24 x 46 1.5 Story in Ohio

[beckhamk]

Well I am finally starting my build thread with pictures of what we have completed to date.  I have always wanted to land for personal hunting and after this very cold winter we had last year, I decided to go on the hunt.   We ended up finding a nice out of the way place that wasnt a very long drive.  When we looked around at properties we saw a place with a nice 1300sqft cabin on it and loved it. Land was way too hilly for mu huinting tastes.   Well that set things in motion to look at cabin kits and log cabins etc....

I had always wanted a log cabin, but wasnt dead set on it.  After researching I couldnt believe the cost of the complete kits when comparing  a 1100sqft to a 600sqft kit. We wanted the larger, but that just showed me that there is alot of markup on these.   Thus began the search for cabin plans or other kits.  Then i stumbled onto countryplans.com - wow. nice selection of plans and lots of comminuty support.     I did alot of research on the plans and costs, not being a carpenter I wasnt sure about taking on the project ourselves.   I got my first quote from a small crew and they ball parked getting it framed and dried in at $30k for labor only.  I think that was really high and probably very very high ball park as I had all framing materials prices around $12k not including the trusses.

Thus began several months of researching and reading on the build process.  read the "house framing" book john suggest many times over. Good book and a must read for anyone wanting to do this themselves!   I started getting quotes for the foundation, site clearing and septic and drive etc.  So then i had my initial idea of those costs and decided to do the project ourselves and hire out on things I didnt want to do.

Here are pics of the original old logging path that would later become the driveway.

[beckhamk]

I also wanted to mention that I fell in love with Dave and Kim's 1.5 story and modeled our cabin simular to theirs, but had the plans adjusted for 4ft wider and went out to 46ft long.


Path cleared for drive up the hill.  Drive way is about 650 ft long





Cabin site cleared for the most part




Crew working on the foundation and footer location


I went around and around trying to decide on post and pier vs crawlspace or a full basesment. I liked the idea of
a fullbasement, but would have had a garage door added for four wheeler storaged etc.  But i opted out of that,
didnt like the idea of critters getting in or under the garage door and into the cabin.  I ended up going with the
crawl to better hide piping and some covered storage and to keep the floor warmer.

[beckhamk]

Footers and crawl wall going in.  Was supposed to be a 40in crawl 5 corse. Ended up being 7 because the contractor didnt get the fall of the hill correct.  But in the end i didnt mind it, easier for me to move around as i am 6' 2".






Completed foundation with piers for the girder. I had decided that i would have the girder even on the 20 wide as to make for a stronger floor. I am a big guy and didnt want any bounce...



waste pipe exit

[beckhamk]

We had planned to get the site clearing and driveway, foundation done in may. But we had such a wet spring nothing got started until the last week of may.  They didnt finish until mid week before 4th of july.

foundation sealed


consruction drive in....



I had always planned for my father to help our with this build and to help with alot of the carpenter items inside of the cabin.  But in Feb dad found out that he had stage 4 melanoma cancer.   Things got really bad around the beginging of June when we was admitted to the hospital.    He got to see the pictures up to this point, as he lost hit fight on June 15th.  At that point I wasnt even sure I wanted to even try finishing the cabin framing this year.  I figured get the floor and subfloor done and leave it until next spring.

So on July 1st we started with the sill plates and then onto the girder

[RIjake]

Sorry to hear about your dad.

Looks like a fun project.  Good luck with it.

How big a piece of land do you have?

[beckhamk]

I will say it was a very hot and humid summer.  The humidity was the killer..  Mostly this build was myself and my wife. Then occasionally i had a friend or wifes father help out.  Had a friend help out with the floor joists.  I had the idea of hanging up that tarp to keep the sun off of us.  It worked great for that, but it needed to be a little higher once we started on the subfloor as it made it muich hotter under the tarp.  Got the advantec down!  Yeah.     I strong suggest that you use advantec in your build as this stuff rocks. It is more expensive but it can be left out in the weather for a year and still not warp or other known issues.  Its still solid as ever.

framed the walls


Those walls are 46ft long.  the friend who helped me with the floor joists was saying oh we just need a few more people to help out with raising this. I said no way once we put the sheeting on its going to be super heavy.
I also couldnt rely on who was going to be there or not. So i found the transporter wall jacks ordered a pair of those. It allows you to raise walls with sheething with only two people.
These things rock and work well!  Anyone want to by mine? might cost too much for shipping.







Got the two outside walls done, me and my wife and her father worked on them and got them up. It was a little scary getting putting these up for the first time, but we got through it.
There was no way these walls would go up with the weight we had unless we had like 12 people helping.  

One note here - the simplest things sometimes take along time. I have constantly been amazed at how i think i can get something done quickly and then it take 2x-3x longer.
We figured we would sheath both walls and raise then in one day. Took us one wall per day.  The biggest problem was that it was july hot and humid as could be. So in the morning
we could work very well for about 2 hours. Then once the sun started hitting the work area we had to start taken more and more breaks which really slowed us down.  So be prepared
if working in the heat for this.

We had only been working on Fridays and SAturdays, once we got the two long walls up. I decided to head out and frame up one of the end
walls with the wife. We actually got one up in 4 hours one nite.  the other end ended up taking 8-12 hours over 3 nights. Think we were getting
too tired.

Oh and a tip here... When we framed the 46ft walls we moved them a little up and in to square them. Well that was ok. but when it came time to move them
back out to the lines for raising we had a little problem.  We could move the wall up and down fairly easy just pushing or pulling while walking down the
46ft side. But tring to push the entire wall from one end a few inches wasnt happening.  Ended up nailing 2 x 2x12's together and setting on the
bumper of my truck and tapping the gass peddal in reverse. It worked thank god, else i dont know what we would have done.

[beckhamk]

pics of the main load bearing wall that our 6x12 will sit on, and some pics of the interior wall framing.  I did enjoy working on
the interior wall framing. the cabin really starts taking shape when you get this done.





This is our 2 - 6x12's and the 6x6 post now in place.  Me and my wife did this in one day.  I was planing to rent a heavy equipment lift to help with the 6x12's. but then realized i could use the transporter wall jacks. Yeah more use from those!  I could easily drage on of the 14ft 6x12's myself but no way we could lieft them ourselves.  We got the first one up and onto the top plate and nailed in about 3 hours.  We were a little nervous about the beam falling off while we tried to get the mounting plate for the wall jacks off the beam but we managed.  The 2nd beam took much longer due to us not having a wall to hold use tiedowns on the wall jacks for stability.  We manged and finally got the 6x6 in place.  I had used up all of my tiedowns to stabalize the wall jacks that i didnt have anything to hold the 6x12 in place while we got the 6x6 under it.  I got resourceful and used wrapped my extension cords around the post and wall framing it worked like a charm.




We had only been working on Fridays and SAturdays, once we got the two long walls up. I decided to head out and frame up one of the end
walls with the wife. We actually got one up in 4 hours one nite.  the other end ended up taking 8-12 hours over 3 nights. Think we were getting
too tired.

Oh and a tip here... When we framed the 46ft walls we moved them a little up and in to square them. Well that was ok. but when it came time to move them
back out to the lines for raising we had a little problem.  We could move the wall up and down fairly easy just pushing or pulling while walking down the
46ft side. But tring to push the entire wall from one end a few inches wasnt happening.  Ended up nailing 2 x 2x12's together and setting on the
bumper of my truck and tapping the gass peddal in reverse. It worked thank god, else i dont know what we would have done.


Loft floor joists are up! I really didnt want to have to use floor joist hanging off the 6x12(i could have done something smaller but wanted the nice
effect look).  I really wanted to use ijoists, but they would have had to be 14in tall and then there became all kinds of issues with connecting them to
the out sidewalls and ledger etc.  I probably could have gotten away with it, but i didnt want to risk there not being enough recommended ledger for the
ijoist to sit on.


simpson hangers - boy thats alot of nailing.  Anyone that hasnt done this. Get some friends the hangers took 16 nails each and my wrist and hand bothered me for two
weeks about.  At this point I always wanted a closed ceiling under the loft. But once I got to see the beams we ordered. I kinda wished we went the open ceiling route.
But I constantly go back and forth on that one.  Being a big guy i would have liked 4ft spacing between the joists. So this floor is much strong with no bounce.




Advantec on the loft floor

[beckhamk]

I do want to mention two mistakes we made and point these out to others os that they dont over look them either.  When we framed the outside walls one the floow. We offset the top place 5.5 inches back from the end for the end walls top place to over lap.  Well we nailed them all the way down. Problem:  we used the same length top plates as the one below it meaning we only had 5.5in of overlap on our seams.  I couldnt live with that mistake and spen alot of time with a sledge hammer and a chisel and crowbar to rip those off and put new ones on.  BTW:  Get yourself a nice large crowbar and sledge - we used these two tools so much and they come in handy for things you hadnt thought of. We plan to hang ours up in the cabin. by far the #1 most useful tool we have.

The second mistake is when we started raising the interior walls.  We had all of the exterior walls braced from the inside, so when we needed room to build the walls we removed the braces. (oops). This wouldnt have been so bad if we had rechecked the plumb and pulled them back in then. But we didnt think about it or notice it until we finished the loft floor and i noticed the one wall wasnt straight.  I was going bonkers trying to understand WTF happened.  Then it hit me.   The harder part was that we alway had the joists nailed and loft floor on.  Luckily i hadnt cut the 2x12 joists for the loft floor for dead tight fits, so i had room to pull the wall back into plubm. Ended up using the sawza to cust the nails pull the wall back into plumb and then renail.  wast to bad and didnt take as long as i thought. The other was didnt have an issue.


Next on to trusses, we ended up getting trusses made and delivered to the property. truss company called me out of the blue at 11:30am and said
we are ready to deliver your trusses in 30 minutes.  Ahhhh ok you know its been raining the previous day right?  No problem. I drove out there and
I drove the guy up the hill in my truck and he said no problem well get them up there right next to the cabin.  I reminding him he will want to get
a good start when he got below the cabin else he would probably loose tracsion due to no gravel and rain. Well he tried 12-15 times to make that
corner and kept getting the area rutted up and muddier.  At one point i said he's gonna get stuck and i am going to have to pay for this. I even
thought we would have to take the trusses off one by one and then he could back down the hill in reverse. Finally I got him to listen to me and
we got him turned around and i said just dropp them off as far as you can get up the hill in reverse thats where it ended up.



piggy back of the truss



BIG FYI - truss people told me 2 weeks to build and deliver. Dont beleive them. Ours took almost 5 weeks to deleiver. So plan ahead and order them
4 weeks before you need them and make them hold them incase they get done early.  I would have had a roof on 3-4 weeks earlier if i had done this.

Now the best part.  So the guy is leaving our drive and gets stuck in the ditch across from my drive. He said his air breaks popped off.
Yeah whatever

[beckhamk]

BTW: I didnt have to pay for that tow either.

I dont like heights very much, but have gotten used to them and doing the various building task that area needed. But no way was i goin on the 12pitch roof. We had planned to rent a boom lift to put the trusses up but my helping hands had other plans and it was getting too close to hunting seaon and my cuttof for dry in.

So I hired some amish roofers to put up the trusses and metal the roof.  Best money spent so far.  I called around to many normal roofing comopanies but no one wanted to deal with the trusses. oh well. But its done now.



from no roof to half roof in one day - yeah





pic of our 4x8 DF beams in the cathedral area



loft area with trusses on



almsot dried in and entire roof sheeted and tar papered

[beckhamk]

Got the house tyvek'd - ended up purchasing the stinger staple caps.  They work very well!

As Dave did in (dave and kims 1.5 story) I also bought my windows off craigslist. Got all 14 brand new in unopned boxes for $80 each not bad.
I wish they were about 3in wider. but they will work for the cabin.  Person that sold them to be called a week later and said they had pulled an anderson
400 frech swing door and wanted $350 for it.  We saw it at homedepot earlier and wanted one but they were $1500.  So i grabbed it, it was used but in
excellent condition.









Metal roof almost compelte and sofits done






NOTE: anyone going to installing a wood burning stove with metal roof. If you are not doing this yourself, verify if your
installers will cut through metal.  I never asked this and a week before the roof was to be put on found out. So i had to
have the roofers leave a strip off for the install guys to put a proper stope file flashing boot up there. I guess this crew
prefers a proper flah vs a cut and chaulk flashing.  But it all worked out.   



Loft stairs completed.  I got very busy and wanted to get up in the loft without climbing the ladder. Things at work heated up
so my time was limited, so i asked my nice amish crew to build it. They gave me a nice fair price. Turned out way better than i
imagined, especially if i did them







I ended up finishing all of the interior wall framing that butted up against the loft stairs and udner it just yesterday.
Wow - i am glad thats over with.

I think i will only have some storage framing in the loft at a much later time.

Talking to the electrician today and plmuber tues. more to come.

[beckhamk]

Sorry to hear about your dad.

Looks like a fun project.  Good luck with it.

How big a piece of land do you have?

We have 42 acres, would like more but its plently for two people to hunt on.  As you can see we decided to move forward with the build. I figured i would push through and do it for dad.   

[Rob_O]

Great work, Dad would be proud

What are you using for siding?

Sent you a message about those wall jacks

[beckhamk]

We are going to wait till spring for the siding.  But I am not 100% sure what we want to do yet.  I wanted to do 1x2 chink wood siding or maybe a log siding.   But I am a little concerned about maintenance etc. then i saw the one post of a cabin i think in MI. that is using certainteed  cement board cedar siding prefinished with a cedar stain which we are going to investigate.
I would really like to go the pine chink look but i keep fearing  we will regret it later on.

[Sassy]

Wow, I am impressed!     Looks really good, enjoyed following your progress...  your wife sounds like a great help w/this build    So sorry to hear about your dad, I lost mine over 3 yrs ago...   Glad you went ahead w/the build, tho, you will really enjoy it.  Beautiful land, too!  Looking forward to seeing your continued progress!

[UK4X4]

Just to check you went with 12 ft ballon walls

so you ended up with roughly 3ft above the floor- what the usable width and what angle is the interior part of the trusses ?

Being 6 ft I see 5ft as a sort of workable height to the side of a room- my wife however can get away with way less

You made great progress! your father would be proud to see what you acomplished

[nysono]

Awesome job, looks great.  I bet your Dad is looking down and smiling at your accomplishments.  Its alot of work but the pay off is worth it in the end, we are fianlly able to start enjoying ours now and with hunting season open work has declined.

[beckhamk]

Just to check you went with 12 ft ballon walls

so you ended up with roughly 3ft above the floor- what the usable width and what angle is the interior part of the trusses ?

Being 6 ft I see 5ft as a sort of workable height to the side of a room- my wife however can get away with way less

We went with 11' 4" balloon walls. I did that for two reason, I wanted higher ceilings and when i was going to go the ijoist route they would have been 14in tall so i wanted the extra room.  We framed the walls before we have the ijoist vs the center beam determined.
The bottom of the loft joist sits a 8' 6" so i have roughtly  20" - 22" of knee wall.


The heigh in the middle of the trusses is either 8' or 8'6" i dont remember i will have to check that and get you the angle.

[beckhamk]

Well another update, we have been busy. Well the contractors have been busy. I really wanted to be able to use my cabin for hunting gun season and have the guys come out.  So I decided to hire an electrician to wire the entire cabin. I was planning on having them only do the box and 220 stuff and all of the high ceiling items. But my time was limited.   As for the plumber we have to get inspections and are required to use a licensed plumber so i had to dish that out.  It was a big trade off, getting it done within two weeks for some extra $$$ or doing it myself and taking alot longer.

Picture of the finally finished roof with the stove pipe flashing.  Before i was there the day they put this in, i was like WTF is the big deal with cutting into the the metal roof and putting a boot with a rubber gasket on. Well this flashing was huge and I think was definately worth the wait. Looks proper also compared to the gasket version.  I think its kind of a cheat as the hole they put in the roof was huge compared to what i thought it would be.




Next on the list the well is completed - yeah - last big truck that needed access to the drive. Now we can gate the drive   The well driller was waiting for a few nice dry days to get his rig up here. This guy has a comverted oil drilling rig. He get most of his jobs drilled in one day compared to the the others around here. My only wish was that i could have been there to take pics.  Well was 125ft, clear and no sulfer.  14 GPM he told me that was good for the area and the height that we are at on the hill.



They came back another day already and installed the pump and water line to the water tank(diaphram) in the crawl. We ended up with a 50 or 55gal tank. We up sized the tank as we wont have grid power for some time, so he suggested a larger tank to hold more water so that the pump doesnt have to run as much.


Pic of the utility room, washer and dryer hookups and the water heater. I will need to take some pic of this coming through the roof and the loft area.




Installed the coner shower - omg what a pain in the arse this was. Plumber said take this crap back and get a fiber glass one. We bought this as the bargin outlet. I assumed everything was fiberglass.  Little did i know that the walls are some srot of plastic stuff.  Didnt seem like a big deal to me, we just needed to green board the walls now.  Plumber got the base setup and said you can put the rest of that together yourself it will take forever. I was thinking yeah right. Well the thing took me 4 hours or so to put togehter. Pain in the butt. All of the glass and doors took the longest.  I think it will work out just fine for a hunting / weekend cabin




We also had to deal with the crawl space, oh boy.  Our contractor who did the crawl woulnt put any of the poly down due to the crawl filling with water due to the large amount of rain we got this spring. Well we finally got the floor and everything else built and finally drained all of the water out with a bulge pump.  Finally about 2 weeks ago the ground finally started to harden up a little (there is gravel already in the crawl. but it was very humid.  So I bought some 6mil poly and double layered it from each side.   The plumber left his wrok string lights down there for us. that made a huge difference and allowed us to get the job done faster.  We layed out the poly and taped it fairly quickly.  then we needed stoned on this.  Me not knowing if there was a company that could fill it did it the hard and somewhat painfull cost wise way. Wen to homedepot and bought 86 bags of pond pebbles. we hauled all of the bags in there.  It was a pain but easier than shoveling it all over the place.  We were able to cover the outside walls and then 3/4 of the crawl with stones.  I will might finish the other end later on, but i doubt we will ever be down that end often for the need.  Two weeks later, i can already tell a huge difference in the humidity and things are super dry now.

[beckhamk]

Well the insulation was finally getting done in the cabin this week. So we decide to head out tonight to make sure they were on it. Well they had done a fantastic job.

Pics of the johns manville "spyder" insulation.  i believe its a R23 for 2x6 wall 


loft view looking down into great room


We got spray foam insulation (CertainTeed's CertaSpray) in the ceiling, gable ends and crawl floor. This has come out better than i thought especially how think it was at the peak of the roof.

[Sassy]

Bet that made a difference in the tempature!

[dablack]

Everything looks great and I can't wait to see how it turns out.  Also, make sure and tell us how the hunting is going!  I'm very interested in your build because the first thing we are going to build on the property is the garage (24 x 48) with an apartment above.

thanks
Austin

[EaglesSJ]

Looking very good. Those trusses look stout. You think a 12 pitch roof is steep you should try a 24 pitch roof. WOWSERS!

[duncanshannon]

great looking place. awesome progress.   

you must do this for a living too, eh?

i really like the red roof.

[beckhamk]

Wanted to post some slight updated pics. Not too much has changed except we now have all of the elctric wiring done and lights up. Now you can see the loft and insulation pics better.

Loft looking out into the great rooms


Looking from great room into the loft. note the nice black stove pipe


got the wood stove installed quadrafire 3100 heat up the place nicely. We definitely need to get the ceiling fans installed and running to help
circulate the heat. Batt insulation will be for sound between the bed room and bathroom walls.


Pic showing the spider insulation in the walls. If I start a fire and heat up the place to around 70-71 for the first floor I can place a few logs in around 10pm and goto bed and there are coals usually still bruning and the temp is about 68 then.  I left for the cabin and came back and it was still 68 at 6pm that was on a 50 degree day. On a colder day 30 degrees it dropped to about 64-65 when i was back at around 6pm. love it!




Looking to place my order for T&G pine this week. want to get the inside moving along.

[beckhamk]

Well its been a busy last few days!  We originally bought our 4x8 beams from twin creeks log home supply and decided to purchase our T&G from them also.  We are going with 1x8 for everything inside.  We ended up getting somewhere around 10,300 linear FT four huge pallet bundles. WOW

Anyone planning to do this themselves, be prepared for alot of measuring and back 'n forth   Also make sure you have a sliding compund miter saw (this is the bomb) and makes things go so much faster. I wish i had this when we were framing.  Also a jig saw for cutting out all of the outlets and switches. Lastly a finishing nailer - I have a cordless passlode and love it.

This is a corner shot of the great room


Got tired of looking at the insulation so i just had to get that outside kitchen wall done


This is the back wall of the great room.


Got three walls of the guest room done and also two walls in the master completed.


Got some good light with the camera on my phone and a nice pic of the knotty pine doors


Got the week after christmas off so most likely start on the ceiling. Not looking forward to that.