Dometastic

I get to say "I told you so!" It is very bitter sweet. First the good news : The power trench is inspected, back filled and ready to continue in the spring after the power company puts our pole in. The pole has been delivered and is just waiting for them to come. Our trench has 4 hay bales in the end of it so we can easily just continue digging to the pole. The concrete contractor came and did the barn foundation. Now we have a place to run power and water to in prep for building the dome. Backfilling the trench. The trench is all smoothed out. Footings are poured Finished foundation ready to do water lines, install automatic waterer and backfill. Now the comedy of errors, also known as, the bad news:  Well... this is more of a general rant of how incompetent people are! ACT 1: THE CEMENT TRUCK The concrete guys built the footing forms and poured the footings BEFORE we filled in the power trench. They were well aware of what the LONG swath of distur...

I hope this is the final for our plans! Barring any issues, the plans are good to go. New floor plan and new elevation view from the final documents.  I edited the standard construction documents myself to reflect the removal of a basement/garage under the dome. I am not capable of creating the plans from scratch but I am capable of editing them thanks to my past work experience in an industrial design firm. While I have never worked on architectural documents they are not substantially different than editing structural design documents. The only difference is the subject. Might as well save some money where we can since everything we do seems to run over budget or we end up with a surprise cost! OUR EDITS: Delete basement/garage Change the area previously for the stairs to a bigger mudroom/laundry (and now utilities) Edit walls to reflect a new way into mudroom from the greatroom front door Edit all the electrical and mechanical pages to add utilities that were pre...

It officially happened. We broke ground this past weekend! Finally starting the barn after many delays. This is not directly dome related but a needed step prior to starting the dome. One of the requirements of building the dome is to have on site water and power. It made sense to us to put in the barn with the water and power first. We will just move the water tank etc. to the house once it is built. Delays are inevitable but still frustrating. Some delays were due to our miss guided idea that we should just wait until everything was ready and submit permits all at once. Some delays are due to the lengthy and complicated engineering phase. Some continue to be related to not fully understanding the permit process. Some were related to contacts going on one or two week vacations. The one big take away from our experience so far: Submit your paperwork several months BEFORE you want to start that part of the project. I continued to make the mistake of starting something one month ...

With much relief I can finally write it! We have the first draft of the engineering! It took two engineering firms collaborating, way more cash than we budgeted for and more time than I care to calculate. So many months went by to get past this hurdle that we have to wait until spring to begin construction of the dome. All the stories of delays when building your own house are very true. I sent the first draft to the building department as well as South Industries to see if either needed any clarification. Both have reported back that the plans look good. We are now waiting for South Industries to give us a formal quote that spells out exactly what is and isn't part of their process so we can determine our next steps. They have assured me that it will be "all down hill from here". I truly hope they are correct! We are clear about their role in constructing the dome superstructure but are a little fuzzy about what they can and can't do in regards to the foundation....

It's been quite a while since I have had much to write about. This was us for the past few weeks. After the driveway was roughed in we were spinning in circles for permits. We submitted all the permit paperwork to the town for our barn but didn't find out for a few weeks that we also needed to get a permit from the health department. So back to the start we went to file for a health department permit. The health department took a few weeks to process the permit. SO...back to the beginning again allowing zoning and the building department to issue permits. It would have been nice to know that I needed the health department to sign off BEFORE the other departments! I guess that is why people hire general contractors. It is hard to navigate the bureaucracy! I never would have thought the health department would need to review the barn plans since it doesn't connect to a septic or need any drains etc. It is basically a glorified shed. It will have water and power but I...

Our newest piece of construction equipment has arrived! A 2013 Bobcat T590 track loader. This little powerhouse will allow us to do the bulk of our site work while doubling as a tractor for the farm. It has high flow hydraulics so we can get all the same attachments available for a tractor. They make everything from brush hogs to snow blowers for them. For now we just have the forks and bucket. We had some trouble getting financing for it (they usually only finance to businesses not "regular" people) but it all worked out in the end. We just have to carry insurance on it as if it were a new car. Some people have cool cars....we have construction equipment. Unlike our excavator, this is a modern machine with low hours so we hope we won't need to repair it during the build. Mr. Dometastic has put it straight to work spreading deliveries of base gravel that replace all that top soil we removed. HERE is a link to the Dometastic facebook page to see a video clip of him...

So instead of getting rid of machinery, it is multiplying like bunnies. We pulled our zoning and barn permits! Gearing up for some actual work we need direct access to our property that big trucks can drive on. We bit the bullet and rented the modern version of our excavator and are in the process of buying a tracked skid steer. This all happened in a week! Mr. Dometastic has just claimed his "King of the Sandbox" title. He is no longer sad. Now he has new toys to play with. This excavator has a grapple bucket, air conditioning and even a back up camera! He had it for 4 hours and all the huge stumps were out! It just tore through them! He is giddy with his sandbox experience. These stumps are HUGE. I should have taken the photos with the excavator as size reference in the photos. Watch a little video clip HERE on my Dometastic Facebook page to see Mr. Dometastic pick up the huge stumps. Next to the 30+ ton excavator they still look big! In just a ...

Unfortunately our excavator purchase seems to have NOT been the best decision. It is fixed and running better than before with new filters and an oil change (not to mention the 3 new hydraulic hoses) but it has turned out to be SLOW and not able to dig out the stumps in the below photo. Mr. Dometastic is sad. He did not have a glorious big boy sand box experience. The latest theory is the hydraulics that give the bucket digging power are leaking when it has to really work and letting the fluid leak around the piston instead of giving it full power. What this means is it operates like a geriatric WWF wrestler. I googled "geriatric wrestler" and found this image of Mae Young an actual wrestler!  The excavator just STOPS when it hits a 4 inch tree root so our stumps are its downfall. It runs and functions like an excavator until the going gets hard and then it just doesn't move. We could live with more hoses going in the future but it is unfortunately not near...

The long awaited arrival has happened. Mr. Dometastic finally gets to fulfill his childhood dreams of sandbox glory. Without any further delay here is a photo of our Case 880B Excavator! Don't buy it? Ok, here is the real picture but I do have an urge to attach 2 volleyballs to the bucket and paint little black circles so it can be just like the steam shovel. Mr. Dometastic isn't impressed with my idea. Be honest with yourself. If you had an old rusty excavator like ours wouldn't you do the same? I can't be the only one! There have been many stumbling blocks along the way but we were able to break ground. Unfortunately it has been a week and we aren't much farther than this photo. We managed to get the track fixed and it looks great. Although, now that it looks so good the other side that used to be the good side looks like it needs help. Its the snowballing effect that happens when you decide to fix or renovate something that is in pretty bad sha...

With the completion of tests pits and the health department signing off on the results we were able to move forward with the surveyor. We now have a site plan to submit to the town! Here is a close up of the map area. Our excavator will hopefully get it's repair done this week and we can then get it shipped to us next week. This is assuming that there aren't any problems when they pull its track. We had a delay in the repair because our friend didn't have time to do the job. He passed it off to someone he knows. So now we have a friend of a friend doing the repair. We were holding off hiring a repair company because of the cost of labor. If we can just hire someone we know it is much cheaper. Typical large equipment repair service charge $100 /hr and they charge you for drive time too. That adds up pretty fast when the machines are big and heavy like our excavator. As we wait for the structural engineers to finish we continue to keep ourselves busy. I finishe...