Dometastic

The big news   - the trenches are done!  We rented another mini excavator and spent a week digging and installing the last 100 ft of the power/data trench and our 80 ft trench for the well. Both are inspected and filled in. We had a flurry of activity these last few weeks despite very rainy muddy conditions. Mr. Dometastic used big boy sand box toys while I was stuck with the more humble equipment and a sore back.   The more digging, the more water we found. This made my humble equipment even harder to use. This has been a really wet year so we were wading in mud. The kind of mud that makes you lose your boots. The power trench required bailing multiple times. Several inches of water repeatedly collected in this low spot near the pole. I would bail it out and it would refill. Thanks to our hay bales in the end of the trench from last year we were easily able to find the end where we needed to connect. Conduit sweeps are on the pole and bonded. We ...

The well is finally going in! We feel like this is a huge milestone because it is one of the big requirements to starting the house. It took us this long to start the process because several things had to be done before the well company could start.  The plot/site plan needed to show where the proposed location would be The barn needed to be enclosed and ready with its concrete floor for the water tank We needed to have the house staked so they could make sure they were the correct distance from the foundation walls of both the house and barn We were ready with the plot plan over a year ago but the other two criteria just got checked off the list. We tried our hand at concrete and did the cement slab in the barn ourselves. We decided not to hire a contractor because of our experience with the company that we hired for the barn foundation. Initially they were going to do the slab as well but they were so horrible we decided to stop before it got worse. Read about our...

I have been lax updating the blog because it has been a busy summer of building, working and trying to do fun summer stuff. There isn't too much to report on dome progress except WE HAVE A BUILDING PERMIT! Whew! So happy to not have to worry about any more Dome Haters!  Read this post if you missed our problem with them.  The weather this past spring and summer was a little rough for getting things done. Spring was super wet and cold causing delays. Summer was super hot and stormy causing even more delays. We are getting close to being done with the barn. Rough framing inspection is done and we have a roof and we have started the siding. Next we pour the concrete floor of the tack room so we can install the doors and finish the siding. One topic I haven't mentioned yet is financing. We have been in the trenches of securing some form of financing for awhile now. Building an unconventional home means you may have issues with getting a construction loan and/or home ins...

We are very clearly a bit challenged in the math department and that has slowed down our barn framing a bit. Who remembers this movie? We had to watch it in school when I was a kid! It has been quite a number of years since either of us has done geometry and it shows. We had to remake one element 4 times and we still didn't get the geometry 100% right. It isn't perfect but hopefully it will be good enough to pass inspection. These triangles go on top of all the short walls both inside and outside. The ones on interior walls are slightly different than the ones on outside walls. They set the roof slope, secure our center beam and are attachment points for our rafters. Until this point the build was all pretty simple. Straight walls with studs every 16 inches. For these we needed to get them the right height to be still spaced every 16 inches and maintain a roof pitch. In the end it mostly worked out but there was a bit more trial and error than we had hoped for. Each...

Framing the barn continues. We try to do at least 2 hours of work on it a day unless the weather is bad. We have answered all the questions from zoning and the building department so our dome permit process is back on track and it is time to pay the fees. On the list of requirements we had to fill out a Res-Check for the building department. It is a very weird document to fill out if you are building a dome! It is so weird that I am not even sure it is relevant but I filled it out anyway. The hardest part to answer was related to the exterior. They want to know the surface area of all exterior walls and ceilings including what direction each faces. Ummmm......where is it wall and where is it ceiling? SO I just lumped it all together under one wall with no direction selected. This did not end my frustration. Calculating the surface area of the dome really threw my math challenged brain for a loop. I eventually kinda estimated in the end. Actually, if I am being honest, I really esti...

It has been 8 weeks and counting since we submitted all the paperwork to the town for the dome building permit. It turns out that they have supposedly been emailing me with questions from both building and zoning for about a month. Mr. Dometastic accidentally found this out when he called the building department to ask a barn related question. I didn't get any of the emails and they didn't try to contact me any other way that I am aware of. And NO they are not in my Junk/Spam folder. The weird part is I do get some emails from them just not any of they ones that are holding up the process! I got one from zoning about 2 weeks ago letting me know they were going to visit the site. If we hadn't called with a question about the barn I wonder how long would it have been before they called me?! Eversource has FINALLY put our pole in! The one we paid for last October. It only took them 7 months and more phone calls than I want to count to find out what needed to happen for th...

Every approval has a catch. We received dome plan approval from the health department ... sort of. The plan was approved but we have a list of requirements to fulfill before getting a septic permit. It seems that when we had our site plan created and all the soil tests done things did not accurately get recorded on the plan. We did have 3 revisions to the layout so we are guessing that at some point the picture and the data stopped matching. Unfortunately this involves having the surveyor and engineer back out again. The good thing is we do not have to complete the list right away to have our building plans go to the next stage of review with zoning. The weather is finally dry and nice out. The last few weeks have been tiring and all about dirt and rocks as we prep the barn foundation. When we excavated the barn foundation we dug up a huge boulder. It is big enough that we couldn't pick it up even with the big rental excavator. When we got rid of the main dirt pile we found ...

We dodged a bullet this spring. We had our first encounter with a Dome Hater. It came out of the blue and was not connected to us directly. It falls under the crazy neighbor category. We have all heard stories of crazy neighbors even if we haven't directly experienced one. Directly next to our property is another lot for sale. We were surprised and caught off guard when we started getting text messages from the owner letting us know that his potential buyer had plans to stop us from building a dome. Clearly a HATER but at least our current neighbor gave us the heads up! We bought a 8.5 acre lot and changed the house site to be 650 ft back from the road on top of a hill. The house itself is only 18 ft high and will be painted an earth tone with the plans to grow vines over it. The house site on the lot next to us is 75 ft from the road and in a low hollow area. The house would be about 500 feet from us and they would need to look through 3 tree lines. I would be surprised...