Tag: quotes

Basement Dig Out – Part Forever

September 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My last basement dig out post was June 3rd. With the dumpsters and excavator gone we stalled out and decided just to hire the rest out. The concrete contractors we talked to gave us some very reasonable quotes and we were just waiting for the plumbers to get back to us. We finally got a couple plumbing quotes, but they’re really, really expensive.

We’re basically looking for three things from the plumbers: (1) replace the old clay sewer line under the basement floor with an overhead system plus rough-in for the basement bathroom and floor drains to an ejector pit, (2) replace the old lead water service with a new copper line, and (3) install an interior weeping system (aka drain tile) with a sump pit. The new water line in particular involves either excavating pits and horizontal boring or a trench across the yard and the street, so it’s the biggest line item, but the sewer work is pretty pricey too.

We’re going to try and get another couple quotes in hopes of a less expensive option, but time is getting short to get this work done before the cold weather sets in. In the mean time, we’re going to tackle the weeping system ourselves. While it’s the least expensive item on the list, it’s the only one we can realistically do. Even though it  won’t bring the plumbing costs down by a lot, we’ve got to do everything we can if we want to move forward.

Before we can put in the weeping system we need to level the subsoil in the basement. When we dug out the basement with the mini-excavator, our limited experience meant the end result wasn’t what you’d call perfectly smooth. Because it’s all clay, making it flat is extremely labor intensive. We’d held off leveling it until we’d talked to the plumbers because we weren’t sure if they were going to have to dig up the existing sewer and water lines. Now we know that’s not the case and we can get started. They’ll only need to dig a hole in the front corner, and over by the soil stack.

Not level

Not level

The first step was to dig out the corners where we couldn’t get the excavator in close, then go around with a pressure washer and clean up the stone footings. Once everything was cleaned up I used the laser level to measure how close to level the subsoil is. I started working from the front bay window toward the back of the house, focusing on one four foot square at a time. I quickly discovered there’s a gradient of clay consistency from one side of the house to the other, requiring different techniques to level out.

Level line

Level line

On the North side of the house the hard-packed clay is the consistency of old, dried fudge. It’s so dense you can’t slice a shovel through it and I have to use the mattock to chip it away. As I move to the other side, it gets gradually softer, which is why a lot of that side is actually dug too deep. So, I take all the clay shavings from the one side and dump them on the other, then use a block of wood and a hand-held sledge hammer to pound it flat. I thought about using a plate compactor or a lawn roller, but everywhere I need to compact the clay it’s sticky and would make a huge mess. As much as I don’t want to do it all by hand, it’s probably the only way. I drew a line on both the shovel and my block of wood to check my progress as I went, as well as a longer board that I could use to check larger areas. Basically, everything needs to be 6″ below the laser line.

Progress is very slow. I often find myself adding up square footage in my head and breaking it down into percentages, since while the digging is physically hard and time consuming, it’s also mind numbing. Each 4×4 section is averaging me nearly half an hour. I’ve only done about 300 square feet so far, to the back of the first column footing, but just that has been a huge pain over several days.

I’m planning to get the leveling finished over the long weekend, but there’s a lot more work to the weeping system. My hope is that by doing this portion ourselves, we can save enough money to still move forward with the basement this year. After getting excited about our reinvigorated timeline, I don’t want to get derailed out of the gate.

Contractor Wrangling

August 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

For the first part of the year, almost the whole first half, we were going like gangbusters on the house. After we returned the mini-excavator and the last dumpster was hauled away, we kind of ran out of steam. We’d go down to the basement and putter about for a little while, digging up the rest of the disconnected sewer pipe to the catch basin, hauling out some of the remaining dirt piles, breaking up the landing outside the back door, but for the most part, a sense of dread and just being overwhelmed took hold. Digging by hand in the clay soil is just terrible and with our dumpsters gone we didn’t really have anywhere to put it. A series of over-tonnage charges came through on the dumpsters that added up to a lot of extra money. We basically got screwed on the dumpsters and should have gone straight to the hauler instead of using a service.

There were some also simple realities of life going on: our son Derek is going to speech therapy twice a week in the evenings, which occupies a decent chunk of our work time. Until she got a new job a few weeks ago, Sarah was working at a temp job that put a lot of uncertainty into our house budget. As for me, I was just sick of the basement. It’s summer, there are all kinds of things to do, and our weekends were more often than not full of fun activities with friends and family. In short, not much got done on the house.

Now that Sarah’s permanently employed, we’re back to hoping we can move into the basement before winter sets in. The only way that’s happening is if we hire out a big chunk of the work: namely finishing the dig out and pouring the new concrete floor, and the sewer plumbing. So over the last month or so we’ve been in contact with a few concrete contractors, a GC, and a couple of plumbers. We got a couple quotes on the dig out and the floor, as well as the new exterior back steps, but getting a plumbing quote has proven elusive. The GC we met with first said he would give us a quote but he never did, plus a lot of what he said really didn’t align with what I understand code to be, even though he said he knows all the inspectors and does it all the time.

Then we met with a plumber that gave us a whole different idea for how to do the sewer plumbing. We were planning on having our sewer pipe run underground, gravity-fed, with a backflow preventer (since Chicago has a combined storm system and high rain can lead to sewer backups). The plumber told us that the city now has additional requirements for backflow preventers that makes them difficult and expensive, and to instead use an overhead sewer line from the main stack to the front of the house. The basement fixtures would drain into an ejector pit that pumps up to the overhead line. The advantage is that it’s unlikely there would ever be a backup because it’s much higher up, and even if it did it would just back up to the ejector pit. Better still, we could run the whole thing in PVC instead of cast iron (which the City requires for below grade sewer). As a result it would be cheaper as well as a performing better. The disadvantage is we would have a bulkhead along the outside wall, but I think we can make that work. Unfortunately, he also said we’d have to have a trench for the new water main, since the city inspectors want to be able to see that it’s one contiguous pipe.

Unfortunately they still haven’t gotten us a quote, and now they want to come back out next week since their “outside guy” missed the last appointment. Needless to say I haven’t gotten a quote yet. We have another plumber coming out on Saturday morning. Hopefully they’ll both get us quotes; after wasting most of the summer, now we need to get moving on this project, but without quotes we can’t plan or budget.

Momentum

October 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We put in the last two bay windows last week, meaning all of the first floor windows are in, aside from the sliding door that we have to hold off on. I need a few more strap anchors and some more flashing tape to call the last window done, and we still have to go around with the Great Stuff and backer rod to complete the air sealing. In addition, Lester, our radiant heating guy, finished the rough-in work ahead of our new boiler installation. It’s been a lot of work but it’s also a very tangible feeling of progress that we’re eager to keep up.

Derek helping

Derek checks for square

Our next major goal is to get the new subfloor installed. We need that done in order to start a whole host of first floor projects like framing interior walls, building the new stairs,  insulating the exterior walls, and getting the radiant floor heating installed. With the weather getting colder day by day, it’s those last two in particular that have our interest piqued.

With so much riding on the subfloor, and the time required to level the wonky floor joists, we’ve decided to hire it out. I’m working on getting quotes this week and hopefully we’ll get some good numbers and people. We’ll need to set to work clearing out the first floor. It’s accumulated an impressive pile of scrap wood from the removing the old windows, plus the giant steel pallet the door shipped on, the sliding glass door we can’t install yet, and all of our tools.

The other thing standing in the way of new subfloor is the radiators, steam pipes, and chimney from the old boiler. The old boiler is disconnected, and so far we’ve been making do with electric heaters. We’ve been reluctant to remove it because it’s still a viable way to heat the house if the new boiler takes longer to show up than the freezing weather.

In short, we’ll get started clearing things out and see how things play out. Hopefully we’ll get our new boiler in quickly and the chimney and pipes will come down before they’re in the way of the subfloor contractor. Worst case, we’ll have to hook the old boiler back up and the contractor will have to wait or work around some things. Either way, things are moving and we’re getting excited.

Better Living Through Self-Delusion

June 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Ever since we put up the beam in the first floor I’ve been grappling with the unfortunate reality that I’m not as good at building houses as someone who does it for a living. This is an obvious statement, but it runs up against my perfectionism. We’re starting to do constructive work on the house rather than destructive work. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, but now that it’s here I’m forced to confront the fact that my carpentry skills are not up to my own standards. I’m also forced to either accept less-than perfect results or redo things I barely have time to do in the first place.

One of our primary goals in building our house ourselves was to make sure it was built right. To achieve this I’ve done a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of planning, and we’re spending a lot of money for the right materials. All of that still butts up against the lack of experience I have at physically doing it. I have a level, a square, a measuring tape and good eyes, but things still don’t wind up fitting the way I expect them to.

One of the things I take pride in is a level of honesty with myself and the introspection to see when I’m not doing a good job. Ira Glass talked about the difference between taste and skill, and while he was speaking about the creative pursuits, I don’t think there’s a difference. I know what good quality construction looks like. I can see what’s wrong with every building I walk into, and appreciate it when things are well made.

We watched a lot of Holmes on Homes before starting this project, seeing horror stories of bad craftsmanship from shady contractors. Because I knew I wouldn’t accept less-than-good quality, I convinced myself that I would do a better job, but I failed to understand that just because I would doesn’t mean I could. I recently read a blog post by Allison Bailes discussing his experience building a green home and the role his own self-delusion played in convincing him that he could do it himself and to plow ahead despite setbacks. In a separate post he said that one of the top ten mistakes he made building his home was thinking he could save money by doing it himself.

On the one hand, without the self-delusion, he (and for that matter, Sarah and I) would probably never have undertaken the project in the first place. The self-delusion is necessary to convince yourself to do risky things. Once you’re committed, you eventually work a way through it. However, the self-delusion is only useful up front. Once you’re in the thick of it, self delusion only serves to prolong the project by telling you you can do it all. The question becomes, when is it actually a good idea to do it ourselves and when should we hire out?

There are always things that are worth doing yourself. The basement steel beam is a prime example. We started out convinced we needed to hire it out, got quotes of fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, and wound up doing it ourselves for about two thousand dollars. However, without the help of our friend Mike, a construction welder that was able to buy the steel and help us put it in, it wouldn’t have been so straightforward.

A counter example is the first floor LVL beam. We were quoted a bit under five grand to have it done. We did it ourselves for roughly sixteen hundred. That’s still significant money saved, but the time and effort it took, the quality of the finished product, and the lingering uncertainty of whether it was done 100% properly add up to me concluding I probably should have just written the check.

If nothing else, I’ve reminded myself to at a minimum get a quote for the work so I can make an educated decision. With Sarah in grad school for the rest of the year, my evenings are dedicated to watching our son, Derek. That means I can only work on the house on weekends or if I take off work, and individual projects that would take a contractor a few days may take me a month or more. There’s value in that time, and I’m slowly realizing that sometimes I need to pony up the cash if it will get things done. To start with, I’m going to get a couple quotes for the joist levelling and the subfloor. If one of them is reasonable, I’ll save myself a ton of time and effort and hopefully have a better product than I could do myself with the time allotted.

Going forward, we’ll take it one piece at a time. We don’t have a construction loan, so everything is out of pocket. That means we feel it acutely when we make big ticket decisions, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth it. I expect we’ll still wind up doing most of this project ourselves with the help of friends, but maybe a bit smaller “most” wouldn’t be so bad.