David and Lisa's 20 x 30 in Plumas County, CA

Started by davidj, January 11, 2008, 01:20:12 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

muldoon

Quote from: davidj on February 10, 2009, 01:25:03 AM
Another improvement that came in shortly after the well was a shower.



I love looking through older threads that I missed.  That's along the same lines as what I had in mind for a temporary shower as well.. only yours is much more thought out then what I was envisioning.  Thank you, Thank you.   

dcados

Hi David and Lisa,

I recently posted on the forum regarding cabins for a summer camp(Nevada City area) and ended up selecting the 20x30 plans. Would very much like to hear about your county planner and code experiences. As you can imagine we need to build 15 of these units and I am trying to learn up front what to avoid.
Best...


davidj

Quote from: dcados on April 22, 2009, 08:23:22 PM
Hi David and Lisa,

I recently posted on the forum regarding cabins for a summer camp(Nevada City area) and ended up selecting the 20x30 plans. Would very much like to hear about your county planner and code experiences. As you can imagine we need to build 15 of these units and I am trying to learn up front what to avoid.
Best...

For the plans, we had one sheet of site plan and two sheets for the cabin drawings.  This is way less than would be needed in the Bay Area.  The upside is that there's some flexibility during construction.  The downside is that you have to work out a bunch of details on the fly.  I think you'd want more drawings if you were paying someone else to do the construction, regardless of code issues, especially if you're repeating the construction multiple times.

We got by without engineering, relying on "conventional construction", although that limited our options in some areas.   I think that after recent code changes you're even more likely to need that.  But spread over 15 cabins that's no big deal.

The "Wildland Urban Interface" fire-related changes to the code came in after we submitted (3 days after!).  If this applies to you it'll limit things like siding, roofing and eave/vent details.  But as long as you consider it from the start it doesn't seem to be a huge burden.

We're still only at the foundation stage, so there's only been a couple of inspections on the main cabin.  The Plumas County guys seem very reasonable so far, mostly checking the bits that are where someone might mess up like the anchor bolts for the hold downs.

However, a couple of things may change your experience from ours:
- you're probably gonna be classified as something other than residential, which could make things more complicated
- counties vary considerably, and Plumas has a good reputation so other rural areas may be less friendly

davidj

Quote from: muldoon on March 24, 2009, 06:33:22 PM
I love looking through older threads that I missed.  That's along the same lines as what I had in mind for a temporary shower as well.. only yours is much more thought out then what I was envisioning.  Thank you, Thank you.   
The shower was over-engineered, as happens too often to my projects.  I've had neighbors build 10x12 cabins for less than I spent on the shower!  By the time I'd bought the heater, hoses, propane tanks, some gravel for underneath, redwood posts, PT framing and some suitably-country shower curtains I think it came in at somewhere North of $600.  That being said, it's worth every penny when you have a nice hot shower at the end of a hard day's work.  And it's gonna last for decades.

I think it's gonna get some T1-11 sheets on the sides this year as the shower curtains are a pain if it gets windy.  I've got some hard-core epoxy wood preservative that I'm gonna use on the edges (basically the same stuff as fiberglass resin) and I hope that will see the plywood through a bunch of winters.

John Raabe

Sweet shower setup! :D :D :D

And thanks for helping folks with "on the ground" info concerning CA code issues. Reasonable people can often get reasonable help from local building inspectors - even when state codes are probably the most strict in the country.
None of us are as smart as all of us.


dcados

Thanks to all. This site and the people on it rock! Nice to learn up front what to avoid.

davidj

Still almost  a year behind current progress, so more catching up...

Once the backhoe left, the footings looked like this:


When the concrete truck arrived, they looked like this:


Getting from the first photo to the second was way more work than I expected and took several weekends.  I think one of the hardest bits for an amateur was the lack of reference points - it was almost 50 ft from one end to the other, with no hard reference points to work from - nothing level and no right-angles.  There was also a lot of dirt to move and everything involved bending over.  One piece of wisdom for other newbies is to remember it's easy to make everything move down with a couple of blows of a hammer, but making it higher involved pulling a nail, extracting the stake and starting again from scratch.  Something like setting all the metal stakes maybe 1/2" high, then a final tamp-down to correct level allows you to go a bit too low on some stakes without having to pull them out.  Especially if you have a cheap laser that only works after dusk so it's hard to check levels as you do it. Another trick shown to me was to set every other form board with a stake at each end, then hang the slightly-short intermediate boards off the end of the staked boards with bent nails so they're automatically level.  Then once you've got everything level add more stakes to strengthen it.

The bit that looks like a room in the foreground is actually for the porch - apparently the porch post footings have to be at the same height as the main foundation, and also tied to it because the porch is tied to the house.  So they look like footings for a wall but it's really just for 4 posts.  There are several wider and deeper sections for load-bearing - even the 8ft window needed an extra 2" of concrete depth under the jack studs thanks to the snow load.

Below are a few more detailed close-ups.  Note the way the vertical rebar (#4 @ 16" centers) hangs off the center 2x4, with the L's alternating sides and the footing rebar tied to it.  The wooden spacers for the vertical piers were removed after the footings were poured (in retrospect, I should have used a loop of rebar, but I think they're short enough and fat enough it shouldn't be a big deal).



davidj

#57
Pouring the footings was a big party - friends, neighbors, friends of neighbors - everyone joined in. One of the guys, Fin, had done this kind of thing many times before so he took over the organizing, freeing me up to actually do work rather than pretending to know what everyone should be doing.


Fortunately folks brought their own wheelbarrows as mine died trying to move mud to the far corner out of reach of the chute.

We finished off the whole surface with trowels, which was hard work given a total of 150ft of footing.  After it started setting up we pulled off the rebar supports but left the forms in for a couple of weeks (which I guess is good for the concrete, but also bad for the back of the person trying to get them out!).


davidj

#58
Too much cabin building and not enough posting to the forum!  The last post was from work about a year ago.  The latest progress can be seen in my photo gallery:

 http://gallery.me.com/davidj270#100036&view=grid&bgcolor=black

Below are a few highlights...

The footings before the grout pour:



The I-joists for the main floor:



Raising the front wall:



The first folk to stay in the loft:



The roof bones:



If anyone is interested in any details let me know...//


Boatz


kontainerville

David,

I'm Herb Nelson's neighbor over on Lodgepole.  We are building our little cabins out of shipping containers.  I'll try to stop by and introduce myself in the next couple of weeks.  I'm about to start roofing our buildings, and may hit you up for advice.

Regards,

Mike

davidj

Quote from: kontainerville on September 11, 2009, 03:08:45 PM
David,

I'm Herb Nelson's neighbor over on Lodgepole.  We are building our little cabins out of shipping containers.  I'll try to stop by and introduce myself in the next couple of weeks.  I'm about to start roofing our buildings, and may hit you up for advice.

Regards,

Mike
Great - another red-dirt-roader on the forum!  We've been meaning to say hi to you guys but we've been more antisocial than we'd like lately due to the amount of work left to do before the snow hits.  Your project looks really interesting...

Stop by any time - we should be up the next 3 weekends and maybe some Fridays.

kontainerville

Great!  We'll be up September 19th and, hopefully, on October 10th for Oktoberfest at the Saloon!  We'll stop by.  Great to see the pictures of your cabin. 

davidj

Here are a few more updates from this fall (posted from 35000ft - wifi on a plane is a great invention!).

The eave rafters were a whole bunch of hard work.  Cutting the notches for the 28 lookouts at random angles (depending on the scaffolding details) involved swallowing more sawdust than is healthy and took nearly 3 hours.  And lifting the rafters in was hard work, but fortunately the neighbors once again helped out. The palm nailer turned out to be the best way to nail them in as it was really hard to lean out with a hammer or nail gun.



davidj

Here's Lisa cutting the notches for the eave vents.  The scaffolding made work at the eaves really easy.  We really wanted to go with sprayed-in foam, but the open cell required venting anyway and the closed cell was seriously expensive (I can't remember exactly right now, but I think it was gonna be close to $7K). 


davidj

I really wasn't looking forward to the roof sheathing - heights aren't really my thing.  To make it a bit less scary I bought a bunch of roof jacks, which worked really well and was well worth the money. The first side I ended up doing alone, which resulted in two of the hardest days of my life - hauling 5/8" plywood up 20ft gets to be pretty tough by the end of the day, especially with temps in the high 80s.  However, for the second half my friend Joy helped and it was way more fun.



Redoverfarm

David don't forget the screen for the vents.  Insects, mice and bats love the insulation to nest in.

davidj

Quote from: Redoverfarm on February 05, 2010, 11:01:04 PM
David don't forget the screen for the vents.  Insects, mice and bats love the insulation to nest in.
Yeah, they went in after I got the roof on - I ended up just stapling venting metal cloth (or whatever it's called) on the inside.  Cheap and cheerful!

If we'd submitted our plans 2 days later we'd have been hit by the new California fire codes and would have needed the $30/piece fireproof vents (x 30 rafter bays!).

davidj

We ended up buying some nice (and expensive!) 6x6 resawn posts and 6x8 beams (needed for the 100psf snow load).  The easy way was to use a bunch of short beams, but the strong way was to get one 18' long.  Fortunately the neighbors inlaw Tre is an HVAC engineer and was up that weekend - his lift made the whole thing trivial!


davidj

Framing the hip roof for the porch was probably the most complicated framing on the whole thing - not knowing how to do it the proper way I ended up doing a lot of math to try and work out how long everything needed to be.  Even though the span was 6ft we needed 2x8 commons and double 2x10 hip rafters, plus a lot of Simpson metal to tie it all together.  I cut birdsmouths in the hip rafters and used a ripped "wedge" to support the commons due to the difference in depth.


As he's done many times before, my neighbor Ken helped out when it came to the sheathing. He's got 25 years on me but I still can't keep up with him!  One day I'll try and do a thread on his cabins - three sleeping cabins, a saloon, a jail and a bathhouse (all <200 sq ft) on 5 acres.  There's not many places to live where you can be in the middle of nowhere and have a (free!) saloon within 200 yds of your cabin!






davidj

The windows are Marvin fiberglass clad wood - pretty expensive but they look (and work) great.  This is the big 8x5 south-facing triple double hung (which needed a 6x10 header - that snow load makes things expensive!).


davidj

This is the stove we ended up getting - a Quadrafire Yosemite.  There was some discussion on stove sizes and I ended going for a small stove rather than a medium.  It seems to be able to get the place up to 30F warmer than outside with no insulation (and uncovered ridge vent!).  This still isn't really warm enough for Casey, who rarely comes out of her down sleeping bag if it's below 80!


davidj

#72
The roof is standing seam metal.  Due to the height thing I got a roofer in to do this and it ended up costing $8K.  This seemed expensive but there's not much competition in these parts, and I guess all of the trim costs a fair bit.

I also had the stove/stovepipe installed, again due to the heights, and this came to $400 (which seemed quite a deal given the round trip is 1.5 hours and they ended up coming out 3 times!)


davidj

#73
We pretty much got everything done before the snow came with one exception - the custom metal door for the crawlspace entrance arrived a few days too late and the road was already closed with snow.  It weighs close to 200lb and is 6ft by 4ft, so not exactly convenient for throwing in a backpack. A few 2x6s and some hardboard was the solution, plus of course the ATV!


davidj

There were some heavy storms in January 2010.  Here's the start of the dirt road into the cabin - about 4ft of really soft snow.  Breaking trail was incredibly hard work, even with good backcountry skis.  Joanne had snow shoes and she could only make progress after Eric and I broke down the snow.  And we had to take it in turns to lead to avoid becoming completely exhausted.



The good news is that the cabin was fine, if a little snow-encrusted.