Ned Harr

I'm also curious about your progress Kyle. (Another person in Oh-hah hoping to move to NM one day.)

Sam Alcoff wrote:

John F Dean wrote:
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but if my frostline is 4-5 feet, can I just stick wood (treated? Cedar?) posts into the ground 4-5 feet down? Everybody keep saying things about rot and recommending these concrete tubes that I'm trying to avoid.

Even treated wood or cedar, in contact with the ground, is going to be more temporary than you want and could lead to other problems.

If you want to avoid concrete, I wonder if you could use carefully stacked flagstones or similar (probably you'd have to buy these so they're flat on both sides) with a few piece of rebar rammed through them? Hauling those up a hill though... anyway, there might be other options like that.

I totally get wanting to avoid concrete. But remember, you're not using a whole lot of it, and yuck factor aside it's kinda perfect for this application.

R Scott wrote:Ned Harr, I will accept your nitpick. I meant to reuse the form for the next pier, not for elsewhere in the house. It isn’t any real money savings, just less hauling up the hill.

Thank you! But I figured that’s what you meant and that’s what I was talking about. Even if you have to make or buy half a dozen forms instead of just one, the relative cost of that is pretty minor compared to other components of the build.

Or, to put it another way, if buying a new pour tube for each footer allows you to use the round holes you dug and not have to spend an extra hour on each one digging corners out so it’s square, well if you have six footers that’s 6 hours of labor you save…is that worth, say, $50? $100? (If I’m working for someone else my rate is higher but even working for myself I think my time is still worth something, especially if I’m not learning anything.) And then how much is each tube? Looks like each one is in the $10 range for 6” to 8” diameters.

Good point about hauling up the hill, that’s worth entering the equation too.

I don't think I have any blizzard stories that rise to the level of "good", but I have one "okay" blizzard story and one blizzard anecdote.

The anecdote is that twice in my adult life, about a dozen years apart, I moved from the western US (Arizona the first time, California the second) to Ohio, and both times it was blizzarding the night I arrived. What are the odds?

The "okay" story is from when I was about 12 years old and would have been in the winter of 1998/1999, or possibly a year earlier; my mom, my brothers, and I had driven to the east coast for a family function and then were on the return trip home.

At some point somewhere in NY or PA it was snowing so hard along I-90 or I-80 my mom decided to pull into a rest stop and wait it out. It kept blizzarding though, on and on into the evening, until she decided we would just spend the night there.

All the restaurants and the gift shop had closed and we were basically the only people there. She found a bench or something to try and catch a few winks on, and since she was exhausted from driving, that's what she did. My brother and I found ourselves unsupervised in a deserted rest stop. And, there was a big indoor play area in the middle, with a ball pit!

I don't know what time we eventually decided to call it quits, but until we did, we spent every moment of those wee hours diving around in that ball pit, even scouring the bottom where we found a lot of loose change and other items that had fallen out of people's pockets over the years. I think I probably scored between 75 cents and $1.25 in that thing, including at least one or two half-dollars. That much money was a small fortune to me at the time.

For years and years after that, well into adulthood, I would have recurring dreams where I'd find coins on the ground, sometimes at the bottom of fountains or other public ball-pit-shaped places, and in my dreams there'd always be lots of huge exotic coins you don't see every day, or that don’t really exist at all. I'd find so many coins I couldn't even hold them all in my hands and my pockets would be full.

R Scott wrote:Code is a one size fits all solution, that’s why it is so expensive—built for worst case.

If you can RELIABLY hit large boulders or bedrock close to the surface, I would dig down till I hit bedrock and use a hammer drill to put rebar pins in the rock and pour concrete piers by hand. I would make square piers from wooden forms, easier to attach skirting than sonotubes and cheaper if you reuse the lumber.

I gave this comment a thumbs up but I also wanted to say "+1" the hard way.

My only nitpick is that it might be harder to dig holes for square piers, and if we're talking about doing it just so you can reuse the lumber, for just a handful of piers, my opinion is: Don't cheap out--reusing that lumber for your footer pours is not where you're going to really save money, and your foundation isn't where you want to concentrate your compromises.

The house I want to build one day (hopefully tao wills it for me as well) will have a masonry fireplace of some sort--RMH, Russian fireplace, pizza oven, whatever--centrally located in the largest open part of the house. The idea is that its heat would then radiate in all directions, rather than half of it basically heating up an exterior wall.

I think the reason so many fireplaces get built on exterior walls is to make the exhaust ducting simpler, maybe some legacy effect too from when the chimney brick was part structural? But it seems to me if you can safely vent the exhaust up and across and then out, locating your fireplace more middlerer is betterer.

thomas rubino wrote:
Some states will let you assemble a kit on your own, and other states require a licensed masonry stove builder.
Other states will let you build your own stove (no kit), provided you follow the IBC International Building Code for masonry stoves.

I went to elementary school in Parma, jr high and high school in the Heights. I’ve moved away since then but heard from contractor friends that Cleveland Heights and University Heights are a nightmare to do big projects in because of all the ordinances and regulations. Shaker heights and Lakewood might be the same way.

Based on that my advice is to keep the project small enough you don’t need to pull a permit.

I’d also seriously think about the current heating system and whether it can’t be improved or modified for way less cost to produce equally good results.

Look at insulation and windows too; if the home has leaky windows and poor insulation (as many old Cleveland homes do) then beefing up the heating system will be a waste of money.

Anne Miller wrote:I feel that knowing a little more about what you like to do might help folks with recommendations.

Do you like art, Or museums, Or hiking?

Or maybe you like scenic drives, ghost towns, etc.

When it comes to small mountain towns I’m looking for great restaurants/cafes, interesting little places to visit, etc. We do like to hike and visit museums, but I’m focusing more on stuff locals probably also do regularly.

Phil Stevens wrote:Chimayo would be at the top of my list. Also, there's a really pretty loop you can make over the Valle Caldera and pass through Jemez Springs.

What’s there that I should see?

We plan to visit Santa Fe and Taos next July and we want to get out and explore smaller towns in the area too. Looking for suggestions. Thanks!