Three years ago my wife and I purchased 10 acres of land in northern Arizona.

We immediatley went to work getting a driveway cut in and started work on a 24 x 32' garage/shop with a living area above. This project for the most part is complete othere than exterioir fininshing and eventually doing a more complete job of fininshing off the living area upstairs to be used as a guest house at some point.

Our efforts have now turned to getting a timber frame home built. I have since purchasing the land purchased a Woodmizer saw mill and have recently completed a saw shed for it. My initial thought was to saw my own timbers and build the timber frame from scratch.

Not that there is any great urgency to move up from the Phoenix metro area to our 10 acres other than escaping the chaos of the city, I felt that doing the frame from scratch myself would be a very long and drawn out process. Although I would enjoy nothing more than tackling that portion of the project myself, reality tells me that it would take way to long to complete being able to work at it only on weekends.

So here we are mid October and to get this far has taken a little longer than I had anticipated. I would say the most surprising part of the whole process is the amount of coordination, planning, phone calls and the amount of getting rather ticked off as to how long it takes people to get back to you, or just plain lighting a fire under some of them to get the show on the rode!!!

As of today 10-17-06 the frame work has begun and from what I am told is well underway for a first half of November raising. Today I recieved word that the infill inside the stem walls is near completion. I have had to have an engineering firm perform soil sampes on the fill. This is due to the fact that I am in need of over 4 feet of fill in the great room area. And on top of that they have had to be on site performing compaction test on every 8" lift.

So needless to say the slab, which I initially thought may come a little under budget is back up to about right at budget or slightly higher.
Here are the stem walls as of this past weekend. In the lower left hand corner we have installed several sleeves through the stem walls and have the conduit rising in the mechanical room. The rather large pipe with the red cap on it is Eco-Flex.

It is roughly 85' long and will connect to the solar panels for our radiant floor heating. It is about 7" in diameter and conatins two 3/4" pex tubes surrounded by insulation. It seemd to be the best way to go, and far out weighs building a raceway myself and tryiing to insulate it. Although it was rather expensive 3/4" copper was not much less in price and I would have still had to construct an 85' raceway and come up with a decent way of insulating it.

Plumbers are to arive on Friday and hopefully will finish up Monday. Our weekend project is to get electrical conduit layed inside for floor outlets as well as stove and oven outlets in the kitchen. Also after a very muddy weekend last weekend try and get the remainder of walls backfilled around the outside.