Cast in Concrete

The pumper truck and the first concrete truck in position for filling the forms.



Joe on the left watching the action. The pumper truck operator is on the right with a remote control unit for his rig.



The quality inspector doing an air content test on a batch of concrete.



This truck is full of rejected concrete and ready to tip as you can see. A strap was attached between the top of the hopper and another truck and was kept taught while the driver of this truck inched forward back onto the drive.


The concrete pumper truck showed up at 8:00 am and began setting up while Jenny and I placed the last of the media conduit sweeps in the forms. The pour started at 9:00 and Joe's crew was wrapping up by 3:00 pm. One concrete truck leaving with a load of rejected concrete drove off of the compacted drive and sunk into the soft soil and was close to rolling. With help from another truck they were able to get him back on the drive without mishap.





We will see if our conduit survived the pour tomorrow when Joe's crew pull the forms.

Plumbing goes in the forms

This is a mix of roof drain, electrical conduit and sleeves for the radiant lines in an adobe wall between the great room and the master bedroom. We put couplings on the end of the conduit against the form wall and then wrapped them with foam to create a void in the concrete around them. We pulled the coupling up tight against the form with tie wire slipped through the form and twisted until tight.The radiant sleeves were just taped at their ends and suspended by tie wire and pulled to the bottom rebar with tie wire.


Here is a typical array of media and electrical conduit.


Jenny and I worked nonstop Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get all the plumbing required in the forms. Dave Himes with Southwest Geothermal was on site taking care of all the sleeves through forms between rooms. We worked on the electrical conduit that will allow us to pull wires up in the gap between the double adobe walls. Curt Nelsen with Nelsen Electric stopped by several times to cheer us on and to look over our shoulder and keep us code compliant. In addition, we had to install conduit for the media wiring, Photovoltaic, and roof drains. We worked until dark and started again at daybreak. We were just completing the last tasks on our punch list when the pumper truck showed up Monday morning.

The Foundation Forms are assembled

Joe and his crew are setting up forms. The forms in the lower right are footers for the framed garage. The forms in the center are roughly 2'x2' in profile and will require 2" foamboard insulation on outside to protect them.


Forms for the guest bedrooms are being assembled.





The concrete crew from Advanced Concrete Solutions showed up on site Tuesday May 20th to begin setting up forms for the foundation. The foundation is a complex design which is a mix of deep footers with stemwalls for the framed portion (the garage) and shallow frost protected areas for the Double adobe walls. Since the walls are 24 inches thick our Structural engineer, Jeff Ruppert tried to minimize the amount of concrete required to support the walls where possible. In addition, there is also a 6' tall retaining wall where the guest bedrooms step up from the main floor (this was to accomodate the sloped site and to allow for south facing windows in this area for more solar gain). The north side of the guest bedrooms are 4' below grade which required a retaining wall as well.


Joe Hernandez and his crew were amazingly quick in understanding the layout and getting it forms in place. In spite of rain Thursday & Friday, they had the forms ready the following Thursday.

A concrete pour date was set for Monday June 2nd. Now it is our turn in the trenches to place electrical, media, water, and radiant plumbing in the forms.

Earth Day Earth Work Begins

By early February, the snow was over 4' deep and didn't melt off until early April.

Late April: Mark cuts into the slope, Kenny moves it down slope, and I compact it.

Our site looking across Horse Gulch. Looks a bit like a sand and gravel pit from here. It will take a lot of native grass seed to restore the site

Jenny and I set stakes for the house corners. We used triangulations based on a CAD model I created.

Filling and compacting engineered fill in the footer trenches.


After an incredible winter that saw a snow accumulation of well over 4 feet, we finally got back on the site on Earth Day. The site is now level, footer trenches are cut, and we have been compacting a foot of engineered fill into the trenches. We should be able to start setting foundation forms by the end of next week.

Since the wiring and some plumbing goes into a 4" gap between the double adobe walls and under the concrete slab, there is a tremendous amount of desk work at this point. There will be no going back if we forget something. This is the reason wood floor structures over a crawl space are such a popular construction method. They are much easier to plumb and wire. However, they lack thermal mass, which means they are unable to store passive solar energy and instead act as a heat loss, requiring more fossil fuel to heat the house. Our double-wall adobe will have plenty of thermal mass and hopefully require very little energy to heat.

We have been struggling with the budget and continuing to get bids for things that seem unreasonable. High fuel prices are causing many materials to skyrocket. On the plus side, lumber prices have dropped due to the subprime lending debacle causing fewer houses to be built with a resulting lower demand for lumber. To bad we aren't using much wood. Another problem is getting experienced, but not over-qualified, crews to do the adobe work. All of this has definitely resulted in sticker shock. We continue to look for every opportunity to control costs.

Winter arrives

Winter arrived with about a foot of snow and brought work on the site to a halt. The ground has not frozen yet and is a quagmire under the snow. We have decided to put the project on hold until spring. There is plenty of design detailing to do over the winter along with sourcing materials and selecting subcontractors. There is also some great snow in the backcountry calling to us so we are off to check it out.

Filling in the geothermal source field

We had a three ring circus going between Danette, Kevin, and me.


Jenny tries out the compactor.

We arrived at the site early Monday morning and started filling and compacting the remaining soil in the geothermal source field but as the sun warmed the site, the ground thawed and things became very slippery. We came close to burying the 2000 gallon water truck trying to get it closer to the hole. Even the excavator was sliding around on the slope which, I would imagine, is very unnerving if you're sitting at the controls. Danette took it in stride. Kevin seemed to enjoy hot roding the skid steer around in the mud. It rained last night and the forecast is for more through the weekend. This puts things on hold until the site dries a bit.

I have had several people ask how the geothermal system works. Here are a couple links to sites that have more information on how it works.

http://www.bluesky-energy.com/ This is a Denver area company that installs systems (not the one we are using)

http://www.waterfurnace.com/ This is one of the geothermal equipment suppliers

Geothermal Source Field

Laying out pipe in the Geothermal source field


Vibrating screen used to create fill to bed the pipe


Pipes bedded and soil compacted as weather hits


Lake formed by the rain being pumped out


Ken Jenkins wife, Danette Jenkins mother of three and excavator operator for the family business created this hole and Gordon Heinrich and Dave Hines of Braxis Engineering along with my labor, laid out the tubing for the Geothermal source field. Assembly took about four hours but filling in the hole became a bit of a problem as we had a difficult time finding a vibrating screen to sift the soil for bedding the tubing. Stones could damage the pipe and hard soil clumps create air pockets around the pipe which reduces thermal connection with the soil. Once the equipment was located it took about one and a half days to sift enough soil to bed the tubing. We scrambled to get the first eighteen inches of fill in place and compacted as the snow and rain began. The following day I returned with a rented pump to empty the lake formed by the 1.5 inches of rain that fell.