Part 12: You can take that stick and shove it up your...
So, you're back. That means I am not just sitting here telling my story to myself- the reason so many people think I am crazy.
To catch up, here's Part 11: Son of a bitch! Radiant floor heating and argon filled super windows..
To read from the start of all this, here's Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."
Below is Part 12, as promised, here is the technical stuff.
So, we had a problem, we had already entered into a contract with the pole barn guy. We had signed to have him build a 40x60 structure on our build site, a contract which we tried to get out of when we found that they had changed the energy credits for the county we lived in. He would not let us out of it, we know this because he started carbon copy all he communications to a law firm. True, it was a law firm with a lot of polyester in it, but we didn't have the time, the money, or the resources to fight it.
Well crap, again.
Let me be clear, I don't blame the builder for his decision, it was business decision he made. It was something that he had already planned to do. He'd allocated the resources to it, he'd pulled the contractors together, and so on. It was, however, super awkward and annoying. We had put the money down and he was being unreasonable not facilitating 2 agitated people just trying to build their dream home. A problem I am sure every contractor has.
At this point, we were no longer friends. He was a douche and we were innocent of all wrong doing, including that time I called him a moron and hung up on him. We were more than slightly butt-hurt by what the county had decided to do to us, but we couldn't keep on going living the borderline life, so we knuckled up and started to move forward... again.
Truth is, we were just angry because it seemed like everyone wanted to keep us from having our cake and eating it too. After the whole thing was done, I was going to be happy with that shop, I just didn't know it, and couldn't see what it was because it wasn't part of our plan to start with.
The contractor took a loss on us. In the end, he let us reduce the size and cost of the structure to 26x26. Which would cost about a 3rd of the cost and take up about a quarter of the space. And also, we would have to put it somewhere else, there was no room on the build site. When you build on a mountain you have to build in tiers and make sure that everything sits on "virgin dirt" as they call it.
As it turns out, despite the major inconvenience this did save us some money, and it was paid for outright, there was no financing for it. It became an instant improvement upon the land. We had no choice, if we wanted out of the contract, we were going to have to go to court over it and like I have said, we did not have the time or energy to do that.
Now, here's some more really good advice for anyone who wants to build a house on a mountain. That advice is this: YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY CAREFULL WHERE YOU BUILD.
There are so many factors that make it way harder to do, unless of course you're one of those jack-wads with unlimited funds and no morals. Most people will know who I am speaking of.
Here is the first bit of advice about building on a mountain. Like the financing, it will take about 2.5- 3 times more space than you think it will. And if you live in a place where sewage systems must be overelaborate and expensive, plan on about 6 times more space- half of which can be on a downhill slope, but no more that 20 degrees, also it must be clear of trees and stumps etc. Seriously, my septic field is 7500 square feet. That is a whole other chapter of this odyssey, but it helps me illustrate how foresight can help with planning.
Don't just pace it out, measure and measure it some more. Then, just for shits and giggles, measure it several more times. This is one of those strange things that happens on a mountain, the space will be different each time you measure.
I mentioned that it's good to consider tiers when building on a mountain, well here's why, and also another great piece of advice. You should make sure the building is set back as much as you can from the down hill slope- this keeps your home from becoming a mud-toboggan in the spring when the snow melts. This was a problem we would have had at the other site we'd picked to build on, we were lucky we liked the view more at our current site, because the other site has sluffed quite a bit. Where we built our house, it's on a granite shelf. This has it's own set of challenges and expenses, we'll get to that.
Any way, at this point, moving forward, I will be talking about two separate builds, because the pole barn became my shop. It is a completely different building about 200 feet up the hill from the house. On a different tier if you will. Needless to say when I want to go up there to work, I get my steps in. All uphill.
It was completed long before the house, nonetheless, it was something we hadn't planned for. It was started in early summer and finished in the fall, just after the house was started. It was done and had the door on before the snow fell. Which was good, because the moose, (pictured above) started to shit regularly inside it. With out a door, I was pretty sure she was just going to move in for the winter or use it as a bathroom forever more. Needless to say, she was not the only animal that moved it. We had a couple of stoats, some mice, a few deer sheltered there for a couple of storms, and a couple of rubber boas. Oh, yeah, and an owl and a shit ton of wasps up in the rafters.
This all stopped when we put the door on, but that didn't happen until October. We have a few months to go, we also have a number of stories to tell, and some good advice to get through.
Stay tuned.
Up next, Part 13: This one time, I moved a whole building, my back hurts.
Cheers!
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