Racing the Winter Storms

Here we have our house-in-progress. You will notice that we are in October and the second story is not yet completed . No second story = no roof.
This is a less than happy situation.

DH Matt and his crew have been out here working away six days a week. The core issue is that, despite all of our years of careful research, we had been unaware that our AAC building blocks were sized for a metric system. No where in the literature did it mention that these are actually Mexican made Hebel block. The sales reps told us that the plant was in Mexico, sure. They omitted to mention metric sizing, during the many, many conversations we had with them. Add to that California seismic requirements for rebar spacing (IN FEET AND INCHES) and we have a recipe for near disaster. Our walls have cost three times as much in labor as we had budgeted. Every piece of block needs to be altered in some way. This is not the easy Tinker-Toy project we had envisioned, planned for, and budgeted for.We had hoped for a paid-for house, but with this setback we will be $30K in debt at the end of the project.

I'm simply grateful that we are building a small house. This problem would be exponentially larger with more square feet involved. The good news is that, despite appearances, the walls will be complete this next week and roof trusses will go in. The roofing, simple galvanized steel (barn vernacular design) will go in the week after, hopefully winning the race against the start of our rainy season by a good week. For those of you unfamiliar with California's Mediterranean climate; we have approximately five months of absolutely dry weather in the summer time. A rain is so unlikely that it makes the front page of the newspaper and goes into the historical record. And then, the rains come. And come...in dryer southern regions rainfall might be only thirteen inches. Here in the mountains we have more than one hundred inches of rain each winter.

Because of the California budget crisis we had layoffs at the City Hall, especially in the building department. So, the plan check department was understaffed and we received our building permit much later in the dry season than was normal. Of course, we all know that there is no "normal" any longer, we are living in unusual times. The unusual has become the norm, if we can wrap our heads around that.

We're not certain that we would ever build with this block again. We might chose to, after experiencing a winter with these well insulated walls. We do notice, though, that the documentation for this block is woefully inadequate. Considering the amount of this block that the manufacturer's and reps sell for commercial and residential building in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico there is no excuse for the lack of a building manual. It's laziness and lack of attention. Which always builds up in a building boom...there's no reason and no time to provide documentation when the product is flying out the door. I hope that now that they have to actually work at sales that the AAC business will remedy the situation with a good manual and better documentation.