Let’s do it

By Dustin

With loan commitment from New Era Bank, we’ve begun our latest project at 417 Trevor Ct in Bonne Terre, MO.

I wanted to begin discussing this project by highlighting the footing forms system we’re using. But first some background on conventional footing systems.

Conventionally (at least in our area) footings formed up with two rows of 2×10 lumber outlining the perimiter of the house which are then filled in with concrete. Typically you’ll spend part of one day setting up the footing forms, part of another day pouring the concrete into the forms, and then part of yet another day removing the forms. Next you’ll form up the foundation walls (we’ll talk about this step in another post). After that, you’ll lay perforated pipe around the entire perimeter of the foundation on the ground next to the footing and cover it with gravel and either filter fabric or straw to filter out dirt particles and allow water to flow into the perforated pipe and then out to daylight.

The footing forming system we’re using eliminates some steps and guarantees a higher quality job. It’s called Form-A-Drain and it makes for a better job. A problem with traditional foundation drainage is that on the jobsite it’s very hard to ensure that the pipe remains level all around the foundation. Jobsites are rough places to be and ensuring that the pipe is level down in the trenches is difficult. FAD ensures a perfectly level drainage system all around. Another quality advantage is ensured by the straps that hold the two sides of the footing forms apart. The straps are engineered with a “U” shape that dips down into the footing. You can lay your courses of steel rebar reinforement on these straps and are again ensured perfect placement in the footing. Additionally, the forms install quickly.

Since this is the first time I’ve used this product we started out slow learning the system, but once we got going on the project and learned the ropes we could just fly around installing these…while at the same time ensuring a higher quality product.

Derive

By Dustin

This is our latest house design. It’s currently under construction at 417 Trevor Court in Bonne Terre, MO with completion scheduled for an October time frame.

(click for large size)

As I’ve noted before I’m trying to get away from the typical design seen on a ranch in our area. To that end, when I started designing this layout I kept a couple things in mind:

All else flowed from these ideas. Now, let’s begin a more detailed look at the floorplan.

To start out, I almost always use “room boxes” like this:

As I lay out the room boxes I keep in mind different rules of thumb that I’ve learned are important such as good minimum sizes for a garage, bathroom sizes, bedroom sizes, bedroom locations, and dining room table sizes. Instead of taking the easy route and just laying the rooms out end-to-end I spend some time figuring out how to locate the rooms in a compact manner so that I end up with a more-or-less square layout, in the end my work coalesced into the above.

Now, the software I use for plan design can take my room boxes and generate a floorplan from them. I then do lots of fine-tuning to get things arranged and positioned as I wish. When I finished I ended up with a house of around 1300 square feet. Where I’m building this house currently has a minimum square footage requirement of 1500 so I did some tweaking to up the size and ended up with this:

(click for large size)

Now, let’s focus on a few areas that I fine-tuned to give the home more character.

Notice how on the right side of the house I extended the bedroom, bathroom, and laundry beyond the basic footprint of the house. This wasn’t done for space considerations. Originally the plan had the same rooms constrained to the basic square shape of the foundation. The reason for the bumpout is to add character to the home. Without the bumpout that side of the house from the exterior would just be a large expanse of vinyl siding with little interrupting it. Now it will look something like this:

Some additional nice features of this home include: