another day, another change.

Farm Office Renovation

       Well I need to change what I call the now farm office upgrades from addition to house. Farm office sounds better and this is to root the original structure to the farm,I can  grandfather it in as agricultural and outside legal mumbo jumbo designed to mess with average Joe. Farmers were here before politicians and a lot of politicians are farmers. This is an upgrade to the farm’s value and eventually will help all in the family. This is a structure that isn’t going anywhere and will be here for a while. I would hope a 100 years before having to be replaced. I am trying to make it maintenance free but in reality when using logs, you have to seal the logs regularly against our weather we experience in Ohio, and there is yet a building to be built that is 100 percent maintenance free. Even stone masonry is subject to degradation due to acid rain. Go to a cemetery and look at the stones in the old section and see that nothing is perfect in nature. The old stones of just a couple of hundred years ago are barely readable. Mom’s house being a log cabin built sometime in the early 1800’s still had to have renovations and is just a shell inside of another house my grandpa built in the 1950’s. The farm office as I now call it was built in the 1950’s I assume also. And originally had an outhouse and required a major renovation by my brother that resulted in a new sewage system and a trailer being added to the original house. This occurred somewhere in the 80’s or 90’ as far back as I can remember.

 

       As I do the floor and drainage and begin to look at the heating system , I again have to look at radiant floor heat as opposed to using ventilation type heating system using forced air.  A floor heating system may in effect drive moisture out of a wet sub floor from intrusion by water if that were to occur. I had to think about how I was going to accomplish this in a maintenance reduced situation.

     But first I need to explain what my current floor plan will consist of . How I plan on designing a passive floor heat system without investing hundreds or thousands of dollars I don’t have to blow. Some problems like how you want to do something, but don’t really have the money, can be solved simply by working off the knowledge of others and sticking to your guns on a project. There are always workarounds in everything you take on in life. lousy marriage , divorce lawyers out there will tell you that is not a problem, too much money for a lawyer, wife or husband moves out on their own and then validates an income where he is now in poverty condition therefore eligible for legal aid, I am sure there is always a work around to everything.  I was thinking yesterday that if you look down from space and look at the Great Wall of China and start to imagine that this is the greatest earth moving and building project by man still today. And it was accomplished by man alone, well a bunch of them, ok it was thousands of them and mostly slaves but still there wasn’t one gas engine that even spent a dollars’ worth of fuel in the effort of building the wall. Unemployment was 0, and people were literally dying to work there, and materials hardly cost a thing, in real money today.  Yet is still one of the most wonderful marvels of man, all it took was work. I am just doing some farm upgrades, should be easy enough. 

 

    A friend of mine gave me about 500-600 ft. of ¾ inch plastic pipe , and I thin k it is rated to 200 degrees and I am thinking about using it in the concrete layer below the finished layer of cordwood floor . Looking for a total floor thickness of 3 inches, so this means the pipe and its outside diameter will rise 7/8ths of an inch high from the grade of the unfinished floor. A total of 2 inches of concrete will be placed in subfloor and then covering the pipe by about an inch and an eighth of concrete (1.125 in.) and this is over a moisture barrier separating the unfinished floor from the above concrete.  Below that is the drainage system which will still have floor outlets or drains that will make sure that if there is ever a floor water problem at least it will still drain to an extent and prevent major damage to contents of house. 

       The back of the reinforced concrete block walls will also have a perimeter drainage system that will prevent water from ever getting to the subfloor and will also have cleanouts to make sure the drainage system is operating as it should be. Again this is preventative maintenance if you care about making sure everything is operational. One could visually check the pond feature in the front as you walk in to see if drainage is working properly including the runoff from the roofs which will be temporarily held in a water feature in front of house till level requires either pumping it to another feature or long term storage. This in turn will make more of the water I need for waterfalls and accessories available from natural sources and requires no pumping to surface. Pumps for recirculating water features will be run by solar, and will have an overflow if water exceeds overall system capacity. 

     Anyhow as I build the house I need to build a thing called redundancy into the system to back up other systems. This, much like the primary system of floor drains and underfloor drainage system will also serve as a back up to underfloor heating system should the floor ever develop a leak. I plan on testing it with air prior to covering with concrete to pressure of 100 pounds per square inch and must last for 10 minutes without substantial loss of pressure to system of more than ten pounds per sq. in.. This assures me that the system is airtight and sealed properly. I will check every aspect and try to design in safeguards as I go along. Time spent thinking this out completely will be of importance to the longevity of any building system.

     Overall it is going to be a story of patience to get it right, and knowledge that one day I may enjoy the feeling of being in a farm office, and I truly could find no reason to be elsewhere, to be able to sit and work in the comfort of a house designed by myself.  I have no other major projects going on. still have real issues with war , gun control and a host of other topics but no one seems to need my help , so I will just help myself.