Posts tagged: house

Whew! The foundation is finished and passed inspection with two whole days to spare before the SIPs crew gets here to put up the house 🙂 .

Here’s a pic of the foundation:

Next up: SIPs installation.

On Tuesday, ‎August ‎4th, ‎the SIPs panels arrived. The floor, walls and roof of our house were all on a single trailer:

The basement walls are framed and we’re starting to put plywood on the outside. Our friend, Trisha, helped!

Here’s a picture from farther back showing the barn, RV and background:

The septic system was completed and approved. 

In a previous post, we mentioned that we had found a local company to engineer our Happy House using SIPs. Unfortunately, our experience with this company has not been very happy. They are frequently not responsive when we need questions answered or have to supply something to Park County for the permitting process. In addition, Tim has spent a lot of time reviewing their plans and finding mistakes that need to be corrected. We noticed that they can’t seem to keep a secretary to answer the phone. We always get their voice mail when we call. Their office is in storage facility behind a locked gate. You can’t just drop by and expect to find someone there who will open the gate and let you in. The owner/engineer just went thru a divorce and is living at the office in the storage facility. There are just a lot of warning flags about this company that we wish we had paid attention to earlier.

This is all really unfortunate, because we really liked the engineer and thought he had a lot of great ideas. When we tried to express our concerns to him, his response (when he got around to responding) was essentially to blow us off. He would not admit that their quality was inadequate even though Tim has pointed out multiple mistakes that they had to correct on their plans. And he said he had been trying (for several months) to hire an engineer to improve the responsiveness but hasn’t yet done so. And he actually wrote this: “You will feel better when the commotion you are personally going through is resolved.” So, he essentially said that I was the one with the problem. In psycho-babble, I think they refer to this as displacing blame. One more thing, I initially expressed my concerns in an email and suggested that we get together to talk these thru. He responded that he preferred to write instead of actually talk. How’s that for personal customer service?

Another impact of this has been that the Park County planning inspector is now on “high alert” to anything related to this company. He spends extra time going thru their plans and the required on site inspections are done with a very critical eye. This is just making matters more difficult for us.

We have stated that this new adventure is something that God has led us into. And we have been amazed by the way things have all seemed to come together and work out so well. This is our first real negative experience on this journey. It certainly hasn’t shaken our confidence in God’s leading, but it does force us to keep pressing forward by faith and trying to figure out how to graciously deal with challenging relationships and to see what our Father wants us to learn from experiences like this.

We know it will all work out in the end. I guess if the journey was too easy, there wouldn’t be as much of a sense of accomplishment when we get to the end.

BTW, if this post seems to have a bit of different “flavor” to it, it’s because Tim wrote this one 🙂 .

Things have been moving right along as we proceed with our move to Guffey.  The main part of the barn is done, and Tim is now working on the extension at the side, which will be our storage area for our furniture while we build the house. The sale of the house on Shoofly continues to move along smoothly. We’ve gotten an extension on the closing date, which will now be April 23. That will give us an extra weekend plus a few days, to finish our storage area and move our stuff.

Tim has been working on the foundation for the storage/workshop extension (and I’ve been helping!).  We passed the interim county inspection on that. Now Tim has some more work to finish the floor before we get the panels for the walls and roof installed.

We are using SIP’s for these (same as for the house), which are being prepared by a local company and will be installed by them. Hopefully, everything will be done in time to move! Installing the SIPs on this area should be great practice prior to building the house.

Last week we spent about 5 days at the property, and enjoyed our time there. Since our phones only work in the RV, near the internet router, we’ve gotten in the habit of using the walkie-talkies for communicating from the barn to the RV. Whatever works!

Here’s a shot of the property with the barn, the RV, and a sketch of the future “Happy House” on its spot at the top of the hill. This was taken pretty much from the east side, looking to the west, maybe WNW.

I’ve been sick with a cold the past 4 days, and now Tim’s got it. We’ve been doing a lot of sitting around not doing much, and with so much to do, it’s kind of hard! Now that I’m better, we’re gonna go into a higher gear and get packing.  We’ll live with minimal stuff and out of boxes until we get things moved. (Good luck with that, Laurie!)

The house plans are coming along, and we’re excited about it!  We’ve been calling it the “Happy” House.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, we liked what we saw on the Smiling Woods Yurts website, and were thinking we would get one of their kits.  Throughout this process, Tim kept forgetting their name and calling it Happy Woods or Happy House…the name stuck. From now on, it’s our Happy House.

We really liked a lot about what Smiling Woods provided, in particular the “kit” approach where they delivered all the components for the shell and we could do the actual labor of putting it up. However, more research led us to the concept of building a house using SIPs (Structure Insulated Panels). SIPs provide a much more efficient home and have other environmentally friendly benefits. 

We went back to some of the other websites we had found previously for round structures, and found an engineering company that had designed round houses using SIPs. It turned out that they were also located in our area, so we were able to meet with them and engage them to engineer our Happy House. 

Tim designed the home using Sketchup, and taught me to use it as well, so I helped!  The Happy House will be about 35′ in diameter, 988 sq.ft.  We want an open interior with few walls, and don’t need or want a lot of unnecessary space.  A utility/storage room and bathroom will be behind walls, but those walls will not go all the way up to the domed ceiling.  It’ll look something like this (north is up): 

The front door will be at the west side, with the parking area adjacent to the deck.  The panels will be 8′ wide, so there will be nearly 24′ of viewing from the south-facing windows.  We’ve put in all the furniture we currently own and plan to keep, in the approximate locations where we think we will put it. The kitchen cabinets and the desk will be custom designed and built by us. Here is another view, with south at the top.

Our plan is to have this house accessible for us into our old age. With that in mind, it’s one story, without steps. We are thinking it’s likely that one of us may eventually require a walker or wheelchair, so the hall, doorways and bathroom will be large enough for wheelchair access, and we plan to custom-design a roll-in shower.

Tim had fun overlaying the house onto a photo of the property, and here’s how that looks. Under the deck there will be a crawlspace about 6.5′ high, and we plan to put a greenhouse out from that deck, similar to the one we have at our Wellington house.  The RV (our temporary home) is currently parked to the right (east) of the house, and will stay there as our guest house.

That’s the plan for now!