A House Grows

It has now been about two and a half months since I broke ground on my new house, and it's safe to say that it has been, and continues to be, a learning experience. Sometimes I'm not sure just what it is I'm learning, other than humility.

Before I take a look back at where I've come from, let's take a look at where things stand. In terms of "major" accomplishments, the list, thankfully, is gaining some heft:

• excavation completed
• driveway in place
• foundation poured
• rough plumbing in place in basement
• sewer hooked up
• basement slab poured
• well drilled
• well pump installed
• framing started
• electricity hooked up

Each stage has, of course, brought its own set of challenges. I've already gone into detail about the excavation/foundation follies. Here are a few more tidbits to dissuade those of you out there who still maintain the romantic notion of one day serving as your own general contractor on a building project.

The Basement Slab

Never again will I look at a basement floor as a benign slab of concrete. Ah, were it so easy. Take a deep breath and consider the ingredients that went into producing my rather nondescript looking surface: Add six inches of crushed rock over the entire surface area; compact using a gas-powered compactor; add two inches of sand; compact; place a 10 mil vapor barrier (plastic sheeting) over entire surface; add an inch of sand on top of vapor barrier; compact; place two-inch styrofoam insulation over top of sand over entire surface; place 10 gauge wire mesh sheets over insulation, fastened together, over entire surface; attach radiant heat tubing to wire mesh; pour five inches of concrete over the whole mess.

I was only personally responsible for putting in the styrofoam and wire mesh, but that was bad enough. I figured it would take three or four hours, but it ended up taking about 12. And all of this had to be done while racing against mother nature - cement doesn't cure too well when it's below freezing.

Sewer Hook Up

This sounds innocent enough, except when you consider the fact that I was first one hooking up to a private sewer line, and no one was exactly sure where the line ran. A deft touch by the excavation contractor was the order of the day. We did eventually happen to find the sewer line without ripping it out of the ground. The plumber hooked my outlet into the pipe (for an extra charge, of course - "my quote didn't include any work outside of the house"). Then there was the matter of getting the hookup inspected by the local sewer inspector. Not a trivial task when you consider the man does not have a phone so you have to call his daughter and hope she can track him down if he happens to stop by for lunch. Miraculously, lunch at his daughter's house (who happens to live two doors down from the new house) and the completion of my hookup occurred simultaneously and everything was completed in a single morning.

Well Drilling

Drilling a well is always a scary proposition because there is no way going in that you know how much it is going to cost. Since they charge per foot drilled, the deeper they have to go, the more it's going to cost. Every site is different, so I could potentially have to drill down anywhere from 150 feet to 500 feet. At $9/ft., a difference of a few hundred feet can be quite significant.

Then you also have to add in the cost of the casement. The casement, a thick metal pipe, must be used to line the top of the well shaft all the way down until they hit bedrock. Casement is an additional $9/ft., so it, too, can add up quickly.

It turns out that the well gods were smiling down on me. They hit ledge at about eight feet down, and as a result only had to use 15 feet of casement. Drilling through what appeared to be solid granite turned out to be a slow process, but in a little more than a day they were down 165 feet and the well was producing a respectable 3 1/2 gallons per minute. He decided to go down to 205 feet in hopes of getting a 5 gallon per minute flow. At that depth, it ended up putting out 4 1/2 gallons per minute. He decided to stop there, not wanting to take the risk of drilling deeper and hitting salt water.

What I hadn't realized was that drilling the well was just one part of the equation. The plumber had to hook in the water line, and then yet another contractor had to install the pump. So any savings realized by having to only drill the well 200 feet were quickly eaten up by the little unexpected extras.

Electricity

By far the most troublesome and frustrating aspect of my life as a general contractor has been getting the electricity hooked up. The process was really begun over a year ago when I met with the power company representative to asses what was necessary to get power to the site. Many years ago, the owner o the subdivision had buried conduits underground to run utility lines through. So, naturally, I assumed it was just a matter of running a cable through the conduit to a transformer box and then hooking up the transformer box.

The first challenge came when the power company told the owner of the subdivision how much it would cost to run the utilities underground, even though the conduit was already in place. The subdivision owner balked and said he wanted poles put in instead. That didn't sit too well with me, and when I pointed out that he had sold the lot to me with the promise of underground utilities, he thought better of his pole idea.

The conduits themselves presented another problem. I needed to run both electric and phone lines through the conduits, but was not allowed to run them through the same conduit. No problem - there were two conduits running down to where the transformer box was to be placed - I would use one for electricity and one for the phone line. You can save a chunk of change by running the phone line yourself, so that's what I did.

Next came the ordeal of finding an electrician. Of all the tradespeople, electricians seemed to be the busiest. When at last I found one who promised me he could get the electricity hooked up by the time the carpenters were ready to start, I jumped at the opportunity, even though his bid was quite a bit higher then the next closest one. So began the weeks-long nightmare of actually getting the electrican to show up. And when he finally did, the panel hook-up he had put together flunked the inspection because he did not use the correct meter box (in his defense, the power company had recently changed the meter box requirements). Once that problem was corrected, the power company could only promise that they'd have the electricity hooked up by January 6.

It was a pleasant surprise, then, when they showed up just two days later.

Then the nightmare continued. It turns out that the power company uses two cables, and thus two conduits, to run electric to the transformer box. So, if I wanted electricity (which I did), I would have to get the phone line out of the other conduit and find some other place to put it.

Fortuitously, I had already scheduled my excavator to return to bury the water line and sink some concrete footings for the deck. So, while he was here, he also digged down to the conduit in which the phone line was buried and we pulled out the phone line. Even more fortuitously, we found a third conduit while digging - the phone line would have a home. Unfortunately, the third conduit did not have a string running through it, so there was no way to pull the phone line through it.

The power company returned the next day and managed to complete the hook-up, although not without some additional difficulty. According to one of the carpenters, the power company apparently managed to get the cable stuck in one of the conduits running up the telephone pole, and between explatives, were arguing rather loudly about how to remedy the situation. In the end, they had to cut the conduit.

As for the phone line, I was desperate to get it taken care of since the phone company was scheduled to come in a couple of days to hook up the service.

My electrician told me that the secret to running a string through the conduit was to attach the string to a plastic bag filled with insulation and suck the bag through the conduit using a shop vac. I was skeptical, but he assured me it worked like a charm.

So, the next day I met up with a friend who had a heavy duty shop vac, and we began the little sucking experiment. Amazingly, when my friend turned on the vacuum at the other end of the conduit, the bag, with the string attached, was quickly sucked through the 2-inch pipe.

Well, almost, anyways. You realy didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? After taking what seemed to be at least 150 feet of string, the progress abruptly stopped. The bag was stuck, short of its goal. So I reeled the string back in, and we tried again. And again. And again. And again...

Four hours later, we gave up. This was supposed to be the owner of the subdivision's responsibility - if it was going to be this difficult, he could deal with it.

So I called the phone company and cancelled the pending installation. And I called the owner of the subdivision and told him of his newly inherited plight. He suggested contacting the local septic servica company and seeing if they had a snake or some such thing that could rid the conduit of the obstruction. So I did, and the septic service suggested that we try sucking the plastic bag through using the big sewage sucking truck. So, the next morning I met up with the machine that I affectiionately dubbed the "giant sh*t sucker" and in a matter of minutes, that string was in one end, out the other, and sucked up into the sewage tank on the truck. Fortunately, the ball of string was long enough so that I was able to hold onto the far end without it being sucked through the conduit as well. The operator of the sh*t sucker suggested that we cut the string where it went into the truck's sewage tank. I wholeheartedly agreed.

Looking Ahead

The weather has held out, so the carpenters have been able to work almost daily. Thay are now starting on the framing of the second floor and hope to start on the roof by the end of the week.

Through all of this, I have coped by repeating the mantra "It's only a house. It's only a house..." But, in fact, it is much more than that. For although I have only directly participated in a small portion of the building process, the fact is that the house would not exist if it were not for my persistence in seeing it happen. And there were many times over the past three years when the prospect of it happening was seriously in doubt. The dream of this house has weathered a divorce and the feelings of being absolutely lost and without direction. The dream of this house has survived three different designs and the desperation that came from twice being so close but then having everything come crashing down around me. The dream of this house has survived unavailable and overpriced contractors, squabbles between personalities, and countless unexpected annoyances that have led to sleepless nights and frantic phone calls. The dream of this house, at least, is becoming a reality. And the realization of this dream represents a personal triumph over adversity that at times seemed insurmountable. It is not just a house that is rising from this little plot of earth, in many ways it is the rebirth of my soul.