Dometastic

We have been busy bees! I kinda want to be the flying panda.... not sure which one Mr. Dometastic is. Mr. Dometastic and I are taking as much time off from work and other things as we can to get this stem wall ready to pour ASAP. In a week and a half we finished the rebar for the stem wall, water proof coated the exterior of the footer and installed the curtain drain! Oh and still worked. What I haven't had much time for is writing this blog BUT I did take lots of photos and video. The rebar for the stem wall was so much faster and easier than the footer! So far the form system that we chose to go with is working awesome. It seems similar to ICF to me but without the styrofoam block part and just the plastic centers. We looked into using curved ICF blocks but could only find them in 6" thickness not 8". This forming system comes in several thickness (including the 8" we needed) and is called  Spider Tie . There are many YouTube videos showing how they can be...

How did we get those curves? I mentioned in a previous post that we had a bit of a struggle with the rebar that arrived. We expected bent and curved rebar straight from the metal shop. They did send us some that were curved but most of what they sent was straight. Read about our issues HERE if you missed the first post. This post is about how to make and use our DIY bender. What it lacks in glamour it makes up for in function. We are thankfully done with the #5 rebar at this point. That stuff was really hard to pull through. The #4 we are using now is so much easier but I don't have video of it. It held up to bending the #5 but you need two people to get it through and it needs to be attached securely to the ground. In our first attempts we would pull on the rebar and the whole thing would just move.  HERE is a short video of us pulling a #5 rebar through it. We found that we needed to flip the rebar around to curve the 5 foot section that doesn't get run through t...

The past week has been a blur. First we were rushing to get everything ready for inspection and to line up everything we needed to pour concrete on Friday. After the pour we were rushing to get the forms off and set up the starters for our stem wall while the concrete was still green. We needed to be able to hammer nails into the concrete (while still relatively still soft) to attach the starter brackets for our stem wall. We are very sore and tired but all that is done! Now there is the pressure to complete the stem wall and get everything back filled before cold weather. Last week we crossed our fingers that hurricane Dorian would stay well off shore and put in all the vertical rebar for the footer. It would have been horrible if the hurricane came our way. We had previous issues with heavy rains washing silt into our trench. With all the rebar in place the digging out means tiny shovels. Luck was on our side and the hurricane completely missed us. We did get one more 12 min s...

It was a busy week after the footer rebar arrived. We finished all the horizontal rebar for the footer in just 3 days! If you look close you can see how crazy the rebar is inside the forms. It took us 3 very long work days over the Labor Day weekend. We rushed to set ourselves up to pour the footer this week before hurricane Dorian makes its way up the east coast. We will be getting just rain from the storm but no one is sure how much rain. Now that the rebar is in the forms there is no way to dig out silt if more washes in. Well.... there is a way but I don't even want to think about it.... The impending hurricane has spurred us into furious action! We got straight to work trying to piece together the giant puzzle of rebar. I think we deserve a giant pat on the back for figuring it out. It was confusing because many pieces were one off parts somewhere in the pile of rebar. They were originally all labeled but during shipping and unloading many of the tags we...

For many frustrating weeks we were firmly stuck while the engineer and the rebar shop went back and forth with shop drawings. Now we have cleared the hurdle and are set to go back to real work! Since we had finished the footer forms we spent our time doing odd jobs on the land and unfortunatly fixing storm damage. More on that but we can all cheer now because we finally have REBAR! The shop drawings are done and the rebar for the footer has arrived. Unfortunately they forgot part of our order so we have to pick it up this afternoon to start tomorrow as planned. At least it is available to pick up and it won't cause more delays. The next week or two will be busy ones as we get the rebar all set in our footer forms, pour and then start our stem walls. It took 7 weeks of revisions and fulfilling the order to get our footer rebar. During this time mother nature was not nice to us. We had several severe flash flooding storms that partially washed out our footer forms. Wi...

We are done with the footer forms with the exception of adding all the rebar. There is a lot of rebar so we still have our work cut out for us but at least all the curved and overlapping form work is complete. Now we wait.... and wait.... oh and wait some more while the engineers go back and forth with the rebar supplier over the shop drawings. We are delayed ordering our rebar by about 4 weeks and counting. Ordering rebar has turned into a series revisions. Shop drawings continue to be a way bigger deal than we anticipated. They had to be revised according to the engineers directions and ultimately need to be approved by the engineers. When I look at how everything has gone so far I can definitely point to the engineering part of this process as the biggest PITA...so far. Every time the engineers need to be consulted it means huge delays. I don't think it is our engineers specifically. I think it is the nature of building a house that needs specific engineering. Our case is ...

Money, Money, Money! Unfortunately everything always comes down to money. Financing is one of the hot topics when it comes to building an unconventional home. If you look around online there are many people interested in dome houses but one of the common threads is financing. Where do I get it? Can I get it? Is it different than getting financing to build a conventional home? The short answer is.... it depends. Not a very helpful and kinda disheartening answer. There are many different ways to approach it and each person may only have one way that will work for them. I wrote a detailed post about it right after we managed to finally find a bank to work with us. Read about it HERE. We had given up and something I read online made me research again. That's when I found our solution. It has been almost a year since I wrote the other post about financing. We didn't get as much as we would have liked because it is a home equity loan against the land we own not based on how much...