Previously on H3

Lots were surveyed and the corners of the homes carefully staked out, we learned (hopefully) that while the association which runs the development likes to tell people what and where to build, they don’t like having any responsibility for screw-ups, and thus CYA became their primary objective.  With the stakeout ‘approved’ the next step is to submit the building plans and permit fee and wait for our building permit. The evolution of this process has followed a similar path as that of the stake out process only more so, more redundant regulations and requirements, more costs, and little if any benefit to the homeowners. And thus, to avoid sounding like a broken record allow me to back burner that and jump ahead to the next stage, where we will encounter perhaps the most game-changing innovation to hit the home building trade in my memory.

Foundations

Pa, I can’t move level those this damn pigs Transit!

A strong building starts with a good foundation and any foundation starts with someone pulling up to the job site in a dump truck with some type of excavating equipment in tow. In 1988 it was a hillbilly towing a rubber tired backhoe with a two-foot bucket, today it’s a citibilly hauling a track hoe with both a two and a four-foot bucket.  In both cases we would meet the excavator and pull strings from those precious corner stakes, paint lines for the digger to dig on, set up batter boards, and determine a benchmark, usually a nail in a nearby tree, that we can use to determine the depth to dig the basement, footer trenches, and drainage lines. How we know that they’ve dug to that depth is where the game changer shows up.

As Mike S and NoDakMat have probably guessed it’s the Quad Laser. Well, it’s lasers anyway. In this case a self-leveling rotating horizontal laser. In 1988 we used a transit level which had to be manually set up and calibrated and checked and re-checked often. These are delicate instruments and they need to be carefully handled, bump one and your nice flat footer trench is now eight inches deeper at one end than the other. Also, they require a man to look through and read the story stick that another man is holding. Men make mistakes, the holder may hold the stick at an angle or the reader may get confused and decide the ditch is two inches high when it is actually two inches low. You get the picture. A self-leveling laser level not only self-levels, natch, but it requires no one to read, and in some cases (where the receiver can be attached to the boom of the excavator) needs no one to hold a stick, and most importantly it stays level and doesn’t get confused. The same laser level is used to set the footer forms and grade stakes after the digging is done. And again it turns a two or three person job into a one or two person job and while not eliminating human error it greatly reduces the potential for possibly costly mistakes.  A 12″ thick footer cost more than an 8″ thick one, and if you think the crusty old bricklayer curses on a normal day, wait until you tell him that the footers are off grade and he needs to gain or lose an inch or two.

Game Changer

But wait there’s more, before the masons can start laying block and yelling profanity-laced tirades at their bricktenders, we need to reestablish the house corners. Remember those carefully surveyed corner stakes we were required to pay for? they’re long gone. So now the same guys who weren’t competent enough to pull strings and measure offsets are now going to pull strings and measure offsets with the added bonus of plumbing down into a big hole and some ditches.  In 1988 this required someone on a ladder trying to hold a plumb bob line to a point on a string without moving either, another person down on the footer marking where the plumb bob centers out, or where it would center out if it ever stopped swaying. Go ahead, try and hold a plumb bob steady from the top of an 8′ ladder to more or less a point in space that’s an arm’s length away, add in a nice wind for extra fun. Repeat this step and with two corners now marked you can pull tapes and calculate diagonals or rely on the old 345 rule to set the other corners. Today we no longer rely on thousand-year-old tools, today we use, you guessed it, lasers. In this case, the 5-way laser, with this tool one man can set the corners easily with a precision a three-man team in the past would rarely achieve.

Between the lasers and improvements in excavating equipment what once took a week or more can now be done in a couple of days, with greater accuracy and fewer men on the job. Thanks go to the government for requiring us to adopt these new products and technology with their rules and regula….oh wait, that didn’t happen. Amazingly saving time, effort, and money was enough of an incentive. Imagine that.

Permit

The Quint Laser

Okay, back to bellyaching about paperwork. After the stake out, covered in part one, we submit a set of plans along with a check of course ($150 in ’88 near $2000 in ’18), In ’88 the plans were five pages of, well, plans… site, foundation and floor, elevations, a section, and a typical construction detail. They were mostly drawings with dimensions and some labels here and there, they were clear, easy to read, and any home builder would be able to construct a house from them. They were drawn up by a home designer my dad knew. I forget all the details but he was studying to be an architect or engineer when life caught him unawares and he had to quit school and punch the clock. He drew house plans for extra money, drew them by hand, some of our clients would ask for the originals or a crisp print of them and have them framed.

The set of plans we recently submitted are eight pages. the basic plans are still there, hidden under blocks of texts and boilerplate details – schedules for light, ventilation, finishes, doors, and windows, diagrams for electrical, plumbing and HVAC, design load specifications for joist, trusses, and rafters. I draw them with a CAD program, they are jumbled and crowded, nobody will frame a copy of them. Like the stake out survey it’s all CYA on the associations part, no one reads all that fine print, but they have a checklist if it’s on the checklist it better be on the plans. None of this adds value to the home, it only wastes my time and a lot of paper and ink.

We are required to keep the official stamped set on the jobsite but no one uses it. I make separate sets for the framers, stripped of all the filler so that they are readable. The electrician and plumber don’t need me to tell them what size wire and pipe to use or where to route it. You don’t need to tell a short order cook to fry the egg in ½tsp of butter for 2.6 minutes a side on a 253° griddle, and you don’t need to tell a carpenter to put studs 16 inches on center and what the rough opening for a 3/0 int door is. 98% of residential construction follows tried and true industry standards, in those rare times it doesn’t I make sure to discuss it on site with the tradesmen.

Lastly, we have a meeting with the homeowner and a representative from the HOA. In ’88 it took, maybe five minutes, the rep would give the property owner a copy of the rule book and welcome them to the community and hand Dad the magic red laminated paper that allows us to start building. Lawyers must have gotten involved because in ’18 it’s an hour-long slog, the rep goes point by point over various and sundry rules and the owner and builder have to initial each page, the welcome to the community now seems more like a warning not to make any trouble. Luckily my dad takes care of that stuff he’s been through 60 of them and even when we are building a spec house when there is no homeowner and it’s just him, he still has to jump through the same hoops every time.

 

That’s it for Part 2, next time we’ll get into some proper building, making sawdust and swinging hammers, we’ll have our first inspections and maybe just maybe, we’ll learn a little bit about ourselves along the way.

It’s always something

 

3  This is not a footnote, it’s an exponent as in H ‘cubed.’ There will be no footnotes in this article.