As I mentioned in a previous post, while I was at eHelp my offsite time was focused on researching Energy, Internet Communication Technology (ICT), and beginning in 2004, Agriculture as emerging sectors.

After working intensely with supporting the then-new RoboDemo community, I decided that eLearning and Blended Learning were killer apps which couldn’t be ignored.

So my grand NorCal plan evolved. Take active duty, soon to retire military vets and train them in a California industry – vineyard management. Vets2Vines was born. And now Ag is the new hot trend. Like I could have planned it any better.

Here I am, positioned with both Renewable Energy and 40 acres of prime, irrigation subsidized Northern California property. The agriculture boom is still on – MarketWatch

As oil flirts with $120 a barrel and corn shoots up over $6 a bushel, it’s clear that demand is real for both commodities, and yet there’s also a bit of froth in those prices as well. How much of it is speculation?

…I have been hearing for three years that corn price couldn’t possibly go any higher. I heard that argument at $2.50, $3, $4.50 and $5. Now here at $6.20, the same bearish absolutes are being spouted from all over the place and my indicators tell me that it’s simply not true.

How much is that in real dollars?

The average bushel to acre breakdown is 183:1. Math says this year will be $7.50 per bushel. That’s a little under $50k for the property. Only half to a quarter what winegrapes would bring.

Then again I don’t have to string all those wires and posts for the vines. And wait 4 years with stranded costs while the vines grow. And do forward contracting to lock in the client. Lowers risk if you make money year 1 instead of year 4. 

Ethanol is what’s got farmers all excited. And the market’s guaranteed.

It doesn’t have to come from corn, either.

Sugar is the New Oil

Sugar beets were Solano County’s prime source of cash crops twenty years ago. According to a recent National Geographic I read, Brazil’s ethanol comes primarily from sugar cane. Sugar beets, sugar cane… Jimmy Smits says it best: Sugar is the New Oil.

From the USDA:

The estimated ethanol production costs using sugarcane, sugar beets, raw sugar, and refined sugar as a feedstocks are more than twice the production cost of converting corn into ethanol.

While it is more profitable to produce ethanol from corn in the United States, the price of ethanol is determined by the price of gasoline and other factors, rather than the cost of producing ethanol from corn.

With recent spot market prices for ethanol near $4 per gallon, it is profitable to produce ethanol from sugarcane and sugar beets, raw sugar, and refined sugar.

Umm. So According to this article, with gas now at $4 a gallon we’re now able to produce ethanol at just about the same cost.

Well, technically the really really cost efficient way would be producing ethanol from molasses produced as a byproduct of the processing of the sugar beets, with HFCS being the other product.

If you build it… they will come…

I’ve already got people stopping by my place to ask me when they can build one just like it. Super simple, not a lot of framing, and near-zero energy footprint.

Funny how a little thing like renewable energy can get people jazzed up now that fuel is through the roof. 51% of our energy still comes from coal, but you know… California’s transmission grid is SuX0r.

I just realized, that as I was penning my Worst Day Ever post about how tough it is to be an entrepreneur (I hate that word)…

…That this little project of mine which has appreciating decently 5% year after year BEFORE the price of corn went through the roof.

Residential units are depreciated 20% in Solano County and here I sit, on a gold mine.

I just realized that all the pain and toil I’ve put into the past year is really really going to pay off. All I have to do is enjoy the view after I finish the next project.

Oh, and the cost of energy?

I’m pretty relaxed about that as well. The six windmills and interconnect I’m going to put in as a micro-wind farm has me kicking back on that matter as well.

Not to mention that my SIP constructed home is 60% more efficient than the best standard stick construction home.

Ask me about Hubbert’s Peak, and I’ll show you my (proven) concepts for hydrogen electrolysis from water. Oh yeah, electrolysis for free since the wind power is up.

“The fundamental question from today’s perspective is how to produce hydrogen,” said Andreas Schafer, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development.

Umm. Well, according to our calcs that great resource called WIND. D’oooh!

Hydrogen used how?

To run your turbocharged vehicle. Just like a NOX canister you can force H2 into your engine’s combustion cycle.

It gets you about 25% more fuel, according to several sources. More on that later. That’s what my brother’s working on. We’ll be selling them after we find a good manufacturer.

It’s nice to have options.

Thursday was A Very Bad Day. This week has been tough as well. Unfortunately I’m having to become an expert in virtually every single thing I’m doing because the ‘experts’ who I hire are completely incompetent in business. Welcome to construction / construction financing / engineering in California. Flakes run the show.

In fact, I’m catching up on my blogging is because since this April Fools Day I’ve been on hiatus while ‘other people’ decide to pull the trigger on my next round of financing.

Whatever.

April Fools Day. What a day to get the final sign-off from the county office for the project.

All of my issues seemed to gain perspective when I watched this guy’s story and listened to the Rich Dad – Poor Dad series creator talk about the resilience it takes in order to make it when, first you’ve made colossal mistakes and second, when everyone around you is criticizing you.

So at least I’m better off than this guy. In a lot of ways, but mainly because I didn’t make the colossal mistakes.

If all I have to do is weather this current storm of boredom and the potential of financial death by attrition, that’s doable. Bring it on…

Saving us from ourselves…

And then there’s this… Bailout backlash – Apr. 23, 2008

“There’s a huge segment of the country saying, ‘We don’t want our money used for a bailout,’” said Brandon.

“A third of the American public rents,” Brandon pointed out. “They’re saying ‘I’ve been saving for a mortgage for years. I could have jumped in on a subprime loan too. Now I’m going to have to pay for a government bailout.”

I happen to be one of those renters who saw this market correction coming, and I’ve been trying to position myself properly for the opportunity.

No, I didn’t go into flipping homes. Although one of my contractor advisors is a guy who did have three or four homes he was in the middle of flipping when the music stopped and everybody grabbed a chair in the California housing bomb.

I wanted to keep on renting when everyone else was buying homes higher and higher. As Kiyosaki said in the clip, the concept of buying in a high market is looking to make money on the ‘bigger fool’. After all, if all your friends are talking about it at the cocktail parties, you’ve just gotta get into it, right?!? Meh.

Thinking of it as a sabbatical from my software, training, and wireless background I decided to work on my strategic side of business in early 2005.

It started with a family project.

Back in 2004 when gas was $2 a gallon, I was researching the soon to be sudden Hubbert’s Peak which we now seem to have slam-danced into. The best part of this construction was that it would be energy efficient, and be an example of a rural wind farm done under $10k.

Below the fold I’ve just got more to say, so don’t go there unless you just have to have the real scoop on how tough the past 18 months have been.

This past year I’ve had the opportunity to live out tough out a project which was entirely outside my field of expertise: building a home. Not only building a home, but building it 500 miles away from my base of operations in San Diego.

Our project in a nutshell – Blended Learning type training in vineyard management combined with a residency program which takes advantage of zero footprint energy efficiency designed into the buildings and wind energy in a zone 4 area. Did I mention the military base just five miles down the road?

For lack of explaining an 80 page business plan, I just call our use ‘rental’ which makes the appraisers and other money guys nod appreciatively.

This was a creative option for improving a 40 acre property gifted to my brother and I by our aunt. The gift had a stipulation: build a house for our father who, at the time was in his late 80s and still very much the Berkeley activist.

Anyone who’s read my About page knows that I had my time of it back in 2001. Getting laid off following an IPO that underdelivered, then having everything go south in the initial wireless data consulting concept when our launch was set for Sept. 11, 2001. Well, we all know what happened on that day in history. Too bad it was also the day CTIA was supposed to launch.

Resiliency. That’s my core value

For the past year I’ve had to deal with people overpromising, and under-delivering, if they deliver at all. In fact, construction is so full of flakes it’s amazing anything ever gets built.

Things started out tough and just got tougher. Property that didn’t just come to us gift-wrapped, we’ve had to do so many improvements for compliance that it just boggles the mind. I still have pictures of what it used to look like prior to 2005. 

Not to mention my dad passing away a year ago after a brutal time of it in the hospitals. Ever since then I can just eyeball any passing nurse and tell you whether they’ll be good at their jobs or not.

Three months before that both my mom’s parents passed away within six months of each other.

Three in one year. Three in nine months, actually.

Meanwhile… back at the ranch…

Property that somehow attracted the strangest and most unhinged Berkeley crowd who felt that somehow they owned it, and attempted not once but twice to put felony ex-cons as squatters onto it.

Confrontations with squatters in the dead of night, pouring rain in January, one with an ex-con with two pit bulls. My private investigation background came in handy. So did the Mossberg 590 I had thought to bring that dark and rainy night, not to mention 911 on speed dial. Nobody got hurt. That’s a win in my book. Well, that and nobody every came back out to squat on the land again. Trouble rides a fast horse.

Like having our subcontracted engineer pull the pin on his boss and catch us and ten other poor homeowners in the frag pattern of his ambitions. He’s on my list of evil people who need to get sued and have their licenses pulled. My complaint’s been filed already.

The rest of the stories. Even worse. They would chill the blood of anyone remotely interested in getting a construction loan. I’ll leave those for telling on long dark winter evenings over beer and wings.

After all of that, having the county approval process turn out to be the easiest part of the situation has been a pleasant surprise. That was no picnic either. Just everything else in comparison was a lot harder.

Lessons Learned

You will hate your contractor. This is something that every single source of information I could grasp about construction gave to me.

So I got creative. I didn’t hire one.

At least not full time. And you know what? Most of my problems and dilemmas wouldn’t have been helped one single bit by having that extra $50k spent on the profit of a contractor.

I’m not saying that I didn’t need advice, but hiring a contractor as an advisor is a lot cheaper.

And I don’t hate him. He’s actually a really great guy.

One last thing. The same basic tenet I try to pass on to my children is that mistakes are okay and even necessary, but not being honest about your mistakes is a sin. Mistakes – I’ve made a few. But the hardest mistakes I’ve had to deal with are the ones that were made by other people which I have had to clean up.

sip,structural insulated panel,construction,energy efficiency,solano county

I was recently asked by a friend how the construction project was going. Another blogreader asked how much I was involved.

A picture is worth a thousand words…

(jump beneath the fold for more)

When you can’t get things in a project completed properly you end up doing a lot yourself. I tried to get contractors to bid on this, nobody, not one, followed through with what I thought was professionalism. So… I took the time off and jumped in to complete the task.

Leadership By Example

Which led to me tied to a forklift thirty feet in the air jumping up and down on a hundred pound SIP to get it where it wasn’t going to go because someone else had redrawn the layout my contractor had previously done.

We used to call that ‘leadership by example’ in the Navy. You don’t want to ask others to do what you yourself wouldn’t want to do first.

Not my fault… not my problem that I created.. but ultimately it was my project, my responsibility.

And the risk associated with tying someone else up there was, in my opinion, not worth it. I had the equipment, and had spent months climbing rock walls in gyms and tying knots. Umm… Because I knew it would come in handy.

Well, in less than two months I and my intrepid band of high school dropouts, (aside from the contractor I brought in periodically) knowing nearly next to nothing about what we were doing took this…

and this..

and by manhandling these energy efficient structural insulated panels (which weigh a LOT more than you’d think) like this…

…We were able to accomplish this much in two months.

Not two months straight working mind you, there was Thanksgiving where we lost a week, and then every other week I was back in San Diego with my boys doing the Daddy thing. Something like 35 days total work sounds about right. With no more than five total people on the site at any time, best working group size was four IMHO.

We are now looking at this (and yes, it’s supposed to look like a barn, that’s what it is designed to be… just a really super energy efficient barn / office space).

Oh, and this…

and this…

We were on track to have our permit finaled at the end of this month however I’ve had just about every single Murphy’s Law item thrown at me during this project, (three relatives dying, one baby born, all sorts of family law issues) why not at the very end of it all just have yet. Another. Family law issue? (hate to vent, but after all, it is my blog).

Like I didn’t have my plate full already.

california,real estate

Luckily, this doesn’t impact the 21st Century Farm Project too much since we were appraised as a commercial property and only had a 5% appreciation value considered rather than the residential appreciation at 20% per year.

It does explain why Anthony Olivier may have printed his own currency when MadCap Software moved recently. It’s rumored that the savvy timing netted MadCap more than just a bigger space.

Quoted from California Real Estate Market Outlook Worse in 2008:

“We’re in a major slump here,” said Jas Deepak, a real estate agent with Help-U-Sell Affordable Homes. “It seems like it’s a freefall in this market.”

Deepak estimated that prices in the Fairfield area have fallen 10 to 15 percent from 2006, and last week only 10 homes were sold out of 1,300 on the market. Last October, about 30 homes were selling each week. Deepak is the agent for a nearly 1,500-square-foot ranch home on the desirable west side of Fairfield for $369,000. Four months ago, the property was listed for $415,000. If the price is reduced any more, it will be a “short sale” in which the seller must ask the lender to accept less money than what is owed.

Solano County,green homes,green homebuilding,energy efficiency,sip,structural insulated panel

Here are a few pictures from today’s work. We had 20% of the first wall completed earlier this week and after taking Tuesday and Wednesday off, we hit it hard today, getting an entire wall done before lunch and then taking on the tallest peak of the second story…

How cool is this view?

The hills in the background are from the ‘mountains’ separating Solano County from Napa.

Today’s progress:

.

solano county,green building,SIP Construction,structural insulated panel,construction,green homebuilding,energystar,energy star

Rain, rain, and more rain

The construction for the third phase of the 21st Century Project is running into a few delays with the monsoon season hitting NorCal.

No worries but it has kept me busy jumping through hoops since the traditional building materials we’re using for the conventional framing are composite and need to be covered against saturation by rain.

While the SIP panels are also composite, they’re treated for outdoor exposure while the glulam materials have to be gently tucked in nightly with a tarp covering, then awakened just as gently by removing the tarp so the ground moisture doesn’t evaporate and condense like a solar still and drip onto those composites.

That’s to explain this week’s delay in posting…

I haven’t worked this hard since…

I’ve been pulling 14 to 18 hour days to hammer this project into the ground. We are three weeks past our initial September scheduled start and the weather is becoming a factor.

I’ve lost two and a half inches off my waist and put on three pounds of muscle. I haven’t worked this hard in twenty years since I was 17 going through Naval Aircrew training. Here’s that aircrew comparison framed properly thanks to this site:

Aircrew graduates leave knowing drown-proofing techniques like treading water, floating and making it to that life raft, even if it’s a mile swim away while wearing between 45 and 50 lbs. of flight gear.

…The air crew warfare designation is one of the toughest pins to earn. The Navy plans to keep it that way because of the reputation that the air crew wings have earned in the aviation community.

“The air crew training program’s reputation has allowed pilots to trust air crews without question,” said Ellenburg. “The pilots never second guess the enlisted air crew’s decisions.”…

The marines (and Jamie Foxx) aren’t the only ones who say… Ooh-rah…

The hard part was Friday when I decided to do a full day and then come back to overnight since the surprise rainstorm had interrupted us prior to locking everything up. Driving back to the site I was very tired, and two lane roads are no joke when there is fog and so forth.

Not so jovial section

This morning there was a serious reminder to me about driving tired I passed by a fatal single-car accident about a mile away from the project site.

The guy departed the highway into a field and evidently wasn’t wearing his seatbelt as he was ejected from the car, a red SUV that was obviously traveling a high rate of speed as it flipped and was airborne (no mud marks) for about fifty feet. The coroner’s van was just pulling up. From what I could see as I passed by (recounting my Private Investigation background) lividity hadn’t set in yet, therefore it was recent. And very very unfortunate.

It was a reminder to me to put safety once again first. No more driving tired, crew rest is back on the books for me.

My thoughts and prayers were, and still are, with the man’s family. Up until today I would have easily said I’m going to finish this project by the end of the month unless I’m dead. Not after seeing that. I’ve got far too much to live for.

Saturday two of my workers left early because of a death in their family. Sunday morning I see a guy stretched out in the middle of a field. There’s always that old superstition about bad news / deaths occurring in threes.

I’m not looking forward to Monday all that much. I think I’ll fly home to San Diego rather than drive.

construction,energy efficiency,structural insulated panel,sip building,energy star,green construction,green homebuilding

I’m just so excited about this. We have put up 80% of the first floor as of Saturday night. It’s a race against weather, so we’ll be putting four hard days in this week starting on Thursday.

For my normal readers: don’t worry, this is a short segment I will return to my analysis of the Technical Communication space shortly. I’ll be posting up a help file regarding the inside story for this job later this year.

From Thursday you can see the bare concrete. We did about four hours work on the lumber connecting to the concrete Thursday afternoon…

After eight hours on Friday things looked like this:

And this…

At this point the walls are about 40% up on the bottom section.We finished up another 40% on Friday, and the walls are plumb and looking set. We have one small corner to finish – about ten feet on the last two walls and then we start on the second story.

SIP,construction,Energy Efficiency

Some pictures of the job site… In NorCal.

Nothing about Tech Comm today, I’m just having a great time putting up the SIP panel construction. Saves about 60% on energy, and is part of the Vets2Vines project.

Measure once… Wait, measure twice, cut once…

Before the pour…

They just trucked it in, we offloaded it in three hours.

They look like oreos on the side. OSB on both sides, EPS foam in the middle. For those construction or energy geeks out there, R40 is a good thing, and this is true R40, less breaks in between meaning you don’t lose insulation in the framing.

Job site chaos… We are about to start erecting the panels today, and should save a month or so in framing and other chaos.

More later as we finish. I guess you’d say we’re doing our part, social responsibility and all that.

Taken one way after all, how can one be Green (new and inexperienced) if they are a Veteran (older and experienced)?

Taken another way it exemplifies a divide between political parties.

After all, most military people are Red-State and most Greens are Blue-State (or Ralph Nader fans). Conventional Wisdom does not consider a Red-Stater being an avid proponent of renewable energy. I describe myself, an Independent voting person, as a Green Veteran.

Red State | Blue State | What’s a Green Veteran?

After careful analysis for the past six years I believe energy is the next dot com and also the glaring strategic vulnerability that must be developed. We must become more self-reliant, period. For a lot of reasons, national security ranking the highest. I am agnostic to political parties in obtaining this goal. There is no Big Oil to me, only Big Energy.

My initiative to address this is Vets2Vines. Training active duty veterans in preparation for their eventual departure into civilian life. Retaining them in California and offering a smooth transition into an agricultural supervisory position that helps keep that management and leadership knowledge here in Cali. Getting farmers and vineyards to embrace renewable energy by seeing the cost savings.

This morning I met with Mike Reagan, the Solano County Supervisors Board Chairman today for about half an hour – unexpectedly. This was my first time meeting him; in the past I’ve dealt with his staff and just advised them of what we wanted to accomplish because I thought that was adequate for my stage in the game.

Today I had thought that would continue; after all, it was an afterthought to stop in once I was finished with my stop into County Planning / Building Resource Management. Sort of like being asked to give your elevator pitch of your project completely impromptu yet it went quite well.

Mike Reagan – Renewable Energy Visionary & Rural Use Advocate

It turns out that Mike is also a Green Veteran. I didn’t ask which party he votes; if he has served his country, is for national security, and for green power he’s a Green Veteran and that’s all that matters to me.

Mike was a zoomie who got in about the time I was born as an enlisted guy who went Officer. In the Navy we call those guys Mustangs. He used to run things over at Travis AFB located in Fairfield.

Mike Reagan has some great ideas and good resources to share and he’ll be an asset going forward. Check out his 80 ideas he wants to work on in his next 5 years as an example.

Disruptive Technology – Again

We talked about analog versus digital radar and how windmill blade design affected radar returns. Hydrogen bolt-on hybrid fuel usage for today’s cars. He trumped my H2 turbocharger concept by chunking a hockey puck-sized bit of hard ceramic material on the desk and told me about the technology behind it. It’s dirt, mixed with a high-tech phosphorus compound just going onto the market. Build anything anywhere by adding this powder to mud.

Revolutionary. Very cool stuff. Basically we geeked out for about twenty minutes.

Surprisingly Mike believes in the same strategy I do and has done parallel research into things like 25x’25 – an initiative providing 25% of our nation’s energy from the Agricultural sector by the year 2025, and sustainable building methods. We both believe that decreasing foreign oil usage is paramount to national security; therefore we must produce more energy locally.

Mike also believes Solano County is poised to be the Renewable Energy Corridor for NorCal. Between UC Berkeley and UC Davis, both centers of talent and research funding. Solano County has plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind – Stage 4 and Stage 5 at my site consistently.

It’s always nice to have another big stick in the golf bag. Now I know the Chairman of the Supervisors board is also a veteran and really wants to push concepts like Vets2Vines through in order to broaden the usage of agricultural land.

I envision one day handling a room full of ‘no’ by leaning back in my chair and saying to nobody in particular, as the old Michael Jordan commercial goes… ‘I want to be like Mike…’ just to make any Solano County opposition to my Vets2Vines plan twitch.  

Farmers are getting it stuck to them

The key issue our conversation made me aware of is that there is controversy and an adversarial position that has developed by a vocal, nonestablished minority against land use of any kind; in fact there are some very vocal factions that strategize about how to squeeze farmers simply out of business by tight legislature and have their lands revert back to wetlands and preserve.

Not exactly a fair way to operate however I happen to have my own nonprofit organizations I support which may well pave the way to victory without any confrontations being necessary.

I think and speak ‘ 1960s Radical’ as my second language. And I strategize like Sun Tzu. It helps to have Berkeley graduated parents when dealing with radical environmentalists. It helps even further to have a strong background in military tactics and history.

My non-profit organizational friends have got my back.

I have been working on providing this type of support for years, following up on what my Dad started when he was a founding member of the Ecological Farming Association in the early 1980s.

Shyaam Shabaka’s EcoVillageFarm Learning Center and Strong Roots non-profits. They want farms to belong to farmers, primarily because inner-city folks need nutritional food sources grown close to the community. It makes no sense to anyone why organic foods cannot be provided when they’re grown a short drive away from a community.

Shyaam is working on changing the distribution network while providing an educational experience for Richmond inner-city kids. He’ll be exploring some joint ventures with 3nW Corporation and Vets2Vines to bring kids into the site and educate them on the organic farming operation. The catalyst for all of this is the amount of money viticulture has to offer. It’s a career choice that just might make a difference in his kids’ lives.

Green Veteran,veterans,green power,organic farming,wind energy,wind power,Travis AFB,political,California,Solano County,big oil,big energy,UC Berkeley,UC Davis

Yesterday I was up in the Sierras talking with SIP Home Systems (SHS) and had a meeting with their president, Tom Frantz. I was there just to straighten out some issues I had with the construction plans for my project but it was nice to see we had some common ground in our vision going forward.

Tom is an ex-techie who has some really high goals for their construction market. SIP construction already provides about 60% energy savings over standard home construction, making it a no-brainer to target energy efficient construction projects using SIPs – Structural Insulated Panels. Think EnergyStar with very little hassle and you will begin to get the picture.

Tom told me yesterday they’re looking into solar energy production. Vets2Vines will be focusing on the vineyard management, however it will be powered nearly 100% by wind, and I’m excited to see the SHS concept going solar. Very complementary to the wind and energy efficiency and Tom’s no slouch at finding the best bang for the buck. I don’t mind drafting behind SHS one bit; less research and dealmaking for me, and I can put together the best package possible for the agricultural clients.

What I would really like to accomplish with Vets2Vines would be to provide an agricultural incubator – something that would showcase renewable energy and other cost saving approaches for the aggies.

Enough about yourself | Get back to the SHS Dudez

I think of it as quite fascinating and there are more ex-techies working in the field than you know how to shake a stick at. A lot of them did get out of dotbombs and into energy and agriculture in the past five years.

Kindred spirits really. It’s like being involved with tech incubators except, as Tom put it yesterday, in construction your competition is used to an older business model and generally not as innovative.

And that’s our edge-y advantage. Carpe Diem.

Ken Porter, one of the founders of SHS, and Tom developed a patented method of tying down the SIP panels to the foundation which saves bundles of cost. Using their experience I was able to spend about twelve dollars and save about sixty. That’s a simple application of applied knowledge. I’m all about applying knowledge. Five to one ratio always gets me pumped. It’s like buying a hot dog at Costco.

In fact, it’s (wait for it wait for it) – Disruptive Technology.

Disruptive Technology

Why I get up every morning. Because proper applications engineering is doing something better, faster and cheaper.

3nW Corporation – Focusing On Disruptive Technology:

Disruptive Technology is defined as any technological advance that attempts to meet at least two of the three following conditions: be ten times cheaper than any alternative, provide ten times higher performance, or provide ten times higher functionality.

Meeting all three conditions is optimum.

Disruptive Technology is typically not favored by the previous controlling interest or monopoly, and potential users must learn of the benefits through cooperative business development marketing strategies.

Disruptive Technology is highly valued by the business or consumer who benefits from lower costs and higher profits.

I’m Back, I’m Back… | My Back… My Back…!

Got quite a bit of a workout today getting all of the concrete tiedown bolts in place. I’m feeling my lack of exercise from the past two years. Aircrew Aircrew Oooh-rah*ouch I think I strained something.

This project is going to utilize some high-tech energy efficiency materials but in order to not conflict with steps four five and six down the road, I did a bit of hands-on work and got the tiedowns properly placed so I won’t have to work too hard in the later phases.

How hard was it?

Let’s just say my subcontracted (experienced and licensed) concrete contractor stipulated to me before taking this job that his quote was ‘without the tiedowns’. I was cool with that; I was going to pay Ken to come down and do it for me and today I saved about a grand by doing it myself. Nice to make or save a thousand bucks in a day.

At least, that’s what I figured mileage plus his hourly rate would have been or what a General Contractor would have tacked onto their rate. Ken knows how to do this a lot faster than I did, so it might have just been an afternoon’s work but it all adds up.

After checking out the plans and how I was doing the tiedowns, George is fired up about using SIPs in a project he’s doing for himself up in the Arizona mountains. He asked me if the panels could handle a snow load.

Me: “Are you kidding George? SHS is located up in Grass Valley and they design most of their projects for heavy snow loads in the Sierras! Call ‘em and tell them I sent you…”

SIP home construction evangelism. One carpenter at a time.

At the end of the day it’s Miller Time…

It’s very satisfying to actually work on the foundation for a building; something primal I think in being able to build your own home (or even your own office in my case).

At least I had the situational awareness nagging at me in the back of my head to triple check my work and I found out that my stupid questions were not so stupid after all. I wasn’t quite grasping it until I had put in the skull sweat onsite for it all to sink in.

But after doing a SIP panel raising two years ago with Ken, I know his teaching style. He would rather you fully appreciate the Zen of being in the Now with the SIPs (my words, not his – he’s very down to earth) in order to fully grasp the techniques. 

The next building I work on will go much faster because this time I was confused about which page of the plans to find which dimensions, etc. etc. etc. And I’m not (too) stupid either; it’s just very complicated.

And the best news of all was, after I carefully checked all the walls I found I had done them all right the first time. I was short a few placements but that’s why I made the phone call to double-check. Wait – I’ll have to get back about having them all right after the county inspection tomorrow.

Kudos to Ken, Jedi Master of all things SIP, for taking the time with me to answer my questions. Even though I called him about six times between yesterday and today. Very patient man, that Ken.

I took some pics with the digital camera and I’ll do a slide show / demo on how I read those plans and put in the tiedowns for the Vets2Vines website. That should help others in the same situation.

I’m excited for the next phase of Vets2Vines which is going to be the big construction project.

At least I know now that I can hack it without screwing up anything really major .

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