Seed Eco-Home 4 Data Collection

House Wrap

• 3 hr for 120 feet. 1200 sf. One roll plus small bit. Hooked on top. Used tiedown strap

Taping

• Complicated by: blocking corrections, House wrap in the way; ambiguity in which is nailed, some 1" strip missing; nails sticking inside, screws sticking outside; redo of top band, which was not connected to roof joists, and roof joists not connected by wide band at top of 2nd floor. Ties at garage, house wrap stuck between modules.
  • Future exterior nail and tape: bottom OSB to sill plate. Mid band- wide joists to first floor blocking to 2nd floor blocking. Top floor lip - to roof joists. Top band - to roof joists, to roof box. Corners - short side flange to front and back. Rework this.

Nailing Off

• Garage straps - 10D nails take 15 sec each with Ridgid palm nailer and constant nail feed. Nail feed is important. Some places it won't go in, hammered in. Much less force than a good hammer. If 60 nails per strap, expect 30 minutes. 6D nails would likely half the time, so do it at the framing stage. Here used longer nails for going thru OSB.
• Jan 14, 15, 16, 17 - 2 half days and 2 ful days taping, figuring out scaffold, finishing hurricane ties in garage, redoing 2 windows (1 day). For taping rate - see video tape. Taping - 2 inefficient days of going around obstacles, and setting up scaffolds. Estimated production rate for taping seams - 8' per minute.
• Jan 13 - 2 hr to do 2nd floor sill, top plate, joints between walls, and corners. Plus 42 blocking corrections nailed. See steps [1]
• Jan 12 - 4 hr - tested 2-story scaffolding. Corrected 42 errors in blocking on 2nd floor, moving to first floor. Corrected but not nailed.

Garage Front Wall and Railing Framing

• Took 2.5 hours to do the front top wall, then another 2 hr to finish nailing board, hurricane ties, top plate. All together promise remains of 1.5 hr total instead of 4.5 hrs. 1" inaccuracy + spacers + bend of header + alignment added all the time.
• Railing - 1 hour per post. 3 hours total up to cutting + installing railing top plate and fitting/screwing down 3 posts under, with EPDM layer underneath. Included T1-11 on the sides.
• Railing - 2.25 hr for all the rails. If had 20' pieces would half this time. Included insect closure at bottom.
• Railing - 3.75 hr for all the sheathing + its blocking. Included cutouts around garage door, using vertical sheeting. For railing outside it's horizontal (used 10' sheets). For inner railing - vertical T1-11.

Garage Front Wall

• Garage header bent inwards towards garage about 1". Made the top modules curve accordingly at top. Best solution - attach modules to top of header, then use top plate + string line to align everything. If difficult to align to header - use blocking to suck in the modules even [2]. Once aligned, nail off the blocking to garage. Used spacer where deck was 1" from the front garage walls. Ideally good quality control means all goes into place without 1" distance discrepancies. Right garage wall was 1"-1.5" too long - hence the gap at the right side of front top garage wall.
• Used a nailing board for front top garage hurricane ties - added a 3" board from the underside, screwed through deck (watch dangerous screws) and nailed off from the edge side from inside the garage. This nailing board should be installed prior to front top garage wall (at the joist phase) as one side of nailing board is inaccessible due to blocking on garage wall modules. Hurricane ties are a known material but this would likely need to be engineered.

Logistics Notes

• Experiment - can a house be finished with [5] 40' trailer loads directly from the store?
• Most effort of house build is materials movement if you stop and think about it. Typical: store to site. Site to storage. Storage to module build. Module storage. Module transport. Module storage on site. Module installation. How can we short circuit from store to module installation in 1 step instead of 5 steps?
• Ex. 1/8/23 - half to whole day to load up trailer and deliver all materials at height in house. Used trailer to stand on. 2 bath tubs, railing, garage finish at top. Loading up lumber, posts, sheet, etc. Included cleaning site, sweeping out rain water, folding up and drying fallen housewrap, removing excess materials from built time, sweeping, cleaning tubs that got dirty in transport, organizing the foam insulation, haying for mud, moving trailer in. Still need to mow down more area at FeF for better trailer movement. Took from 2 PM to 10:40 PM to load trailer from FeF (16 sheets, all lumber railing, front garage modules, 2 shower tubs [3]).

Budgeting

• $85k was budgeted for labor. $40k was spent due to severe understaffing, major omission being professional builders. Early termination by 2 days due to harsh conditions.

Framing

• 48 minutes to do front top garage module (for triple strap tiedown). Using already cut members. Most of the lumber was available, did not need to cut any.
• 1 hr 7 minutes to do 3 modules, front garage top, simple. Blocking and bottom/top was already cut, I had to cut verticals. Adding cutting would add 5 minutes to time per module? See pictures. Simple modules have 9 members.
• 50 minutes demo for one full simple 9' module build, including detailed quality control with unruly wood - during workshop.

Tasks

• Concrete summary - 27 prep, 15 pour prep (8 am till 1 with 3) + 6 hr pour (3 people 2 hrs until scree) + 5 hr floating in extremely slow drying time. Total concrete time = 53 hr. This was 1104 sf compared to 500 sf last time at 42 hours, so scaling is favorable: 1.7 times faster than the 500 sf.
• Wed Dec 7 - 14 hrs? Casey and Aidan on Bobcats from noon to 6, Aidan till 8 PM. I set up the site for 3 hours, talked to neighbors, packed up portopotty.
• Tue Dec 6 - 19.5 hr till finish of pour with 3 people from 8 to 2:30 PM. Got gravel level, did poly, rebar, chairs, mudsill anchors recessed - then I until 8 PM floating and power trowel. Aidan was there outside of 2 hours cleaning up. Packing up trailer to travel to Savannah until 9 PM. Total work - 5 hrs power trowel, and 3 other (Aidan) + 2 hr packing. Total of 27.5 hr total concrete-related.
• Mon Dec 5, 2022 - 12 hrs to plumbing, gravel spread. Insulation on forms. + 3 for Brent on plumbing etc.
• Sun Dec 4, 2022 -12 hrs to forms largely done, minus entry to garage

• Friday Dec 2, 2022 - Laser level and evening high spots - about 25 minutes? Meter reading - . All together today - 5 hrs including selecting final location, calculating diagonals, figuring out foundation detail, starting micro excavator work. Bulk of time - deciding on proper location of house.
• Thu Dec 1 -Smoothing - 1044.4 - 1045.5 - 1.1 hrs.
• Dig time - 1042.1-1044.4 - 2.3 hrs. Finishing of bulk digging.
• Dig time - 4:10 on Sunday. Bulk of the diggin. Key is to get into mindless flow, which is possible with ample soil, and is definitely easier if the soil is not rock hard like clay. 1038.0-1042.1
• Scrape time for grass for 70x50 area - 2 hrs. Start hour meter = 1036.0