Crestone Domes

Once the digging is done, a lot of planning takes place. First, you have to mark exactly where you want the house with accurate corner pins and string lines. Then, you have to consult your drawings and mark where your plumbing pipes are going to come up under your house.
The kitchen sink pipe (2″) has to come up either in the wall behind the sink, or inside the kitchen cabinet, preferably in a corner.
The washer drain (2″ or 3″ depending on local code), must come up in the wall next to, or behind the washer. If you are even an inch off, the whole wall has to move, so measure ACCURATELY!
The toilet drain (3″) has to come up 12″ inn from the finished wall behind the toilet. Vanity (2″) must be inside the wall behind the vanity, and the bathtub pipe depends on what is happening. If you don’t have a crawlspace, it is common to put the pipe into a small sandbox under the tub. After the concrete is poured, the sand in the box can be dug out, and the pipes connected. If you do have a crawlspace, the bathtub pipe can come up right under the wall, just like the vanity pipe does.
In our case, we ran the main drain pipe in a 45 degree angle through the house, so all the branches connect with 45 degree long sweep elbows. Make sure the pipes have the right fall, to. It is supposed to fall 1/4″ per foot, or 2 1/2″ per 10 foot. All the branches has to hit the main drain at the right level (which is sure to give you brain burn before the day is over). Don’t forget to put a cleanout outside the house (we put one outside each bathroom as well).
This part is never fun, but once it is done, that’s that, so hang in there, and good luck with the plumbing inspection.

Tags: underground plumbing

When you buy a piece of land, you never know what you are going to run into. We built a house 3 lots down from this lot, and there was nothing but beach sand everywhere we dug, so naturally, we thought this lot would be the same. We couldn’t have been more wrong. There was just stone upon stone. We ran into two stones about 8×8x12 feet that had to be blown up with dynamite, and the rest of the ground was so hard to dig that the digger broke twice…
Before the digging was over, we were both questioning our sanity – why did we ever even consider building a new house? And the land started looking more and more like a bomb had exploded. Total chaos and destruction! Very depressing. No matter how many houses you build, the destruction of the digging is very disturbing, but this, too shall pass.

Tags: buildign with ICF, building a new house

We started out with a beautiful piece of land. It looked like a park in the middle, and it was difficult to imagine a house there. But we marked the corners out, got our plans approved and started clearing the land. We cut down the trees in the building area, saved what we could and took the small branches to the dump. After a lot of hard and sappy work, we got ready for digging just after July 4th.

Tags: new piece of land

Whenever you plan out a new house project, it often tends to take on a life of its own. There are always factors that are not in your hands, dreams turn into nightmares, the weather turns nasty, people don’t show up, and nature has little tricks up its sleeve.

To all of you people who signed up for my feeds, I have to tell you that the house is no longer going to be a dome. I still believe that a dome is the very best kind of house you can possibly build, but the question is – how are you going to build it?

In our case, we live in rural Colorado, and there is only one person in the vicinity who has a concrete pump. When he didn’t get back to us with a price, I started getting suspicious. So, before we put our plans in for review with the local POA, I told my husband that we better call and find out if he was still interested in letting us use his pump. (This is not just a normal concrete pump – it is the kind that you tow along behind a truck and hook up to a huge compressor so that you can shoot the concrete onto the walls.)

Anyway, the guy didn’t return any calls, so we went to his house, and there was an angry dog in his yard, and his neighbors told us he was not in the area any more. And without a concrete pump, how do you spray a dome?

If we had enough money, we could have hired a crew from monolithic dome institute, I suppose, but we didn’t have that kind of money. So, we quickly had to redraw a new house, which put us back at least a month.

The new house is a square ICF house, 1600 sq ft, one story. ICF is insulated concrete block, and the brand we are using is Nudura.
We chose Nudura ICF because the Nudura blocks are bigger than the other blocks on the market, and also because the blocks clip into each other very nicely. The corners can be used right side up or upside down, so you don’t have to worry about right and left corners.

We made another ICF house in the past, and they are pretty good when it comes to R-value. (Performance R-value is about R-50). The Nudura block also has places that you can screw into every 8 inches, so this makes it easy to hang kitchen cabinets, sheetrock etc.

It is definitely more expensive than a normal framed house, and a bit more time consuming, too, but it makes a very solid and warm house, and concrete walls don’t burn, and neither do they allow mice in.

The biggest difference between a dome and an ICF house is the fact that the dome has heatmass on the inside in the form of 3″ of concrete, so once you heat it up, it holds the heat incredibly well for a long time, and the heating doesn’t have to come on again for hours and hours. The ICF house doesn’t have heatmass on the inside to hold the heat, but when the heating comes on, it instantly heats the house. Therefore, the heating system in an ICF house has to be adjusted to heat the house in a different way. It has to come on often, and for a very short time, just to top up the heat.

Tags: ICF, Nudura