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10/11/2006: "Current projects, mid-October 2006"

Here's what is in process at the moment as we leave the fall harvest season and head into winter.

One of the big issues last winter was the cellar flooding in the farmhouse. There is a sump pump there; the former owners used to direct the water from the sump pump to the adjacent pasture that we call the North yard, where it used to pool and form a small pond.



This water would then percolate its way from the pond back down to the cellar, causing an endless cycle of pumping (and using a significant amount of electricity). One weekend last fall when Grandpa Dennis was down he helped me install a corrugated PVC drainage pipe to carry that water further away. Alas, I did not engineer this well. Although I verified that the sump was still pumping water, I did not anticipate just how fast the water would enter the cellar during the rainy season - it's a veritable spring under the house.



As a consequence, the increased height that I was asking the sump pump to conquer decreased its flow capacity, and during peak rainy periods the incoming water flow was a greater flow than the outgoing water - a sure recipe for disaster. And disaster overtook the cellar, when the water rose to a height of four to five feet! The former renter did not notice this until the water was well nigh its crest, and as a result I lost a perfectly good furnace that became inundated.

Off and on I've been trying to get a contractor interested in dealing with this problem of ours, but so far no one has taken the bait. I've kind of given up on Hughes Excavation out of Philomath; numerous faxes and calls over 10 months have not resulted in any follow-up. When I discussed this with a contractor friend he said, "Yeah, they're among the best in the area, but this means that they're always busy." My realtor friend Dorothy recently attended a seminar given by John's Waterproofing - it seems like this problem is right up their alley, but so far i've gotten no response to my email. I guess I'll have to start faxing and calling them now.

What I'd really like is to put in a passive, gravity-driven drain: the swale that runs through the pasture is about 275 feet away. One could shoot a pipe from the swale up alongside the house, and direct water from the cellar into this pipe. In the winter you'd have a steady flow out of that pipe as it drained the water under the house.

Another project in process is the installation of the wood stove. Nate and Channa have been eagerly awaiting the completion of this; we have the wood, we have the stove, but there are two remaining prerequisites: we have to have some sort of fire-proof hearth, and and we need proper woodstove venting. The venting installation is contracted out, and due for construction in about two weeks. The easy, semi-ugly solution to the hearth issue is to simply buy a 4' x 4' pre-made stone hearth; they cost about $400 and sit under the stove. This doesn't seem ideal to me; it creates a stumbling hazard on an appliance that is made for cooking, so every time you walk up to it with a pot you have to be aware of the slight step up. Also, the kitchen floor has seen various repairs that were not done very well; it seems logical to consider tiling the who kitchen floor. This would eliminate the tripping hazard, extend the fireproof surface throughout the kitchen, and cover up some ugliness in the floor. However, this requires a tiling project, probably one that we do ourselves. I like to tile, and don't consider this an insurmountable project, except that...

The floor sags noticeably in the kitchen. The engineer in me says that this needs to be addressed before laying down a relatively inflexible tile surface - once the tile is in place any attempt to deal with the sag will open up cracks in the tile grout. Seems simple enough: shore up the floor joists in the basement should do it. When I went down in the basement, however, I really began to understand some things about the farmhouse.

For one thing, the previous owners had tried to address the sagging floor issue in their own clueless way. The reason that the floor sags is that there is a long, long beam that runs the length of the building to hold up the floor joists. This beam should be resting on foundation walls at several points, but either the foundation walls have settled downward into the mire (likely), or the foundation, which is likely a replacement foundation, was never poured high enough to contact the beam (also likely, unfortunately). So now this long, long beam spanned 30 feet of house with nary a middle support - until the previous owners braced it with a steel I-beam and a couple of 4 x 4 posts. Which would have been fine, except that being clueless all they did was put the beams in place after the sag was well advanced. This arrested further sag, but did nothing to reverse the condition.

After thinking about it more, I came to realize that this sag manifests itself throughout the house! More than once I had looked at the ridgeline of the roof and thought, "Damn, it looks like the profile of some kind of ship, with a sagging middle and upturned ends." This is all because the long, long beam holds up a wall that runs the long length of the house, and that wall goes all the way up through the second floor. The sag in the beam means a sag in the wall. The sag in the wall means a sag in the attic. The sag in the attic means the sag in the roof.

The right way to deal with this is to do what my Uncle Charles did when they moved into the Josiah Lombard house in Lombard, IL. This was an old, old heritage house that belonged to the first banker in that town, and it had floors that sagged six ways to Sunday. Uncle Charles went out and bought a small arsenal of floor jacks (screw jacks). He installed them in the basement at strategic locations, and about once a week he would take a glass of sherry and go down in the basement. I don't know what magic he used to decide what post needed jacking, but whether tapped them to hear them ring, or just went by feel he would give a little turn of the screw here and a little turn of the screw there. Over the period of about a year he gradually got the house squared up again.

I went down to Winks Hardware, and ordered up a few floor jacks. They're sitting in the truck, waiting for tomorrow night, when I'm going to drive halfway down to the farm; Channa is going to meet me halfway, and we'll have a hand-off. We'll probably be working on a little more accelerated schedule than Uncle Charles, and we may introduce some small wall cracks, but we'll get the job done. Nate will install them in the basement in place of the fixed 4 x 4 posts, and every other day or so raise the house another millimeter. By my eye we've got about three quarters of an inch to an inch of sag to correct.

Another farm project that I'm trying to get moving is some form of solar photovoltaic power. Actually, at the heart of it this is not about electricity - it's about WATER. We have some surface water on the farm, but it's muddy and seasonal. Instead we get water from a well. The well has a pump, and the pump is run by, you guessed it, electricity. So, no electricity, now water. Why would I not assume that electricity is not always going to be there at the flick of a breaker? Well, that's a long topic for another time, but suffice it to say that the utility grid is far more fragile that people realize.

I contacted a local solar guy down in Corvallis. He came out and inspected the cow shed roof and pronounced the structure sound enough to support a photovoltaic array. I told him that I wanted a grid-tied system that would ultimately be capable of running without the grid. He went back and drew up a proposal for a grid-tie system with battery back-up. It uses a package system called the PS1 from Outback, whom I've heard good things about. However, the PS1 is pretty limited in what you can do with it. It can't handle too big an array, nor too big a battery system. It's for the homeowner who wants a basic grid-tied system with a few hours of backup on a circuit or two. It kind of made sense when we were thinking of installing the inverter and charger out in the cow shed, since the PS1 is fully enclosed and weatherized, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted the electronics installed on the back porch, with the batteries in the cellar (assuming that we solve the seasonal swimming pool problem).

So, for now I'm combing through the Outback catalog, and comparing prices and specs. I'll probably have to design the system myself, and then tell the installer, here, price this out for me and install it.

That's all I've got cooking for now. Well, except for the cider in the basement, and the water rights application on my desk. However, both of those will have to wait for another posting, as right now I have this fine home-made cider from last spring in front of me. The juice wasn't from The Farm, but it will do for now.



========= comments ========
December 29th, 2006
Rich wrote:
>
> Hi there
>
> I just found your site via Jeff Vail....it's great to see another
> Willamette Valley farm making a go at it.
>
> It's hard to tell from your pics, but a curtain drain could help clear
> out your basement swimming pool...I helped a friend put in his and it
> has kept their basement high and dry. With a better view, I could tell
> better if it would work
>
> Cheers
>
> Rich
> Mossback Farm
> www.mossbackfarm.com/journal

Hi Rich!

The Current Projects posting is probably due for an update, as I think I have finally figured out a plan for the seasonal swimming pool (AKA cellar). Hughes Excavating had suggested putting a perimeter drain IN the basement, since the house has a lot of concrete and decking surrounding its outer foundation. They suggested cutting a channel with a diamond saw, excavating, and then replacing with river rock. The only problem with that is that eventually the river rock will silt up. I had a meeting with John's Waterproofing, and they taught me the importance of a solution that you can do maintenance on; however, their solution is quite expensive for the likes of my cellar. So I think that what I will do is install simple plastic gutter drains with gratings (which I think I can get at Home Depot or Lowes for much, much less than the proprietary solution from John's Waterproofing). I just have to get the attention of somebody willing to do the trench out to the swale then.

If a curtain drain is something else, feel free to respond and educate me... thanks for writing.

Kurt