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Tuesday, 23 October 2007
After the long winter of planning, it was time to set a date to
start building. Much depended on the weather (concrete is best
poured when it is not too hot, not too cold), as well as Don Roscoe's
schedule. He had been busy on a home outside of Halifax over the
winter, and had another solar home to start before helping us with
ours. We decided to aim for the end of June to pour the foundation.
We had the opportunity to see the house near Halifax before it
had been drywalled, and so could see the `innards of the beast’.
It seemed, thankfully, straightforward. We noted some of these
owners' material choices, which we would either emulate or avoid!
We also visited a solar home designed by Don, but built by the
homeowner in Pictou County NS. This homeowner told us how he had
deviated from some of Don’s plans, and why. This was very helpful,
and opened up our thinking a bit. Again, it was nice to `fee’'
what it was like in a solar home, not just look at the floorplan.
During April and May, we were still waiting see the final houseplans
and blueprints from Don. In the meantime, we took advantage of
the early spring and dug up the yard for a vegetable garden. We
figured that, since we would be there much of the summer, we may
as well grow something too. Much wiser than last year, we decided
to wait a while before planting any more trees, since we still
expected much digging and mess around the building site.
We also called NB Power to arrange for electricity at the site.
This turned out to be a bit of a problem. In our area, the poles
on one side of the road belong to NB Power and the ones on the
other side belong to Aliant. Our lot is on the Aliant side. So,
everything that required decision-making also had to go through
Aliant. This slowed things down quite a bit.
Our building site is also located too far from the road to simply
string a wire - we would have to look at putting in another pole.
We spent some time thinking about this, and looked over at our
neighbour's house. He had built recently, and had some nice new
poles along his driveway. We spoke with him, made arrangements
with NB Power, and eventually we had power extending not from the
roadside, but from his set of poles. I hope that we will be as
good neighbours to him as he has been to us!
This was also the time to look at the excavations that had been
done before the winter, to examine just how level things were,
and to see if the ditching had been adequate to handle the rain
and snow. We found that some more ditching was needed, and the
shale pad for the house required evening out. This work would be
done when the gravel arrived, to put under the foundation.
Finally, the houseplans arrived in the middle of June. Don had
his local draftsperson make up the blueprints, and had his favourite
engineer to sign off on the plans. An engineer was required because
our plans deviate from the provincial Building Code. We brought
the plans to our local building inspector, and spent some time
explaining to him the whole design, confirming that the house was
designed for our Sackville weather and snow load, and detailing
the ways that we knew we were deviating from the Building Code
(for example, we would use rough-cut lumber, and the slab foundation
with no basement was quite unusual).
After much consideration, the verdict was that we would have to
have a New Brunswick engineer sign off on the plans too. This was
not too much of a surprise (which doesn't mean that we think that
NB engineers know more than NS engineers when it comes to designing
structures for varying locations - we just knew that there would
be jurisdictional `red tape' stuck to our project!). So, we found
a NB engineer who examined and signed the plans - for a fee, of
course.
We were ready to build! The first thing to do would be to prepare
to pour the foundation. This would turn out to be a longer, more
complicated process than we had originally expected.
Next Time: Pouring the Foundation for our Solar Home
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