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 ...