Crestone Domes

After all your plumbing trenches have been filled in and the ground has been somewhat flattened by machines, it is time to check your levels. If you take the time to rake away the high spots and filling in the low spots, it will be much easier to calculate the amount of concrete needed. So, whatever time you spend leveling is well spent.

Here, we used a long level to move the dirt around with. Dig up any rocks that are in the way, as long as they are of a managable size, and leave whatever you can’t move.

After we flattened the ground, we put 2″ of gravel on top and buried a 4″ pipe with a t-piece on the bottom into the gravel. This will become a passive radon system later. In Colorado, the radon levels can be very high in places, and putting a pipe in under your slab, with a vent going through your roof, makes all the difference in the world. Then the gas can simply get out from under the house, without actually going into your house. It costs a few hundred dollars in gravel, and a bit of labor, but it is well worth the hassle.

Around the edge, we suspended 3 rows of number 5 rebar. We simply made up some u-shaped piece of rebar that were knocked into the ground, and tied the rows on rebar on top of theses. Don’t forget to put an L-shaped piece of rebar in for the electrical grounding!

In Colorado, you have to ground your electrical panel, and any copper pipes, to the rebar rings in your foundation. So, what you need is an L-shaped piece of rebar tied to all three rings, sticking up from the concrete enough that you can tie ground wires to it.

After spreading the gravel in an even layer, we covered everything with thick black plastic, taped together, to keep the radon gas from entering the house.

After marking the foundation with stringlines, the forms must be made. Nigell likes to make solid, elaborate forms where he puts 2×4 lumber on the top and bottom and OSB on the side. Then he puts small blocking pieces on the inside, so you can actually walk on the forms without crushing them or changing the angles. But, from what I have seen others do, this is probably a bit over the top. Normally, people put 2×6 or 2×8 lumber in place and secure them to metal stakes at the right level all the way around.

Anyway, however you choose to create the forms, remember to double check all your measurements, especially the diagonals. After the forms are in place, you should also redo the stringlines that mark the interior walls that have plumbing pipes in them, to make sure that the plumbing pipes are still coming up in the right places.

In our case, we are making a 3′ crawl space under the house since Colorado code no longer allows plumbing pipes in the attick, so we’ll run electric, phone and gas pipes under the finished floor at a later time. But, if you don’t plan on doing a crawl space, you must also make sure that the main electrical wire and the phone line comes up exactly where they are supposed to be.

After passing the plumbing inspection, the next thing to do is to mark the forms with stringlines and stakes. The foundation needs to be totally square, which means that both diagonals have to be equal. So, how do we calculate the diagonals?
Do you remember that old school math? If you have a right angled triangle, the square of the two sides equals the square of the diagonal? This is your secret formula.
Say for example that your house is 20′ x 30′. What is the diagonal?
On the calculator, compute 20 x = and put the answer in M+
Then, compute 30 x = and put the answer in M+
To find the diagonal, push MR and then the square root button, and voila, your magic diagonal shows up as 36′ 1″.
So, how do you use this magic number? First, put in two corner pins. Then, put a measuring tape on each pin and move towards the third corner. You’ll need two people for this part. One person’s tape should be the length of the side, and the other person’s tape should be the length of the diagonal. Wherever the tapes meet, is where your third pin goes.
Do the same to find where the fourth pin goes, check that both diagonals are the same (make sure you use metal tape for this since fiberglass tape is useless since it tends to stretch).
After you get your pins in the correct places and the diagonals are perfect, make sure you check that your plumbing pipes are still coming up inside the rigth walls. If everything is just right, you are good to go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This morning, I woke up to 13″ of snow!!! By the time I finished shovelling the driveway, another 3″ had fallen, so I shovelled my way back to the house. After taking a nice, long bath, there is another 4″ out there! And, it is still snowing!!!
OMG! No housebuilding for a while, I guess.
I’ll start blogging again when the snow melts. Right now, I just want to be a bear in hibernation.

It is snowing sideways again. It is hard to even imagine that we went to the local out door swimming pool wearing bikinis just about a week ago! The weather here is so odd. Every year, it starts to warm up in February. The snow melts away, spring is in the air, and when March comes around, everyone feels like summer is just around the corner. The bikinis come out and the winter boots go back in the closets.

Then comes April – and the same happens every year. Snow, snow and more snow. December and January is cold, March is always lovely and warm, and April makes you realize that you should have been hibernating a few more months…

Maybe it was silly to think that we could start on the new house in early spring. It isn’t much fun to freeze our fingers and noses off. I think we’ll wait a little bit longer. It is definitely cozier inside right now…