Nov. 2010: Septic System, part 3

We arrived, my cat and I, in the afternoon of Sun Nov.7. After feeding Boo Boo I began the usual chores of opening the house. I turned on the electricity and made a fire in the stove. I unloaded the truck, unlocked and started the tractor and got the water pump going. By the time I had settled in, daylight was all gone so I busied myself with cleaning up the bathroom area which by this time had become a sort of storage closet. My goal during this visit was to have indoor plumbing by the time I left in a week. At this point my septic system consisted of a drainage field and a septic tank. The 4" drainage lines where partially assembled under the house by me and my dad during the previous visit but they had not been finished to the point of entering the house through the floor or glued together.

I got up early the next morning. It was raining and gray but not cold for November. My first task was to finish assembling the main drain pipes: a dirty job I did not relish doing. There were two sections to complete. One line was under the living room floor and needed to enter the house behind the stove to connect with the bathroom upstairs. The other branched off the main line and extended to the far end of the kitchen. This line also needed to come up through the floor so that all the remaining plumbing would be interior work.

I started with the line under the living room. I donned my orange jump suit as coveralls and crawled under the house with as many tools as I could drag along with me. It took many trips back and forth to get all of my materials under there. I connected a "T" joint to the end of the 4" line with a 3" inlet and a clean out plug. After cutting a hole in the floor with my sawzall I was able to run the 3" line into the house with a 90 degree turn. It had to be a tight turn to meet the gentle slope of the rest of the line. From there I began to join it all together with a special glue for PVC pipe. Little by little I dragged myself along through the dirt and cemented each joint and hung the pipe with metal straps screwed into the floor stringers. It was such a dark, cramped and dirty job I hated to even think what to do if any of it leaked. When I got to the line under the kitchen I spliced in a similar section as the first off the main line to bring a 3" pipe up through the floor. It was late Monday night after a 13 hour day when I finished. Early the next morning I pressure tested the main drain lines. I did this by capping the end at the septic tank and filling the pipes with water (the volume is great enough to create about 5 lbs. of pressure). I then crawled under the house with a utility light. I groaned and cursed as water sprayed from most of the joints I had fitted the day before.

I laid in the dirt for a moment to collect my thoughts. It was not the end of the world. It didn't leak everywhere. At least the 3" sections going into the house were both water tight. The leaking parts were all concentrated where the main kitchen and bathroom lines connected. There were a lot of fittings in the area.. why was it leaking? I must not have used enough glue.

With three swift cuts of my Sawzall I removed the entire leaking section in a giant Y. After another trip to Buxton's building supply and a few hours time the line was complete again. Before a second test I wanted to give the glue a few hours to dry. In the meantime I began to assemble the drains and vents from the bathroom. This included a trap and vent for the shower, same for the bathroom sink and the waste line for the toilet. Most of this was concentrated in the wall behind the stove. The venting of the lines took the most thought, although it's actually not so complicated. It just took a bit of "sinking in" after reading up on the concept to understand how the air in a pipe is displaced by the water running through it. Anywhere in the line that water is going to run there must be an escape route for the air that otherwise occupies the volume of the pipe. For the function of smooth drainage the air must be able to vent out an open stack, in this case a pipe that exit's through the roof.

That Wednesday evening I tested the main drain again. Again it failed to hold water. It wasn't nearly the colander it was before but it had enough drips that I would have to redo the same section for a third time. Fuck.

On Thursday afternoon, main drain fixed again and an exhaust pipe out the roof , Randy the plumbing inspector dropped by and approved my work. This was monumental. I was within spitting distance of the apex of this project: flushing a deuce.

For the third time I filled the main drain lines with water and this time it held. I then joined the main drain to the septic tank to complete the entire system. Done! I decided to take this monstrosity on it's maiden voyage the next morning when I am usually ready to do my business. I wanted to give all my fittings time to cure.

I arose early Friday morning. I looked everything over and decided it was time for the moment of truth. I turned on the water at the pump...good! No leaks in the waterline. I turned on the valves at the bathroom sink and toilet tank and turned the water to full blast. I flushed the toilet several times and went downstairs to watch the pipes and then crawled under the house for one last inspection. All seemed good except for a leak at the trap under the sink which I quickly mended. It was 7:30am and my own bodily plumbing was ready for a flush so I settled myself upon the throne.

I am pleased to report it was a most satisfying expulsion.

Oct. 2010: Septic system, part 2

My folks had rented a hotel room for the next several days. I rode into Belfast with them (about a 20 minute drive) to have dinner and take a shower. A hot shower is such a luxury when you do not have one at your convenience! When staying at the house sculpture I take sponge baths with water heated on the stove. After this visit, I am much closer to having a hot shower at home. I still have yet to sculpt a shower stall..

I stayed at the hotel that night with my folks. When we awoke the next morning it was pouring rain. It continued to rain after we had arrived at the house. It put me in a lousy mood and I did not feel like working but Mom and Dad seemed determined to get some shit done. Two projects were high on my list of priorities. One was to assemble all of the 4" waste pipe underneath the house. The other was to level the bed for the septic tank which needed to be finished today as the tank would be delivered the next morning. I had already dug the pit, but it needed sand to be thrown in to make a level 6'X8' bed. Thanks to the rain the pit now had about a foot of standing water, so I suggested we work on the waste line and wait until later in the day when the rain might let up. That was all my Dad needed to hear. He immediately went outside and crawled under the house. It was still pouring outside and there was mud everywhere. As dirty a job it is to be crawling around under the house it was at least dry. So we assessed the situation, figured out what we needed to do and got to work. I knew where the 3" line from the bathroom would need to exit the floor to the underside of the house and meet the 4"pipe so we started there and ran the pipes on around to the center of the house and aimed them toward the septic tank some 40 or so feet away. We added a T in the line so that we could connect a waste line running from the kitchen which we also hung. We pitched the line at 1/4" per foot which is standard code. After a couple of hours all the pipe had been hung and Mom had a delicious lunch ready for us. We were covered with dirt. The combination of getting wet with rain and then crawling around in the dry dust under the house outfitted each of us with a thorough coating of mud.

The rain was letting a bit after lunch so we decided to make the pit ready to receive the tank. My folks were all into doing the dirty work of standing in the pit raking while I dumped in sand with the tractor. The standing water in the hole actually helped determine a level grade. After awhile a nice bed had been made and we were ready for the tank.

I stayed at the house that night and met the truck delivering the tank early the next morning. It was a huge truck with a hydraulic lift off the back. The driver was good. He backed his truck all the way up my driveway and up to the hole. By remote, the driver used the lift to pick the 2 ton cement tank off the truck and set it gently on it's level bed of sand.

With the tank in place it was time to build the drainage field. We set to work leveling each course with sand and setting in three 10ft. sections for each of the five courses to make a total of 150ft.. Each course ran at 4" graduated elevations which we were able to determine with the site leveler. It took us a couple of days to install all the enviroseptic lines. When the pipes were in their places we capped and linked them together with 4"pipe. Last, we joined the drainage field to the septic tank and the tank to the house.

Now it was time to call Randy the inspector to come out and take a look.

Randy would come by the next morning so it the meantime my Dad and I turned our attention to the roof of the house. During the recent rain storm the house had showed some leaks. Eventually we made an educated guess as to where the water was getting in and made the necessary repairs.

The next day Randy came out and measured our work against the nail in the fir tree. All was good! We had passed inspection and were ready to backfill. The entire system needed to be buried 18" deep from the top of the drainage pipe. We had some sand left so we buried the drainage area, but only just barely. There would need to be much more backfill later. For now this visit had come to it's end.

It was time for a sad farewell to my folks who were flying back to Oregon the next morning. I am always amazed at my parent's willingness to travel such a long distance and do so much physical work for the sake of me and this little shack in the woods. For myself, I decided that I was done too. I was tired and missed my wife and needed to be back at work on the Cape. As always, leaving my little haven in the woods was a painful experience. I've invested so much of myself in this thing and in the process have grown very close to my parents. Now at three years into this project, I care so much for what of myself and my family it embodies, I can't help but tear up with sadness every time I must leave.

Oct. 2010: Septic system, part 1

The time was nigh for a long put off project. I had been trying to wrap my mind around this certain necessity since before I began building the house sculpture. During this October visit, three years into the project, I, with the help of my parents (yet to arrive) would build a code septic system. I had plans drawn up, but the building process was still foggy in my mind. As usual it was my intention to learn as I went along, one step at a time. I knew I would need a lot of gravel and sand so I called a local contractor, Steve Roche. He had brought me fill for my driveway the previous year and the locals spoke highly of him. Steve also turned out to be helpful whenever I had questions regarding the construction of the system as he had built a few of this type himself. This sort of design is called an enviroseptic system because of the special pipe used in the drainage field. Each length is 10 ft. long and 12 inches in diameter. Each piece is ribbed, perforated plastic wrapped in a filter cloth.

I also knew I would need a site leveler to know at what depth in the soil to place each row of the enviroseptic drainage pipe. Ted Pellerin, who had designed my system, offered to let me borrow one of his. It was an old fashioned sort, just fine for what I was up to.

With the leveling device I could determine how much from grade level to take off of the drainage field. I first made some 8ft. stakes to mark the four corners of the field. They needed to be tall in order to pass level of the fixed point at which the system would be built: a nail in a small fir tree nearby. Ted had picked this point and sited everything against it. By lining up the leveler with the nail, and aligning it to my stakes I could calculate how deep I needed to dig for the pipes to sit in their proper places: seems I still needed to take away another foot of dirt. More tractor time!

With the tractor's backhoe I lowered the grade level by about a foot. By that time Steve had delivered two loads of fill, one gravel and one sand. I used this material to build a berm on the lowest side of the drainage field. The lowest side would need to be built up more than the other three; about 30" from grade level. At this point I turned my attention to the location of the future septic tank. I needed to dig a large pit located between the house and the drainage field. The tank would need to sit at a depth relative to the waste pipe coming from the house. Set at a slight angle of 1/4" per foot, the pipe could enter the inlet flange at 54.5" from the bottom of the tank. The depth would change in accord with it's distance from the house. The plans called for a standard 1000 gallon tank which measures about 6ft. X 8ft. side to side and about 6ft. tall, (54.5" to the bottom of the inlet).

I had already measured and positioned the 4" waste pipe's angle starting where the main interior drain would be located under the house to where it would exit the side of the house. Knowing that height I was able to extrapolate the depth of the tank. I wanted to put the tank as far from the house as possible because it must by code be located at least 10ft. from any structure. My future plans for the house involve an addition to this side of the existing house. The location of the tank would therefore dictate how wide my addition could be. I thus began digging next to the drainage field. A big concern when digging in Maine is stone ledge. It's everywhere and makes digging to any great depth very difficult. In my case I needed to have a pit that was about 5ft. deep. With an excavator that isn't too difficult to achieve but with my little backhoe it's a little trickier. I had to dig around a bit and displace a lot of dirt and large stone before finding the spot where a level 6'X8' bed could be made.

It was at this point on a Thursday afternoon that some very welcome guests arrived. It was my parents all the way from Roseburg, OR to help with the completion of this mighty project.

September 2010

At the end of September, Sprocket and I arrived at the House Sculpture. It was still early afternoon so I had some daylight to accomplish something. The clearing for the septic still needed finishing before the inspector could come by and look at it, so I started up the tractor and got to work. I called him the next day; I think it was Tuesday. He said he could come by on Thursday evening, so I had a couple of days to turn my attention to the house and it's awkward kitchen. I have noted during several past visits the cramped feeling of the kitchen. Some part needed fixing or "adjustment". The culprit was within the camper section for sure, specifically the spot where the old RV refrigerator was located. I also had decided months before that the entryway was not right. The exterior door must be moved. Really, the whole kitchen needed to be pushed out and that meant more floor which meant more foundation.

Before I began working I did some thinking. I do lot's of standing around thinking. I wanted to picture how the upper floor would relate to the lower. The new section would be squared to the living room section with a second floor deck, I surmised, which will have an entrance from the second floor future master bedroom... and there might be some funky tower in there too. All that will sit upon a garage/ workshop area which will also serve as a seasonal dining room or a place for guests...or something like that...

First I figured out how a wall, square to the box of the house that was the living room, would meet the porch that extended off the kitchen. I then cleared and leveled two spots where two heavy "feet" would need to be located in order to support a load bearing wall that could eventually run flush with the living room. I made the feet with my usual method of placing two 8"X8"X16" cinder blocks together and filling them with concrete. The legs consisted of pressure treated 4"X4" blocks with treated 2"X6"s attached to form "I"s. I bridged them with a thick beam of rough-cut Hemlock. The span had to be rather long, about 8ft.. The floor's close proximity to the Pine tree that will eventually be at the center of the completed house made me want to tread lightly so as not to damage any roots.

When the stringers were in place and anchored to the deck it was time to put the sub floor down. But first I had to cut away another section of the camper (about 44") so that the floor could meet the camper's floor flush and attach securely. I first moved the old RV fridge and propane heater. I began cutting with the Saws-all and Kitty made herself scarce. She always knows when I'm about to make a racket. It's always a messy job removing bits of the camper. Shortly I had yet again cut away a section of my original "house" on this land. Now all that remained was a 6ft. section of what was once the camper's tiny bathroom.

With the removal of that section, the fen Sui immediately improved. Now, in my mind's eye I could see all the kitchen appliances, shelves and cabinets falling easily into their places. It was a stark contrast to my previous mental arrangement of a losing game of Tetris.

At this point in the day, late afternoon Thursday, my time was limited to close up the opening in the wall, but it was also time for the inspector to arrive. And he did just before 6pm.

As before, he had no concerns about my haphazard building style. He took a long look at the clearing I had made and at the plans Ted had drawn up for the septic system. He issued me a permit to continue with my plan, but expressed concerns about my narrow winding driveway. It may have to be widened to get a dump truck up there for the many loads of fill it will take to complete this septic project. But that is for another time, soon to come!

August 2010

My busy work schedule during the summer season rarely gives me an opportunity to get to Maine. Luckily, at the end of August we were graced with the visit of three lovely female tattoo artists from Philly. As much as I would enjoy their company as work mates, the time was ripe for me to excuse myself and take a trip to the woods. As a person who treasures his times of solitude, the hoards of tourists on the Cape can make me very uncomfortable over the period of summer months. That many people jammed into one space makes my skin crawl. I feel like I'm immersed in some kind of human ant colony. Provincetown and the outer cape takes on the inertia of the colony: continuous, mindless movement of doing and taking and consuming. More and more ants arrive all the time, filling the limited land mass and septic tanks to capacity, all with the same frantic goal of relaxation. They all do it together, all at the same time. It's what people do and that makes it okay. That's normal. normal scares me.

It is my ultimate goal to live in the house sculpture. It's location in the great North woods with it's "hearty" winters gives my wife pause.. but she's up to give living there a try, under expected conditions: there must be functional, modern plumbing. I would want nothing less for my lovely bride. The point is she's into it! All I have to do install a septic system, sewer pipe, drain pipe, vent pipe, water lines, fixtures and appliances. Easy. I suppose I must finish building the kitchen and bathroom too... All that may take awhile. I absolutely must spent a great amount of time in Maine this winter and finish this house!

Now this is more than just coaxing my girl into living with me in some shack in the wilderness. Having a house to live in on property I own (and will own outright in a few years) means something. It means that I will have created a home for a family that is solid and payed for. It will be a place for dogs and cats and kids to run amuck making adventures and a great many other things, thanks to the possibilities that a good chunk of property affords. The community around it is no economic power dome but it is a very friendly, self sufficient community. It is a good place for a kid to grow up and learn many useful skills. I might not make as much money up there as in other places like Cape Cod or New York but I won't need to. I would only have to make a fraction and could still support a small family. My expenses are already low as this place is concerned. Over the next few years they will only go down as the tractor and land is paid off. That leaves only food, utilities, insurance (blaugh) and of course taxes. Not much. If all goes well I maybe able to set aside a few bucks for the kids to go to college or mortuary school or whatever... but I suppose I am getting ahead of myself...

For the present I need to focus on this septic system. This alone is no small task and will likely be the most costly project connected to this entire undertaking. First thing I did

was call Ted Pellerin, the local soil tester. I needed him to look at my site, test the soil and stake out the location. I had arrived Thursday evening and was going to be there until I had to leave on Monday morning. Ted came by on Friday afternoon. He had been there before when I first bought the property and had tentative plans to build some kind of camp but my plans had since changed. He was surprised to see how much it had grown up over the last few years and was delighted to see what I had been up to. "It's a hippie house!" he exclaimed. He was really into the whole project and was hoping to do something similar to make retirement affordable. The next day he came by to show his wife. I was really happy to get such positive feedback from one of the locals.

After the site had been determined and test pits dug to determine drainage capacity, I was ready to start clearing the area. I sharpened the chains on my chainsaws and mixed a new batch of fuel. I felled several trees and cut them into firewood. I loaded the pieces into my truck and took to the porch on the other side of the house and stacked them into rows. After repeating this process a couple of times I was ready to do some work with the backhoe. After the tractor was warmed up and lubed I proceeded to rip out the stumps of the trees I had cut as well as those cut by Skip, the logger before I owned the land. Pulling stumps with a backhoe can go quickly if the stump is small or many years old but can be big projects as with big hardwoods like maple and oak. In any case removal involves digging around the stump and severing the roots until the hoe can pull it free. At that point I wrap the backhoe's arm around the stump like a bully putting a kid in a head lock and drag it to my big brush pile at the edge of the property where I drop it with all the other stumps.

Over the course of my three day stay I managed to clear the area of trees and stumps and cut and stack a fair amount of firewood for the upcoming winter. I had hoped to get some work done on the house, but alas it was not to be. I gathered up Sprocket my cat and headed back to the Cape.

Wedding Preparations, April 2010

My last visit in April did not yield any further progress on the house or the property but it did so on the family front. My mission was to gather supplies and prepare for my upcoming wedding on May 1 to my lovely girlfriend (now wife) Sarah. I arrived late that night on the last Sunday in April.

The first night I got drunk. I don't know why. It was my own personal bachelor party.

The next day I built the wedding arbor out of driftwood collected by my friend Kris. I tied the sticks into bundles that could be connected together to form an archway. I also wrapped rusty chains around the uppermost peak to hang down with a hook on which our ceremonial hand-fasting ribbons would be set after all was said and done. I then tied it up against the back porch of the house and arranged black metal tiki torches (purchased that morning in Belfast) around it as a sort of mock up of what the actual ceremony might look like. I wanted it to look as though castaways recently washed ashore had put together a wedding out of what was left over. I imagined how this event might look on the beach at sunset. The butterflies in my stomach began to flutter about for a moment, then they settled back down again to rest.

The next day my family arrived: Mom, Dad my brother Aaron from Bend, OR and my sister Allison from Portland, OR. It was the first time my brother and sister had seen the land so it was fun for me to show off my accomplishments. If we had had more time I would recruited them all to help me build a bridge or something..

The following day we all drove back to the Cape, picked up my Aunt Punkin (Diane to the layman) in Hyannis.

Time to have a wedding...

More interior work, Feb. 2010

I returned to Maine at the end of February. It was during a warming trend so I had no trouble driving up to the house without plowing. During the time of my stay the snow melted considerably thanks to a warm day of rain in the middle of the week.
Upon my arrival there were the usual chores to perform. I noticed that I was getting low on firewood. I still had enough to heat the place for at least a few more weeks but I felt that I needed to add to my reserve, especially since the weather was nice and sunny, ideal for outdoors work, and would likely not last. I felled some standing dead pine nearby the house and dragged them to the porch and cut them into usable pieces. Since the trees had been dead awhile I was able to burn the wood immediately rather than waiting months for it to season. Dead (and in some cases partially rotten) wood does not burn as hot or as reliably as well-seasoned hard wood but I figured I could use the recently cut stuff during the day and heat the house with the seasoned wood at night which will burn until the next morning with the stove dampened all the way down.
With that out of the way it was time to do something I had been putting off: call the local code enforcer. I needed him to come over to issue me a plumbing permit so that I could begin the rough interior plumbing. I was rather dreading this because to date no government official had laid eyes on my project. Maine (esp. the village of Monroe) has very little in the way of building laws. I see Maine politically as a Libertarian state. Compared with other states it's citizens are granted great freedoms concerning themselves and their own well-being. Their laws seem designed more to prevent anyone doing harm to others and the environment. This is one of the reasons that I love Maine so much. I'll get into my personal politics some other time but I am a big believer in personal liberty, so long as that freedom does not compromise another's.. So in building this monstrosity I could (theoretically) build it to implode on itself but if waste water was going to be exiting into the environment it could cause others harm so it would need to be regulated. Makes sense to me, but I was still afraid of what he might say about my unorthodox well and water system as well as the rest of my weird little house. But true to the spirit of Mainers, he looked over my project like he'd seen it all before (I think maybe he had) and issued me the permit for $30. So I was ready to plumb but that would have to come later, maybe next visit.
I had decided that this trip would be about creating storage space for much of the junk I have been accumulating over the past few years. In order to work on different parts of the house I constantly have to move the ever growing collection of old metal parts, automotive and otherwise fixtures fittings pipes valves anchors hangers books blankets lamps camping gear etc. etc.. So I decided that with some permanent storage like a closet under the stairs and a (maybe not so permanent bench in the living room) I could eliminate this game of musical shit I was always playing and open up the upstairs area enough to finish the walls and eventually the bedroom. I needed a sanctuary, complete with a door, carpeting and paint so that I could finally remove myself at the end of each dirty day from the ever present dust of construction.
So my first order of business was to build a closet. It was a little tricky deciding how to frame and situate it but at the end of day three I had a closet under the stairs with an interior light, shelves, hooks and a funny looking door I built myself. It also features built in bookshelves on it's exterior.

The next morning I built a bench that may later become some sort of entertainment unit... not entirely sure yet but for now it would be very useful for storage. Now it was time for another major cleanup that would take me the rest of the day and all of the following day to complete. That included reorganizing most of my building supplies and putting some outside or under the house.
For the last six months or so I had been sleeping on a mattress in one corner of the upstairs area along with all my "living" stuff but now it was time to move downstairs. I dragged the mattress down the stairs, opened up the sleeper sofa (donated by Jim Hutto) and threw the mattress on top of the open bed. It was the best way to save space and now it looks like I have a proper bed. After reorganizing or throwing out all the junk upstairs I was ready to get to work on building a real bedroom: a dust-free zone. Such a thing may also help entice my fiance', Sarah to visit more often.
I started off framing the walls that would enclose both the bedroom and the bathroom. Next I hung sheetrock and trimmed out the doors, skylight and windows. I left an opening in the wall where the stove pipe runs up through the roof. This will also be the location of the main waste vent for the toilet sink and shower. When that is all in place I will build an inset bookcase to finish off the walls in the bedroom. After a little more trim work around the ceiling and mudding the sheetrock I'll be ready to paint.
Unfortunately, at this stage, I was at the end of my visit so with a sad farewell I gathered up my cat Sprocket and departed with the hope to return soon..