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Here's a quick "then and now" view of where we stand with the construction:

Background: when I bought this property, it was always my intention to have a "real" house built on it. With interest rates so low, Karen and I decided in 2002 that the time was right to pursue this dream. It has taken us a year to figure out what we wanted to do, who we would contract to do it, and how we would finance it. But now it's finally happening.

Manufactured homes: we ultimately decided on a manufactured home for our new house. A "stick-built" house would cost 2 or 3 times as much per square foot, putting a house of the size we wanted out of our price range. And the quality of manufactured homes today makes them comparable to stick-built homes. Our house will be coming from Silvercrest. We're getting a house from their Westwood Craftsman series, specifically the WC 6 model, with this floor plan.

The team:The dealer we're using is Custom Manufactured Homes in Jamestown, run by Pat Crass and his dad John. They also run Woods Creek Builders, the contracting firm we're using to do the work. Pat and John have both been a real pleasure to work with. They enjoy their work, they enjoy the positive things their work brings to people's lives, and they're very professional. Our financing is being handled by Danny Heuton of Alpine Mortgage. Anyone in Tuolomne County who's had anything to do with real estate or construction will tell you that Danny is a real pillar of the community, as well as an honest and dedicated professional.

Financing: We entered into this project knowing very little about how mortgages and refinancing works, other than that mortgage rates were low, and unlikely to get much lower. We should walk away from this with a 30 year mortgage at 6.25%, which we're very happy with, but the world of home finance is a topic all its own.

The actual construction: We've gone through a number of steps so far. Karen and I are trying and write them up and document them with photos as best as we're able.

  • Removing the old house. The old house overlapped with the foundation site for the new, so it had to go. We bartered with Wayne Young to pull this off (otherwise we would've paid the contractor $5000 to demolish an old, but perfectly usable house). Wayne took the house, felled some trees for us, and agreed to turn back to us a portion of the felled trees in usable lumber. In exchange, he got a free house. Wayne and three of his buddies did all this:
  • Garage life. In the mean time, we've moved all our possessions into the garage, which is also serving as a temporary apartment. Check out the new bathroom. We're ready to have phone and eletrical service moved to the new pole.

  • Prepping the foundation. Our foundation will be a concrete slab. There are several steps required to prepare a site for concrete pouring:
    • First, get a really big bulldozer.
    • This thing can grade an entire foundation site in an afternoon.
    • Grading a perfectly level foundation is really important. I've always wondered how they do this. Turns out they use a laser to communicate to the bull dozer, and keep it callibrated on a perfectly level grade.
    • When it's all done, the finished foundation pad looks something like this.
    • Having a pad is only part of the job. You also have to have a frame within which to pour conctrete.
    • This involves create a wooden framework nested within another wooden framework. The area between the two is lined with rebar. When you're done, you're ready to pour concrete.
  • Moving Power. Now I know why I don't want to work for PG&E. While the foundation frame was being graded and built, we had power moved from the old utility pole to the new. They send one guy, by himself. If anything happens to him, well, too bad, I guess. Taking down the old power line isn't so bad. But disentangling the line from where they had stapled it to a tree didn't look like much fun. After that, putting up the new line was a breeze.

  • Trenching. New power lines and new water lines have to run somewhere. With the new setup, we need:
    • A power line into the garage
    • A power line to the pump in the well
    • A power line to the house
    • An unfiltered, outside water line for watering plants (we can't use filtered water for this, as the salinization from filtering would kill the plants)
    • A water line to run into the garage, through the yet-to-be-installed water filter, and then back to the new house
    All of these lines require lots of trenches. Digging all these trenches has turned our yard into a big pile of dirt.

  • Pouring the foundation. Our foundation consists of a concrete form, which is a kind of low perimeter wall, and a concrete floor. It took six cement trucks to provide enough concrete. The crew uses a long hose that looks like a reverse vacuum cleaner. This pours concrete into the wooden frame they had set up. Finally they pour the concrete floor, for a finished foundation. Seeing the poured foundation was a big deal. This step makes it look like a real construction project, one where we can begin to visualize the end result. Everyone, including our cat, has been eager to check out the new foundation.

  • Water. In parallel with the foundation activity, other things have been happening. Every house needs a way of disposing of waste. We're too rural to be on the county sewer system, so we have a brand new septic tank, with a waste line running through a trench connecting it to the foundation.

    A much bigger problem for us has been water quality. Much of the mountainous area in Tuolumne County has high iron content, particularly iron and manganese. Our old Culligan water software did little to help. Through the services of Sierra Water Filtration, we now have a Hague Watermax Filter. This is a chemical filter that removes bacteria, chlorine, and minerals, as well as applying salt as a water softening agent. It can remove up to 10 parts per million of iron, which is just about what we have. Ours now sits quietly in the garage doing its job. This gives us clean running water in the sink in the garage, and has enabled me to set up a makeshift hot water heater so that we can shower. The water heater is pretty simple: take an aluminum trash can (aluminum absorbs heat well), spray paint it black (black absorbs heat), stick it on the roof so it gets plenty of sunlight and some gravity water pressure, then run it through some flexible dishwasher hose to a shower head. By mid afternoon the water temperature gets to about 88 degrees, which is not hot, but warm enough to take a tolerable shower.

  • Placing Section 1. Our house was built in the Silvercrest factory in Woodland, California (just north of Sacramento on I-5). In Tuolumne County there is one guy, Jim Barnes of JV Enterprises, who has the skills and the truck needed to move modular home sections around. They bring the house one section at a time, and each section has to be maneuvered onto our lot, and then placed onto the foundation.
  • When the first section arrived, they have a crew with walkie-talkies coordinating with Jim, who drives the truck, to make sure they maneuver it correctly. If you've ever tried to drive backwards with a trailer behind you, then you know that this kind of driving is a real art. The key is this black column attached to the trailer hitch of the truck cab. This column slides side to side by as much as four feet, and up or down by as much as 18 inches, giving the driver very fine control over the trailer. With that kind of control, they can put a section right where they want it.

    Throughout this process Karen and I have puzzled over just how they would put a section onto the foundation. I figured they'd use some kind of crane to lift it into place. I was way off. In fact, two guys with some specialized equipment do the whole thing by hand. It goes like this:

    • Set support piers within the foundation;
    • Set rails made of steel I-beams onto the support piers;
    • Using a hand crank, pull the house section across the foundation on the rails;
    • Once the section is in place, raise it up slightly with hydraulic jacks, remove the rails and piers, and then lower it onto the foundation.
    This part of the process, by the way, attracted more of an audience than anything so far. Not only did friends and neighbors come out to watch, but all of the other crew hung around just to watch these two guys do their thing.
  • Placing sections 2 and 3. Section 1 was smaller than the other two; only 39 feet in length instead of 57 feet. That meant clearing some room for placing the other two sections, at the expense of one of our oak trees. Even so, section 2 nearly took out our fence. With a lot of finesse, they did finally get section 2 in place and ready to roll onto the foundation. Once again, the crew worked their magic, laying down I-beam rails and pulling section 2 into final position.

    One of the impressive features of Silvercrest homes is the amount of lumber that goes into them. Modular homes traditionally have a reputation -- and unfortunately an appraised value -- below custom constructed homes. But your typical custom home is made of 2x4's, and done as a one-time job. Silvercrest homes are built to a standardized process, and the structure is all 2x6's.

    One of the exciting moments with the arrival of section 2 was we finally got a glimpse of our new kitchen. The blue formica countertops look really great, and we love the solid maple cabinets. This is an upgrade from the standard model that cost us $1700, but to my mind that's a bargain. It's $1700 that gets folded into the mortgage, as opposed to paying $3000-$4000 out of pocket for equivalent "after market" cabinetry.

    2 down, 1 to go. Section 3 finally arrives. Woohoo! Like section 2, section 3 was a tight fit, but by this point the crew had plenty of practice. It didn't take them more than half an hour to get section 3 from the street into place to be put on the foundation. It's really an awesome sight to see all three sections assembled on the foundation. It's finally starting to look like a real house!

    Finishing Touches. In the final stages, very little needs to be done, and it all seems to take too long. We've been living in the garage for more than two months, and it gets old. What's happening now:

    • Interior work. Inside the house they've done paint and dry wall touch-up, put in the rounded corners on the walls, set up the lights, ceiling fans and blinds. The only remaining items are laying the carpet and correcting a few factory defects (we'd like the dishwasher to work, and we'd like the kitchen counter top to actually be attached to the counter).
    • Exterior work. They've now finished the landscaping, and laid gravel on the final grade. The plumbing, electrical, and gas have all been hooked up and cross-connected between the three sections of the house. We have steps to the front door and side door. The last step is attaching and painting something call the belly band. This is a strip of wood that covers the seam between the house and the concrete foundation.
    Once these steps are complete (some time in the next week), we can close on the financing, move in, and finally enjoy our new house and the view from the deck and family room we've been longing for.

    Final Steps: Closing! For the last week, time feels like it's at a standstill. The house looks done. Every day it looks done. And every day some little thing has yet to be done:

    • The dish washer doesn't work
    • The ceiling fans are wired wrong
    • Backup drainage lines from under the house weren't hooked up
    • The front door jams in the door frame
    • The master bedroom door doesn't close at all
    You get the idea. None of these things are serious, all are within normal bounds of what gets overlooked on a big project, but they take time.

    September 24: We're done! We're moving in! The first one in is, of course, the cat. All the remaining issues have (basically) been worked out, we've closed on the financing, and signed dozens of forms at the title company. Here's a final pristine look at the inside of the house before we start moving furniture in:

Last updated:
9/29/04