2012 Summer Adventure: Idaho Building Project

For part of the spring and most of the summer, I lived in a motor home in North Idaho, where I worked with Cathie, my dad and other relatives to build a shop for my dad. The photos below show how we progressed over the course of the summer. Alas, we didn't finish our work by the time I had to leave. Much remains to be done. So it looks like the adventure will continue next year....

On to the pictures.

Here is the site near the beginning of the project. In this picture, we'd already built the first set of forms -- for the south foundation wall. Little did I know how much work would be involved in building the foundation. The building's dimensions are 60' deep by 54' wide. That provides 3240 sq ft of space on the first floor and 1080 sq ft of "office space" on the second floor -- a total of 4320 sq ft of work space. It's a good sized building.

A closer look at the form for the south foundation wall. The form was made from scrap lumber my dad had been accumulating. We used scrap to save $$. But in retrospect, it may have saved time and trouble to use good lumber for the forms. Using scrap (and sometimes rotten) lumber made it difficult to keep the walls straight and even, when pouring the concrete.

Here I am building a foundation wall form. A typical form was seven feet long. The one shown here  is a shorter end piece. 

Dad and me working on the northwest corner of the foundation. In this corner, we had to dig deeply into the hill side to make room for the building.

Bending re-bar. The trailer hitch holes in the truck's bumper worked wonderfully to hold the re-bar in place. (hey! when did I get that bald spot on the top of my head?)

Cathie wiring up some re-bar.

A view down a set of foundation wall forms. Once we started pouring concrete into these puppies we realized (a bit too late) that using old (often rotten) scrap lumber for the forms maybe wasn't such a good idea. The weight of the concrete badly warped the forms in some places. We had a hard enough time keeping the forms straight and level without adding the serpentine curves of weak forms into the mix. In the end, we reinforced the forms and made out OK.

The cement mixer. All the concrete for the foundation was mixed by hand. A boat load of work!

Dad working at the the concrete mixing station. The station was comprised of the generator (a workhorse!), the cement mixer, a pile of sand, a pile of aggregate (in bobcat bucket), cement bags, and water (barrels in truck). Our mix ratio was 2 parts cement, 4 parts sand, 6 parts aggregate, and water as needed to make a thick slurry. I lost count of how much cement we mixed, but it was more than 100 93 lbs bags.

Cathie mixing concrete. When Dad was on site, he would typically mix the concrete. But  on those days he wasn't (typically Mon-Thurs), Cathie did the mixing. She mixed one heck of a lot of concrete. 

For my part, I mostly hauled and poured the concrete. I did do some mixing though, when working alone. We built ramps to bring the concrete up close to the form edges. This setup worked well.

When Cathie wasn't mixing concrete, she helped by tamping the pour. This  helped push the concrete up under the forms at the base, as needed to fill in the foundation footers.

Cathie also took care of the finish work. Here she is using the trowel to level the top of the wall.

Cathie inserting and leveling a "J - bolt." The J-bolts are used to anchor the walls to the foundation.

Once the foundation walls were done, we moved on to pouring the footers used to support the two interior walls. Shown here is the trench and simple form used to pour the footer for the south interior wall. 

The northern interior wall's footer after pouring. The re-bar will be tied into the concrete floor.

Pouring the foundation was a BIG job. We started the project in mid-May and didn't finish the foundation until mid-July. Granted, I took a 3 week break in June to vacation with Audrey, but still it was a LOT of work, especially since we mixed and poured everything by hand. Whew, was I glad when this step was done!

Once the foundation was done, it was time to move onto the framing. We ended up buying our lumber from Albeni Falls Building Supply. Here is Cathie with the boys from Albeni Falls Building Supply. They were a couple of characters. Nice characters. 

The guys from Albeni Falls Building Supply unloading our lumber. They had to use two fork-lifts to unload the 20-footers. The load was too heavy for one. In total we spent a little more than $15K on building materials (lumber, sheathing, metal roofing, etc), not including cement (bought at Badger Building Supply), sand and gravel (Woods Sand and Gravel) and other miscellaneous expenses. Yeah, we even bought some stuff at Home Depot.

Framing for an interior wall segment. Framing the wall went much faster than building the foundation. Maybe it was because we had extra help. Sally, Erin, and Sarah visited during this time. Aunt Mary was visiting also. They all pitched in a bit, as did Aunt Eva. Still, it took a couple weeks to build all the walls and put them up.

Aunt Eva carrying a 10 foot stud for a wall. The outside walls are built of 10 foot 2x6s. The interior walls are built from 12 footers. Eva not only carried a lot of lumber for this project (and by a lot I mean tens of tons), she also helped mix concrete and build walls. She also did most of the nailing for the wall sheathing. All by hand. Not bad for a woman in her eighties!

Dad installing a wall. For the most part, we used the Bobcat to lift the wall frames into place.  Dad would roughly place them with the cat, then I would wiggle them onto the J-bolts and tighten them down. 

Wrestling the walls onto the foundation wasn't bad. Dad had a gentle touch with the Bobcat,  so he could almost always align at least one of the sole plate's J-bolt holes onto a bolt. From there, it was pretty straightforward to use the wrecking bar to lever the rest into place. 

Progress. By late July we had the outside wall framing up.

Another view of the outside wall framing. Once this was done, we turned our attention to the  front sections and interior walls.

First up, the wall frames for the front sections.

Then onto the interior walls. Getting the beams up (for the interior wall opening) was a major pain. These babies were 13 feet long and made of 3 - 2x12 boards nailed together. They had to weigh a few hundred pounds. It took Dad and me everything we had to hoist them into place, while balancing in the bucket of the Bobcat. 

Dad temporary tacking in one side of an interior wall beam. This tack held one end of the beam steady so we could focus on lifting the other side into place. These suckers where so heavy and awkward, I wasn't sure we'd be able to get them installed. But somehow we did.

Once the beams were in place, we tied them into the walls with steel plates.

More Progress. A view of the building with the wall framing complete. By now it was early August.

Once the walls were framed, we got to work on adding wall sheathing. Here Eva and Dad wrestle a piece of sheathing into place. Eva did the majority of the nailing for the sheathing. 

The sheathing helped stiffen the walls and made everything feel more rigid. With the sheathing in place, the structure also somehow began to feel more like a building.

Progress: A view of the building with the first layer of sheathing on the exterior walls.

The Bobcat was an invaluable tool. Here, I bolt down the roll cage after doing some repair work. For the most part, the Bobcat was incredibly reliable, but on this day, we had to fix a wire that broke lose from the ignition switch. Unfortunately we didn't have a schematic of the electrical system, so we were kind of working in the dark. Nevertheless, we eventually figured it out and were up and running again after a couple hours of futzing around.

Shown here is the saw setup I used to cut the lumber for the roof trusses. The building design calls for 46 trusses. Each truss is built from 14 different pieces. Creating these pieces requires a total of 14 cuts per truss. In total we used this setup (and variants of it) to make 644 cuts. It took the better part of a week to cut up the truss lumber. I did the cutting, while Aunt Eva did the carrying.  Pieces ranged in size from 10 foot 2x4s to 20 foot 2x12s!

We built the trusses on the ground, one at a time, using steel plates to join the joints. In most cases, we plated only one side of a joint at a time. This made the trusses a bit wobbly when putting them into place. Once in place, we went back and added plates to the unfinished side. I estimate that each truss weighs about 750 lbs.

We planned to use the Bobcat to lift the trusses into place. Unfortunately our first attempt to lift the trusses failed miserably. The idea was to hook the truss on the end of the boom (shown) and lift it to a near vertical position. From there, we could clear the walls and drop the truss in place. It turns out the Bobcat's bucket controls were too coarse, especially when magnified by the boom's length, to provide a workable solution.  The result: we jerked the truss around too much, broke the boom and dropped the first truss we tried to lift. It shattered to pieces. 

Our second design worked much better. This design used a winch mounted to a 16 (and later 18) foot boom that was used to gradually lift the truss from a chain mounted just above the truss' center of mass. It worked like a dream.... sort of. We still hit some glitches. 

One time, the electrical wire connecting the battery (in the blue bucket) to the winch came loose. As a result, it got hot during operation, melted and started smoking. I can tell you, I got kinda freaked when I saw smoke pouring off the winch, while a 750 lb truss was hanging over my head. Tightening the electrical connection solved the problem. 

Another time, Dad accidentally jerked the controls too hard while the boom was in the vertical position. The entire assembly snapped off at the bucket and fell back over the top of the Bobcat. The (blue) bucket containing the battery landed on the back of the Bobcat just behind Dad's head. Luckily, the boom missed the propane gas tank mounted on the back of the Bobcat. Otherwise we'd have had a real BOOM! Solution: rebuild and reinforce the boom. 

A third time, the winch cable got tangled up in the spool, wedged and tore the spool axle off its mount. Solution: disassemble the winch, bend the mount back in place, replace the axle, install the cable guide (left off the first time. Oops), pray the frayed cable would hold on future lifts (so far so good). 

A forth time, the truss we were lifting got snagged on the bottom of the Bobcat bucket. The winch kept pulling, the truss couldn't move. Before we knew it, we ripped the pulley assembly off the top of the boom and dropped the truss. Luckily it only fell about five feet. Solution: rebuild (and in the process extend) the boom.    

Placing a truss: 

Step 1: lift the truss off the ground (previous photo). 

Step 2: position the truss in front of the building (shown here). 

Step 3: Lift the truss to clear the walls. 

Step 4: Drive the Bobcat into the building, roughly positioning the truss. 

Step 5: climb the walls to carefully position the truss into place and tack the edges down on the south and north exterior walls. 

Step 6: tack spacers onto the truss rafters tying it into the other trusses. 

Step 7: unhook the truss from the bobcat winch cable and unhook the chain. 

Step 8: finalize spacing and nailing onto exterior walls, interior walls, and rafters of other trusses.

Note: Step's 3-7 had to be done within 1-2 minutes. Turns out the lift hydraulics on the Bobcat had a slow leak, especially under heavy load. As such, once we raised the truss, the bucket would begin to sag within a minute or two and we'd loose our height. There was no way to lift it again since we couldn't use the bucket controls (too jerky) and we had no cable line left in our winch. So we had to rush to get the truss situated and secured, before it sagged down on the others or got hung up on the walls. Crazy. But it worked.

Step 3 of truss installation. Lifting it to clear the walls. This was always a tricky step.  We always attached the winch cable a little off center so the truss would sag to one side. Then we'd put a rope on the "light end" and pull on it to keep the truss level as we moved. In this way, Dad and I alone could put a truss in place -- Dad driving the bobcat, me manning the rope.

Another view of Dad lifting a truss over the building walls.

Dad unhooks the chain used to hook the truss to the winch cable, while I attach spacing braces to the rafters.

Progress: The building with 3 trusses installed. These first trusses were the toughest because they were wobbly and  minimally supported. Once we got a few more installed we were able to straighten things up, tie them all together and cross brace everything. 

Progress as of mid-August. By the time I had to leave in mid-August, we had managed to install only 9 trusses.  Building and installing trusses took longer than we expected. On our best day, we only managed to build and install 3 trusses. Unfortunately, we still have 35 trusses to go. We also have roof sheathing to install, and steel roofing and siding to install. From there we'll have a basic building in place, then come the doors, the concrete floor, and interior finishing. We spent the last few days on site buttoning things up for the winter. I'm disappointed we didn't finish. However, I don't feel too bad about it. It's been a *lot* of work, and I'll be back next summer to finish things up. It will be a very nice building once it's done.  

Stay tuned. More to come next summer.... :)