back. So that's what I finally did, but when we got up to the car we still couldn't get her into the front seat.

I picked her up and managed to get her trunk onto the front seat with her face down and her across the seat at an angle, but we couldn't get either of her legs inside the car since they wouldn't bend enough to get past the door frame. I then went and turned the Jeep on so the air conditioning could blow on her while we figured out what to try next.

I finally had to go backwards to get further forward. By that I mean that I had to grab her around the trunk (her's not the Jeep's) and haul her back out of the Jeep into what would normally be a standing position, but she couldn't stand. I somehow managed to turn her around enough to get her rear end on the side of the seat and let her lie back into the Jeep.

I managed to push her feet into the floorboard enough to get the door shut. We finally were able to drive back home with the A/C on high all the way. That took about 40 minutes. By then she had recovered enough that she could get inside the house with her walker. I made her get in the shower to clean up while I washed her shoes and clothes. Then I showered and we got dressed and then Rose and Merrill came over. They brought dinner and we watched TV till ... well, we're still watching it at 1:53 am!

The ordeal of getting up the hill took about 30 minutes. I took a couple of pictures of her while she was lying flat out on the hot dirty hillside resting for a minute. I took the pictures to remind us to never let her try to go up the hill again! I won't include them in this blog although I kept them on our computer to remind us of our near disaster.

It was a day to remember (I'm afraid!). It was also Clay's 31st birthday!

2007_08_07 Subfloor-deck materials delivered-pipes connected to water meter

There was more progress on the subfloor today, but they got only about a third of the way through. It should be finished in the next few days.

The next big thing will be putting on the deck. The deck materials were delivered today and moved down to the site so they'll be ready as soon as Steve's crew finishes the subfloor.

The wood for the deck is pressure treated pine by YellaWood manufactured by Great Southern Wood Preserving in Abbeville, AL.

If you live in the South you probably have seen the millions of TV ads for YellaWood. Jimmy Rane is the man behind the company who makes/made Osmose treated wood. Their yellow tags resulted in the TV ads having Mr. Rane in yellow shirts using yellow (or yella) for everything from yellow walls to yellow telephones and him answering the phone became "Yello" etc. He has made untold millions with the growth of his company. He is an Auburn grad who has gone on to get advanced degrees from Harvard, etc so although he portrays just a good ole Southern boy in his TV commercials he is a marketing genius. (He's also now a member of the Board of Directors for Auburn University.) I took the picture of the YellaWood sign because it's so well known around the South due to his TV ads with virtually every head football at every major university in the South.

Scott connected the water pipes to the water meter himself. At first he didn't know why there was almost no water pressure down the hill even though gravity alone should have created pressure even if it had not been connected to the water meter at all! After checking several things he discovered that a valve or something that had just been installed was inexplicably filled with some Styrofoam-like material. Once that was removed water flowed just fine. Whew!

The septic system guy (Jerry) did some grading etc today, but is not finished yet. He will not be available tomorrow (Wednesday) so it'll be Thursday before he's back to work. He may finish then or it may take till Friday. It was over 100 degrees here today. They said that the heat index was supposed to be around 110. Brutal!

2007_08_06 More sub floor preparation and clearing area for septic system

Today the septic tank man, Jerry Bailey, backfilled the dirt that was piled up in front back around the basement walls and Scott's crew (headed up by his brother, Steve) continued working toward trying to get ready to put the sub flooring in for the 1st floor, and Jerry (the septic guy) began clearing the small trees in the back where the septic tank has to go and also down the hill and to the right where the drain field (they're using the Infiltrator system) has to go.

Below is the view from the place where the driveway will branch off from Scenic Peak Road toward the house. The gravel pile to the left is left over from when the basement gravel was put in before the concrete was poured. It'll be moved somewhere until Scott can decide where he wants to use it.

There was a small-diameter pine tree (about 60 feet tall) that I had him remove and also an oak about 15 inches in diameter that wasn't healthy since more than half of its trunk was missing (hollowed out) so I had him remove both of them since I don't want pines and I didn't want the oak falling on the deck someday. You can see the oak below and the pine at the far left in the picture. They're both gone now.

Below they are putting in a 2 x 10 board. Then the 2 x 10s going crosswise can be put in.

You can see below that three of the 2 x 10 inch boards are "laminated" together and they run from front to the back of the house.

He cleared out a fairly large area (maybe 100 to 120 feet or so) down the hill and then perhaps 60 to 75 feet toward the right.

He removed mostly trees and brush that were 6 inches or so or smaller, but I had him get rid of a 8 inch pine tree and an oak that was about 15 inches or so but it was not healthy and perhaps 60 percent of its trunk was missing and it was going to fall soon and I'd just as soon not have it fall back toward the deck. Below he's digging up the roots of the pine.

Jerry pushed all the brush and trees far to the right and down into a small ravine so it doesn't show at all.

Tomorrow he will dig the hole for the septic tank vault and also for the drain field. To get the truck down to where the septic tank goes he'll have to sort of rearrange the dirt at the back of the house to level it off then after he gets the truck back out he'll push the dirt back where it was.

From above the house you can see where the elevator and inside staircase will go. The square in the foreground is where the elevator will go and the inside stairswill from the basement to the first floor will be back in the middle going left to right.

Also, the last picture is how the view toward the back looks after he removed all the trees. Not much different from up high.