Our New House is On Its Way

[Gerowen]

5 hours ago, jnelsoninjax said:

@Gerowen any updates? I've been enjoying watching your progress!

Since you're not the first person to ask me about an update (first on Neowin, but I've had others send me messages and things elsewhere), and I went from a video a day to none for the past couple weeks, I threw together a quick status update video for everybody, :-)

 

 

Edited January 9, 2017 by Gerowen

[Gerowen]

Here's the next video in the series showing progress on the house and the stuff we've been up to lately.  I've got to head to bed and YouTube is still processing the video so if it's not working right now just give it a few minutes and try again.

 

 

[jnelsoninjax]

Keep them coming! I am enjoying watching your progress! How long do you feel until you will be at move in ready state?

[Gerowen]

3 hours ago, jnelsoninjax said:

Keep them coming! I am enjoying watching your progress! How long do you feel until you will be at move in ready state?

Maybe this weekend.  I got some footage today of Asplundh cutting trees to make room for the electric wire because the power company is going to have to set a couple of new poles and string wire to our house.  I added those two bags of cement I bought in the last video to the base of the pole for a total of 480 pounds of cement in a 3 foot hole around the base of that pole, and it's still 2-3 inches below ground level so I'm debating on getting a couple more bags to have the cement slightly raised above ground level in order to shed water away from the wood.  A rep from the power company apparently stopped by after I left for work and spoke to my parents (since they're just about a quarter mile down the road on the same property) to ask about buried utilities, but the only thing we have that's buried is the water line I'm putting in and you can tell where it is because it's still exposed in places (I want to be able to inspect splices when I turn on the water pressure to make sure they're not leaking before I bury them) and the dirt is still fresh, so that shouldn't be any problem.  From what I understand, they should be up there tomorrow to set the poles and run the wire, so maybe by tomorrow evening we'll have electricity in the new house.

 

After that I have to call Clayton Homes (the manufacturer) because they still owe me part of my central heat/air unit, some underpinning, etc., but the AC part has to be pressurized and they have to be able to test it and things, which requires electricity, so they're holding off on those things until we have electricity and I finish doing everything I need to do under the house.

 

I picked up the last of the fittings and things I should need to connect my septic tank to the house this evening as well, so I'm going to try and get that taken care of as soon as possible.  My wife has tomorrow off work so I may stick her with filling in the ditch in places where the 4 wheeler couldn't reach the other day, or task her with digging up and finding the water line that is already coming out of the underground well box so I can just splice into that instead of punching another hole in the side of the concrete.

 

Now that all these inspections are done things are starting to move along again, so hopefully I'll have plenty more footage to string together by the time this weekend is over, :-)

[jnelsoninjax]

@Gerowen,

Have you got the power hooked up yet? When you have time you could put an update, even to say nothing happened!

[Gerowen]

6 hours ago, jnelsoninjax said:

@Gerowen,

Have you got the power hooked up yet? When you have time you could put an update, even to say nothing happened!

I'm actually working on footage right now.  Power should be hooked up Monday.  When the tree trimmers came up and cut trees that would be a danger to the new power pole and line, they made a mess of the driveway since it was the first layer of gravel that had ever been put down.  I got my truck stuck in the mud and when the power company came to look at it they said they would have to wait until Monday because they would have to use a tracked vehicle to get through the mud, and the operator of said vehicle is off work until Monday.  However, I've got a load of gravel scheduled for delivery tomorrow morning and once that's here, I'm going to call the power company back and see if I can get it all done tomorrow evening or Friday.

 

I finished hooking up the septic system hooked up as of this evening.  I've got some footage of it, but not of the finished product.  I still need to test it before we start flushing less attractive substances down the drain, but I'll have more footage of the finished product once we're able to test it for leaks and it's all g2g.

 

I'm going to try and have the footage I have right now edited and uploaded by the morning.

[Gerowen]

Here's a screenshot from one of the video clips.  The tree cutters cut one additional tree for me as a favor (It wasn't a danger to the power company's stuff, but it would have been a danger to the service wire I'm responsible for) since they tore my driveway all to pieces, but since they sort of did it as a favor, I agreed to cut it up and get rid of it.  I was cutting up from the bottom on the main trunk of the tree (the ends were on the ground and the center suspended, leverage) and instead of the two pieces falling way from each other, they pinched the blade of my chainsaw and I had to spend a few minutes with some old railroad spikes and a wood maul to wedge the two pieces apart so I could retrieve my chainsaw.

 

After this I notched the other pieces on top before cutting them from the bottom so they wouldn't pinch my saw blade any more,

 

As you can see here, since the yard has no grass and we've been working in the winter rain, the yard is a soupy mess right now.

[jnelsoninjax]

Sounds like you are finding out just how much work is involved in getting a home! Your videos will definitely show anybody thinking about getting there own land and mobile home, just how much work it can be! 

[Gerowen]

7 hours ago, jnelsoninjax said:

Sounds like you are finding out just how much work is involved in getting a home! Your videos will definitely show anybody thinking about getting there own land and mobile home, just how much work it can be! 

I turned off the deblocking filter to get smoother video in PowerDirector, but because of that it is taking a LOT longer to render videos @ 1080p60.  I left it rendering at about 12:30 last night and it's 8:14 AM now and it says it still has about an hour left.  Apparently hyper threaded dual core processors are not the best tool for rendering high definition video,

[jnelsoninjax]

1 hour ago, Gerowen said:

I turned off the deblocking filter to get smoother video in PowerDirector, but because of that it is taking a LOT longer to render videos @ 1080p60.  I left it rendering at about 12:30 last night and it's 8:14 AM now and it says it still has about an hour left.  Apparently hyper threaded dual core processors are not the best tool for rendering high definition video,

Yeah, apparently Mac's are the best overall system to use for video processing!

[Gerowen]

Part 8

 

[jnelsoninjax]

Making good progress! Soon you might have that fancy stuff they call electricity! I mean you're getting close to having indoor plumbing!

[Elliot B.]

On 19/01/2017 at 2:44 PM, jnelsoninjax said:

Yeah, apparently Mac's are the best overall system to use for video processing!

People are still spouting this 90s BS?

 

PCs and Macs have used use same hardware architecture for years and you simply have more, faster options for PC when it comes to CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, RAM etc.

 

And OS performance/efficiency won't do much when a PC has hardware with more horsepower; not that Mac OS X 10.12 is any faster than Windows 10.

 

Workflow could be a fair argument but that is purely opinion-based.

Edited January 21, 2017 by Elliot B.

[Boo Berry]

On 12/18/2016 at 11:15 PM, Gerowen said:

The hills shelter us from most of the severe weather that comes through the area.  We've had one tornado in the past 30 years and it literally jumped over this holler because it was too narrow for it to touch down,   What's weird is that the wind we do get goes the reverse direction that it does in town.  The wind comes across the ridge line, hits the eastern hillside and basically makes a big loop/vortex, so while the wind at the ridge is going west to east, wind in the holler goes east to west and at a greatly reduced speed.

That doesn't mean a tornado can't hit the area though, because it does and has happened - there's a theory that tornadoes going down mountains/hills might actually grow in strength due to forward momentum. I'd still have a shelter, regardless... even more so with a mobile home. Otherwise you'll be living in a false sense of security and may come to regret it if one day a tornado does hit your home.

[Gerowen]

5 hours ago, jnelsoninjax said:

Making good progress! Soon you might have that fancy stuff they call electricity! I mean you're getting close to having indoor plumbing!

Things could have gone faster, but I work, my wife works, and it hasn't stopped raining enough for things to dry out, so we've just been doing what we could during the periods of time that we're both off work and it's not pouring rain outside.

[Gerowen]

4 hours ago, Boo Berry said:

That doesn't mean a tornado can't hit the area though, because it does and has happened - there's a theory that tornadoes going down mountains/hills might actually grow in strength due to forward momentum. I'd still have a shelter, regardless... even more so with a mobile home. Otherwise you'll be living in a false sense of security and may come to regret it if one day a tornado does hit your home.

I had planned on basically digging straight back into the hillside and building a small shelter to use as a sort of temperature controlled storage area for food and things.  That's going to be an entirely separate project after we get moved in though, because it's going to involve carving out the face of a rock cliff since the topsoil at the base of the hill there is only about 6 inches deep before you run into solid rock.

[The Evil Overlord]

2 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

I had planned on basically digging straight back into the hillside and building a small shelter to use as a sort of temperature controlled storage area for food and things.  That's going to be an entirely separate project after we get moved in though, because it's going to involve carving out the face of a rock cliff since the topsoil at the base of the hill there is only about 6 inches deep before you run into solid rock.

My GOD You're ugly!

 

 

No I meant to say, well done dude, it's good to see it coming along,

what's the potential for expansion by the way?

(sorry, possessed keyboard, I angered the Logitech gods by testing a razer)

 

(edit

 

by expansion I meant specifically for living quarters)

[Gerowen]

1 minute ago, The Evil Overlord said:

My GOD You're ugly!

 

 

No I meant to say, well done dude, it's good to see it coming along,

what's the potential for expansion by the way?

(sorry, possessed keyboard, I angered the Logitech gods by testing a razer)

About the same as any other house I would imagine as long as you know how to seal it properly.  The biggest challenge of adding a room onto a manufactured home, since the roof is designed as one piece with the specific dimensions of the home in mind, is that a lot of people end up building a separate roof for their addition and almost always have problems sealing them against water.  Around here the most common method of adding a room is to just box in the porch they already have and build a new porch, but since usually they just have the joint between the porch and house sealed with tar or caulk, they almost always leak, which isn't a huge issue when it's a porch, but when you start boxing it in and adding insulation, electrical wiring, etc., it can cause mold in the walls, short out electrical outlets, etc.  It's easiest to just extend the existing roof for the house to cover the addition, even if you only extend it enough to cover the joint where the two meet.

 

It's a simple enough process if you know what you're doing, it's just time consuming because it's not just building the structure and stopping water entry, it also means adding a breaker to your breaker box and wiring the room for electricity, branching off your central HVAC system and adding ductwork, etc.

 

That's why we decided to just buy the new double wide.  We own the 14x70 single wide we're in now, and it's in decent shape, but it only has two bedrooms and we need three.  We have a little boy and a little girl who share a room for now.  They're young enough now that it's not an issue right now, but eventually it will be.  I started doing the math and we were quoted $4,000-$5,000 for the septic, another $4,000-$5,000 to move it into position, and another couple grand in materials for me to build a third bedroom and get it all squared away, etc.  Heck I spent $200 in electric wire to go from the service box on our small pole to the house because it's $3.50 a foot, and even then we still would have had to go without power (so no hot water, no electric heat, etc.) for quite a while for the same reason we've had to wait now (no power at the site, so the power company has to wait for dry enough weather to bring a big truck up there and set a new pole, run wire, etc.), and with all said and done, I figured we would have been out $15k-$20k to move the 20 year old 14x70 we have no up there and get it squared away, and that still would have meant me putting in the labor of building a room, so I figured if we were going to spend that much money on something this old, we might as well go ahead and spend some more and get something new with a warranty that already has the third bedroom.  This also allows us to continue living in this one we're in now with all of our utilities until the new one is ready to roll.

[Gerowen]

32 minutes ago, The Evil Overlord said:

My GOD You're ugly!

 

 

No I meant to say, well done dude, it's good to see it coming along,

what's the potential for expansion by the way?

(sorry, possessed keyboard, I angered the Logitech gods by testing a razer)

Random side story.  Our old house that burned down when I was a kid (arson, gunfights, etc., long story) actually started out as one of those little 20 foot silver camper trailer kind of things that you see in the old 50s home movies.  Mom and dad lived in it together when they first got married, and they basically built the house around the camper trailer while they were in it.  What we ended up with was a house that was something like 2,000 sq. feet with a large porch all down one side, and the camper trailer became the kitchen and bathroom.  I however, had no clue about this for the longest time because from the perspective of inside the house you couldn't tell, and from outside the house they had put the same siding up all around so that they basically boxed in the camper.  The kitchen window was actually one of the windows built into the camper and they had just built the wall right up against the outside of the camper, put shutters and a window frame and things in place so you couldn't tell.  I only found out because I crawled up into the loft one day to get something and there was an opening where you could look down and see the top of this little silver camper trailer neatly nestled in between a couple of walls, and I thought that was the weirdest thing in the world, lol.

[Gerowen]

Just uploaded part 9.  I managed to keep this one just under 20 minutes,

 

 

[Gerowen]

Electricity is on the way. Should have it end of day.

[jnelsoninjax]

12 hours ago, Gerowen said:

Electricity is on the way. Should have it end of day.

Well aren't you all fancy! Electricity and indoor plumbing?!

[Gerowen]

Good and bad today. Good news is we have power, bad news is no water. I fit the splice in, but the service box for the well was filled with lady bugs and wasp nests, so when we flipped the breaker in order to drain the pressure so I could do the splice, they dislodged and shorted one of the breakers.

 

Here's a quick update video from my phone since the internet won't be moved over here until tomorrow or next day.

 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q2ARB1fGi0Q&feature=youtu.be

[jnelsoninjax]

Well at least you are in your new home! Congrats for that, now as you said the fun part, moving!

[Gerowen]

So we are officially almost done.  We have electricity, sewage, running water, and telephone/internet.  The house is complete and the majority of our important household items are here.

 

I've got some video clips that I'm going to string together and upload as a sort of finale.  We still have some things to move out of the old house, but for the most part, we're done; we've been sleeping here the past 3 days now, :-)