Below Freezing And Still Working

Today the temperature was in the 20's and there was a wind chill, too, but Jose, Cal, Gil and Chris were up on those roof trusses putting on the plywood decking. That is some serious dedication to getting the job done!

Jose Pounding Nails In the Below-Freezing Cold and Wind

Gil and Cal Working in the Cold

Roof Trusses

It's really starting to look like a house now!  Today the roof trusses came and the SAR crew (Chris, Jose, Gil, Cal, and Jim) got all the main regular trusses on in short order. Then they started working on the hips and end trusses, to be fnished up on Monday.

The view from the street below

Jose, Gil, and Cal at work

View from the West side of the house.

Walls Are Up!

The Faswall walls are up and the last concrete in-fill was done today. The cement truck was very late getting to the property and that left Chris, Gil, and Cal working late and into dusk to finish up.

Looking up the driveway to full-size walls!



Waiting for the cement truck to arrive



Chris starts pouring!

And Chris is still pouring...It took two cement trucks to carry all the concrete.

Decisions on Electrical, Doors, Roof

Today was an exciting day. Our friends Paul and Judy arrived from Puget Sound and we got to show them the construction. Paul was in the construction field for much of his life and was curious to see the Faswall getting installed. He was as impressed as we are with the care being taken by all those working on it - the carpenters from SAR Construction, Chris, Jose, Gil and Cal and Brett, the electrician from Current Concepts.

Paul and Judy discussing the construction with Randy

We also met with our contractor, Rick (SAR) and the electrical subcontractor, Mike (Current Concepts) to get some of the electrical items/locations finalized and located. We decided on our front and back doors and the color of our roof shingles and that feels like great progress!  Everyone is working hard to finish up installing the block and putting in the electrical so that the wall can be in-filled with concrete early next week.



Brett, the Current Concepts electrician is taking great care in adding outlets to the kitchen



Window Bucks In Place

The walls are starting to grow today! Backfill inside the walls has been done, with gravel added and compacted. That allowed the SAR crew to put up scaffolding so they could work on stacking the block up higher. Excavating has been down to bring the power and water trench up to the house, and around the back up the house over to the future site of the garage/shop.

Looking at South-facing Window Bucks

Why We Are Using Faswall Block

Faswall is the name of the stay-in-place form we are using for our walls and foundation. We chose it because it is fire-proof, termite-proof, quiet, allergen-free, strong, easy to use ( can be cut, nailed, etc.), manufactured locally (near Corvallis, Oregon) and will help provide some thermal battery for our passive solar house. The blocks look something like concrete block with the two vertical chambers, but the resemblance ends there. Faswall is 85 percent mineralized wood chips and about 15 percent Portland cement. There are channels that run horizontally to hold rebar or conduit, and the two vertical channels in each block also can hold rebar and conduit. There is foam insulation added to the inside chambers, at the exterior wall of the block. The blocks are dry-stacked (no mortar), and after rebar and conduit is in place, the stacked blocks are in-filled with concrete. The poured concrete then forms a reinforced concrete grid throughout the walls.  The standard Faswall block is 2 feet wide by 1 foot thick by 8 inches high, however, the  blocks can be cut with the same tools used to cut wood.

My preliminary house design, prior to handing it off to Winter Sun Design to get it made into a workable and per code design, was designed for the Faswall block to minimize trimming of the block. In reality, some trimming is inevitable due to items like standard sizes for door height, for example, which does not neatly fit into a multiple of 8 inches. For the most part, though, this house was made for Faswall. I can imagine that designing a house without much consideration to the dimensions of the Faswall block would add alot of extra work to the carpenters and crew building with the blocks.