20x34 Universal Cottage Tahlequah Ok.

[FarmerBill]

     Well this is the start of my thread for our owner built 20x34. Lets hope that I can keep up with it better than last time I started a thread. A few years back we owner built a 24x30 1 story cottage that we recently sold for a pretty good profit. We were shocked at what they gave us for it actually. Anyhow we took our profit and used it as a big down payment on 21 acres in Tahlequah Ok. It is 8 miles from town and close to my wife's job. Its a pretty piece of land with a live water creek and highway access(no more dirt roads). We have decided on the 20x34 universal cottage and just received the plans. I did a cost estimate using the materials list and figured $22,000 not including fixtures, electrical and plumbing which we will pay for as we go. I presented this to my banker and asked for a $30,000 line of credit. I haven't heard back from him yet.
     Last weekend we marked out a spot and we plan on doing a beam and pier foundation. I think the beam and pier foundation will be cheapest, simplest and more flexible than the other types of foundations. On our property it is very rocky where the placement of the house is so I think individual holes dug to the bedrock will be easier than a trench for a concrete block crawlspace, a basement would probably require blasting. We decided against a slab because of the lack of flexibility in the plumbing. Plus we want wood floors not stained concrete like last time.  During our 24x30 build I placed the toilet too far from the wall. I told my wife that if we had done a raised wood floor we could have fixed that.
     We would like to do exposed beams on the first floor ceiling/2nd floor flooring. Where the stairs are we would like to do exposed posts. I have access to some large downed pine trees. They should be dry, probably been laying off the ground for several years. I am thinking about hand hewing them with an axe and using them as joists for the second floor. I also have some Osage orange logs that are green I would like to strip the bark from and use as posts in the stairs and as support for the second floor joists. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Will the Osage orange beams need years to dry, to avoid shrinking? Will the pine logs work as joists on a 20 foot span?
     So I will try to get some pics up of the location this weekend. We plan on working every weekend till we get it done. The lease on our Apartment ends in May 2014 so that is our scheduled move in date.


       

[Jared Drake]

I have no advice, but I bought the same plans and have 5 acres a half mile from the Illinois River here in Siloam Springs, AR, about 45 mins from you. I'd be interested in seeing what you do. We're hoping to start on ours around March-April, although I'm not sure we'll be using the Universal plans.

[flyingvan]

   Osage is very hard and stable, and a beautiful wood.  I don't know if you could find or mill a piece long and straight enough to support the second floor joists. http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/osage-orange/
    The houses in my neighborhood often sit on bedrock.  Post and pier foundations have a very high failure rate, with people later lifting their house to pour a perimeter pinned to the bedrock.  Might as well do that without a house in the way, in my opinion.  This IS a do it yourself project, I've done two and planning a third.  Trench where you can, pin where you can't, form with fabric, then you have the best of both worlds---a monolithic perimeter with crawl space access.

[FarmerBill]

  Thank you for the advice, we still have not decided on the foundation yet. I figured the post and pier if done right would be better because it is more flexible. There are houses around here sitting on stacked rocks. My uncle's home is two story and well over 100 years old. It is a stem wall of just stacked rocks. Block stem walls are popular around here, and floating slabs have become very popular, but I don't why. Every slab or block stemwall(specifically slabs) has a crack in it somewhere.
Our last (contractor built) home had a slab, and it was cracked all the was across the slab. We had an older home several years ago that had foundations issues. The house was on a stem wall and the addition was a slab, the slab was settling and cracking causing the addition to separate from the house. It also had sagging floors. I figured that a post and pier would not move, because of the size and depth of the footings, and if it did it would be easier to fix. Just jack it up and replace install a longer post, or shim it. That is how we fixed the sagging floors in that old house a bottle jack and some scrap wood, but I spent a lot of time pondering how I would fix that addition till I finally sold the old house, I still don't know how I would fix it. But I am a greenhorn I don't really know.
   As far as the osage orange interior posts. Our last owner built home we had a porch with cedar posts, I cut from the property. I just stripped the bark and left them with some of the branches for hanging stuff on. I really liked that and its becoming a popular option around here. We have a lot of Osage orange trees on the property. I thought I would find one or two to make posts in the stairwell. Maybe the porch also. The more twisted the better, but stripping the bark and staining it.
   The real engineering challenge we have is the upstairs floor joists and flooring. My wife saw in a magazine a room with exposed hand hewn beams and subfloor. We liked that. I was hoping to do hand hewn beams and maybe ship lapped planks for the upstairs flooring. I would like to use local wood for the exposed parts and the floors. Maybe hardwood beams and cedar planks from a local sawmill? Anybody done this? If I do wood plank flooring do I still need the beams to be 24" oc or can I go wider?
  I will get some pics of the house location up this weekend. Thanks for the advice. And Jared you are more than welcome to come see our progress anytime 

[Don_P]

4x12's @ 24" on center in #2 southern yellow pine will work. 6x10's in #2 SYP will work at 32" centers. If there is support somewhere in midspan those can be considerably smaller and will perform better. The wider the joist spacing the better and thicker the flooring needs to be. If pine logs have been down with the bark on for several years they are probably shot.

Osage Orange... Bodark... Bois D'arc (wood of the bow, as in bow and arrow) would be a fine choice for a post, it is hard and dense so it'll move more than a less dense species as it dries, Eastern redcedar is relatively light, grows quite dry and is more stable. Anything that is spiral grained or "funky" is going to move more and less predictably as it dries. Structurally using green for a post is ok, the movement is more a matter of personal taste and expectations. Black locust is one I use for those applications a fair amount and it is generally pretty stable as well, although dense it has a high extractives content that helps stabilize it. all three of those are also naturally decay resistant.

Cracks in block or concrete are not neccesarily a sign of a failure. Since masonry has no tensile strength cracks are fairly common. As long as things are not displaced they are usually not a concern. For instance in most steel reinforced concrete they tell us in engineering texts that the steel that is giving the tensile reinforcement isn't doing any work until the concrete cracks. In your area of the country post tensioned slabs have become fairly common. By stretching the steel chords in the slab after the pour and securing them, the slabs tend to crack much less and can handle the soil movements common to shrink swell soils by acting as a stiffer unit instead of breaking over areas of uplift or subsidence underneath them. Some of what foundation walls do is provide uniform support and brace the building. Google foundation repair in your area of the country and you'll normally see the greatest number saying they repair pier type foundations. The way to do post and pier right is to have a local engineer design it.

[FarmerBill]

4x12's @ 24" on center in #2 southern yellow pine will work. 6x10's in #2 SYP will work at 32" centers. If there is support somewhere in midspan those can be considerably smaller and will perform better. The wider the joist spacing the better and thicker the flooring needs to be. If pine logs have been down with the bark on for several years they are probably shot."

   I am wanting to use hand hewn beams as joists, so would a pine log that has been down with the bark off be okay? On the ranch I work at there at least 8 or 10 pine logs that have fallen and are not touching the ground. I was rolling around the idea of dragging them up on a trailer and hand hewing them with an axe. If I actually hand hewn logs that were green as 6x10's how long would I need to let them dry? What if I bought 6x6 or 6x10 rough cut posts from a local sawmill and shaved them with an axe to give it a hand hewn look?

  Thanks for the foundation info, my thought on the post and pier was the ease of installation and ease of repair if it does have issues in the future. To do a slab on grade or block stem wall would require some dirt work. Especially slab on grade. But perhaps we should get some estimates. But Don_P I take it your vote is slab on grade?   

EDIT: repaired broken quote...  MtnDon

[MountainDon]

Our home is on a concrete slab; concrete placed Dec '84.  No issues. Cracks in it here and there but no movement of any part of it.

We have a cabin on piers and beams, erected in '09. Also no issues. But I have a better understanding of foundations now than I did then. Some of which I learned from Don_P, some from professional engineers. Wish I had known them all before. If I was building today I would not do the piers again because with piers there is a greater chance of needing future repairs.

Repairing piers might seem easy, but it can also be fraught with considerable danger.

[Don_P]

I wouldn't say I prefer slab on grade, I prefer continuous perimeter support and tie down with good lateral bracing, which is easiest to do with slab, crawlspace, or basement. In my mountainous terrain I've never done a simple slab on grade. There are some but they are not the common foundation here. So topography is one of the factors. Someone posted the other day from the mountains where he has some ridgetop land and a need for an accessible house for his aging father, I'd try real hard to do a slab on grade or very slightly raised slab with thoughts of rolling from vehicle right into the house. My own house is half crawlspace and half elevated slab on fill. We hand shovelled and tamped about 20 cubic yards of fill, then 6 yards of gravel, foam insulation and then poured on top of that. That is the large south facing living/dining side with alot of glass to help with heating this time of year. The overhangs are sized to admit the lower sun angle this time of year yet provide shade during summer. The plumbing all drops into the crawlspace half. If a post foundation is used I'd prefer a post frame with posts that extend to the tops of the walls and the walls acting as bracing for the post, but you're into an engineered building to do that right. Look at a "pole barn" and think about what that metal skin is doing to brace the tall posts. A proper foundation is just a part of the cost of a house. We see it all the time here, people chomping at the bit to start, trying to save a nickle on one of the most important parts of the house, and not realizing they are perching a huge sail on top of wobbly legs.

If the logs show no borer damage or decay, are good straight, small limbed trees, then they can be used. With a 20' span be very critical, if there's any motorhead in you, imagine installing those timbers, attaching a torque wrench at midspan and pulling down on the handle to 4400 ft-lbs. That is the bending force the fully loaded joists are resisting. When you look them over to hew them try not to put knots along the lower part of the beam where the bending stress will cause the beam to break, you'd prefer an unbroken strap of nice straight grained wood along that bottom edge. No knots or defects anywhere over 1/3 the beam depth, the center third of the span length is the most critical. There is no shame in going bigger.

SYP dries relatively fast. If these are kept under shelter, up off the ground well, good spacers between timbers and a good breeze they will be fairly dry in a year. They will still dry, check and move more for a couple of years inside a conditioned house. Big timber takes awhile to finish drying and then some species like white oak can dry at a glacial pace. Yellow pine has very long relatively large bore cells that are connected by pretty large pits between them where something like white oak has smaller, tighter cells, small pits and membranes within the cells that block them... which is why Jack Daniels likes them for storing whiskey, they don't leak! To be really honest when people ask "how long?" the only truly correct answer is, "when it's done". There are too many variables in the weather and in the tree to speak in absolutes. The dryer the better but many buildings have been built with green wood as well, again it's a matter of expectations. In old timberframe work the peasant's cottage was often framed with dead green timbers where the cathedral and castle were built with fully seasoned timbers.

Oh, one of the cool numbers from Van's link on osage, look at the compression parallel to grain number (crushing strength), about 5,800-9,300 psi, green to dry (dry wood is about twice as strong as green wood). Now think about compressive strength of concrete, 2,500-5,000 psi typically. Osage is tough stuff.

[FarmerBill]

Okay so today we went out and somewhat leveled the land using the front end loader of the tractor. We are going to buy 2x6 lumber to use as forms for the footer of our foundation. We have decided to go with a full block stem wall instead of post and pier. Last time we did this we built a slab, we built a form out of 2x12's and leveled the form instead of the ground then pushed dirt up around it. This time I hope to do a little of both, because this is a stem wall not a slab, I am going to do a little dirt work and set the form level. We have no transit just a level. So I figure if I can get the form to sit on the soil level I can then just dig a trench in the form as deep as I can then pour concrete up to the top of the form and I have a level footing to set block on. Does that make sense?
  I hope we get it right, I built a native stone wall in my last home behind the wood stove of our last home. That is the extent of my masonry experience. I am proud to say it survived several small earthquakes.

I am trying to insert an image of our last foundation for reference. Can anyone show me how to attach images?

[FarmerBill]

guess the pic didn't work. I also thought I might throw this interesting little tidbit of info out there. My uncle said that when my Great Grandparents built his home back in the early 1900's they used a bowl of water as a level. Can you imagine!!!
I promise to get pics if someone can show me how.

[MountainDon]

Can anyone show me how to attach images?

read   http://countryplans.com/smf/index.php?topic=11663.0

basically you can not upload images directly to the forum message. You need to host the pictures on a site like Photobucket. Others work.  Them from there find the {IMG} tag and place that in the message here.

The link above is to some info on Photobucket use. PB keeps chnaging things so there are discrepancies in the info, but the link should help

[Don_P]

Around here it was a pail filled to one of the rings. For king tut's pyramid I've seen the levels squares and cubit sticks. The level was an inverted T shaped frame with a plumb bob that hung in front of a mark that indicated when the beam was level, simple and effective. A water level is the best cheap way to level something like this without a transit. About 40' of clear plastic tubing for a job this size would do it. As long as it is calm and the plastic is 1/2" or better in diameter the water will seek its' own level and you can use that to check your work.

You'll need to check what the local frost depth is. I think you'll be in the 18" neighborhood. Remember the footings can be stepped to follow the contour of the land, in 8" increments to correspond to the height of a block. A footing need only be about 8" thick typically, so normally we don't need to form them in good soils, the sides of the trench create the form. We'll put bulkheads across the trench to create steps. The blockwork then begins a bit below grade. If you have enough native stone I've used that for foundation walls as well, it needs to be at least 16" thick though. I have dug footings with a garden tiller, using it to loosen the soil and then shovelling that out. A single shank subsoil plow would work as well. If you have some scrap steel and a welder you could put together a shank for the 3 point pretty easily, just a ripper.  Clean out the bottom of the trench to undisturbed soil by hand.

[flyingvan]

Water level---this is 3/8" stuff but 1/2" would have found its level quicker.  Make sure you get all the bubbles out

http://flyingvan.blogspot.com/2010/07/forming-forms.html

[MountainDon]

Leveling:  We've used wine bottles on their side to find level with the truck bed for sleeping in when the real level could not be found.

A little food coloring in the water makes a water level easier to read.  Works well.

[rick91351]

Leveling:  We've used wine bottles on their side to find level with the truck bed for sleeping in when the real level could not be found.

A little food coloring in the water makes a water level easier to read.  Works well.

I have found back in my drinking days after finishing a bottle of Night Train or MD 20 20 or Bones Farm or Anne Green Springs did not matter much if the pick up was level or not.   

[Don_P]

But I sure hated waking up all corrugated 

[rick91351]

With all that said I will apologize for hijacking your thread.  Just one of those days...... 

[FarmerBill]

  We worked for a while on sunday getting the footings dug for the foundation. For some reason we didn't make much progress. MY daughter also lost the SD card for her camera so we didn't get any pics taken. 
  Some good news, our banker called and said financing would not be an issue, just send him the plans along with a materials estimate. I had the local lumber yard put together a materials list. It came out at $43700 if we bought everything new. From blocks for the foundation to the kitchen sink. I was pleasantly surprised with the cost because I know we can do better on a lot of those items. For example that included $5000 for premium windows.  We will source all our new materials from them because we prefer to stay local than go to Lowe's. But we will be checking Craigslist and habitat for humanity local sawmills and discount yards for a lot things.
  I also talked to the county assessors office. She said we have no permitting requirements in rural Cherokee county just call them when we are finished. And they will reassess the property.
  Lastly, we stumbled across a link on this site for the Firstday cottages. Does anyone have any comments on them? I called the company and the owner sounded legitimate. I loved the building techniques used in the construction, and the exposed wood frame. I asked him if we could just buy the plans and source the wood and materials locally. He said no because they can supply higher quality European wood at a better price.
  Man!!! I just wish I could get a set of plans. We could get some beautiful wood here in Eastern Oklahoma/Northwest Arkansas. This is the Ozarks for gods sake, you can throw a rock and hit a sawmill. Not to mention the crazy spike in portable sawmills sawing eastern red cedar in central Oklahoma. I just don't believe he could get higher quality at a better price. But maybe so!!
I did a search on here and they seem like they have a lot of satisfied customers. And their similar floor plans come out to be around the same build cost as our 20x34 two story universal.
We haven't poured concrete yet!!! any thoughts ?

[Don_P]

Well, we call it eurotrash, I can post design strength values for comparison 
You want post and beam construction? Let's see what you have for a floorplan and see what's possible.

[Don_P]

 First Day is a sort of hybrid similar to old dutch timber frames.
I was achey before dawn so doodled a little.

checks out in 6x6 posts and 6x8 beams of reasonably strong wood. FD seems to use built up bent assemblies shich is neat but I'm not sure how you would accomplish this in the field without tons of exposed nails in the build up. There are companies that make glue laminated timbers of that type but cost likely gets high. I drew this with solid sawn timbers, the downside is that it would be best to get these as dry as possible before building. I like to plane them first but finish expectations are a matter of personal taste. Anyway, a starting point for discussion.

[FarmerBill]

From what I gather, the first day's strength comes from the T&G sheathing. I contacted a local sawmill and they can mill me 1x6 T&G pine or cedar for $1.50 a bd. foot. It is good lumber that is locally sourced from eastern Ok. Western Arkansas. I feel much better about that than having wood shipped from Siberia to New Hampshire to Oklahoma. They also can do T&G and spec lumber out of any other material. Say Walnut or Red Oak. I think that would be nice maybe a Walnut entryway. So I like the goalpost building method. It seems so simple, just space them 3' o/c to match your doors and windows. Then start applying the T&G sheathing. But I am sure it is not so simple. Check out this link http://employees.oneonta.edu/landrydk/spechouse.html
The floorplan we are wanting to use is from this forum the 20x32 in NC by mwhutch see this thread
http://countryplans.com/smf/index.php?topic=13150.msg171133#msg171133 

[hpinson]

Don would you be willing to post a link to the Sketchup model file that you made? I would really like to play with that a bit.  Thanks.

[Don_P]

There are a couple of problems with the FD I googled.  The sheathing doesn't add strength as far as bending but is supposed to brace the structure, it should be run diagonally or some X straps of metal over it or plywood, under the foam. The goal posts I looked at in one design on the net, the tie was way up around 10' and in the upper third of roof height, he could have dropped it to 8' and been in or very close to the lower third where it is supposed to be prescriptively. with engineering this may be ok but I'd have it designed. I saw they had to put 4" of foam on the walls, that's more what I was guessing. I do like the concept. Basically sort of like a timberframe, there is pretty much the same amount of wood as a stick frame build it is just concentrated in fewer but larger members. I was checking prices on some 1x6 T&G I misordered and ended up eating, it's been in the barn for about 2 years but was .46/lf, happily a friend emailed that he might be interested. You should be able to do better in pine, but for cedar or something out of the ordinary that sounds like a good deal.

I played with a little model of a bent down in the shop a year or two ago, rather than trying to laminate 3 equal width boards together flush I used a wider board as the center ply making a stepped reveal on the interior for decorative effect.

There are several papers by Bonhoff on nail laminated posts as well as a paragraph or two in the WSDD manual at awc.org. I think I have one or two from VT as well, this is a common post frame (pole barn) post assembly... in fact one of those engineers would be a good plan checker.

hpinson, it is quick and dirty, I didn't spend much time on it, just a doodle;
http://timbertoolbox.com/sketches/20x32PB.skp
The rafter to tie connection at 30psf snow needs to be ~2200lbs, unresolved at this point, maybe a strap on the top of the joist, bore horizontally thru the rafter seat and bend it up on top of the rafter or a large bolt thru the rafter and joist plugged on the bottom... always a problem when the tie is not alongside of the rafter.

Can you all get FD's website to come up?

[MountainDon]

Can you all get FD's website to come up?

Yes, both http://www.firstdaycottage.com/    and    http://www.firstdaycottage.com/Main.html    come up.

[hpinson]

Thank you Don.  Even though it is a doodle it helps me learn a) Sketchup and b) your ideas of what might work in such a post and beam house.  I've working with the Timber Framers Guild book "Fourteen Small Timber Frames": http://tfguild.stores.yahoo.net/tifrguplbo.html and one model is partly complete in Sketchup. I don't use it enough to retain facility between sessions though-- basically I forget what I learned the last time.