My Industrial Cabin Build

[WoodChuckDad]

Newest video. Sanitizing the well

Shock Chlorinating our New Well for our DIY House.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Keep chipping away at those tasks. Another one checked off.

Think I just used a gallon of bleach in my well, then pumped until you couldn’t smell the chlorine.

We withdrew a bid on property in Rockbridge county yesterday after looking at it. Was just going to be too costly to put in driveway and utilities. And after walking the land, the knoll we wanted to build on didn’t have enough room, had large rocks sticking up, and was rather steep on the sides. The lower land has a nice field, but no view of the mountains down there. Was surprised it had good LTE signal for being rather remote.

 

[WoodChuckDad]

With interest rates climbing , I am wondering if prices are gonna come down a bit. I haven’t gotten anything right about real estate in 20 years, so I am just watching. I bought a house in 99 then met a woman and got married. I wanted to sell the house but was under water on the mortgage so I held on to it as a rental. I ended selling for a nice profit to buy my land but it was all just happenstance.

 

[mike0000]

With interest rates climbing , I am wondering if prices are gonna come down a bit. I haven’t gotten anything right about real estate in 20 years, so I am just watching. I bought a house in 99 then met a woman and got married. I wanted to sell the house but was under water on the mortgage so I held on to it as a rental. I ended selling for a nice profit to buy my land but it was all just happenstance.

I don’t see prices coming down too quickly, the Inventory in my area is very low. Homes are selling in days after listing, many going over asking price. Some listings state seller will not consider offers until day x of listing. Knowing they will get multiple offers then ask for last, best, highest hoping for a bidding war.
I flip houses (when I can find/buy them) I recently put a for sale by owner sign in the yard and two directionals in the neighborhood on a Friday, I accepted an offer on Monday, $5k over my asking price.
I am concerned that a recession is looming.

Mike

 

[WoodChuckDad]

I am not sure if I mentioned it but We had some permit issues. When I got my building permit there were different people running the county community development office. Lots of people in the rural areas used to build their own homes, etc.
The new folks running the office seem to have a different philosophy. Scuttlebutt is that they don’t like self builders and think it should only take 6 months for a house to be built, but I was grandfathered in.
After my last inspection to get the early service, i got a notice from the county. I think the inspection triggered them to look thru my file and they found a discrepancy. The guy who built my septic never filed the certificate of completion with the state. Because I have a two stage system, I am supposed to file some stuff with the county court basically declaring that I will properly maintain my system. Since my state well and septic had technically expired without completion Documents they issued a stop work order.
Basically they found a reason to pull my permit. So I started calling different folks at the county and explaining that my septic and well were both put in, in 2018. Since that was the case, they allowed me to reconcile things.

I had to pay the guy who designed my septic an additional 800 to come out and verify it was done according to his plan. The guy who built the septic couldn’t do the statement of completion because he lost his license.

I had already passed the early service inspection and received permission from the county for my early power and they said I could proceed. That allowed me to install and connect the pump which was required to get a water sample which was required to do a cert of completion for the well and septic.
The guy from the state Dept of health who does the field work and a woman in the office who put me in contact with him, helped me to navigate the hoops and get the paperwork filed myself.
Yesterday, the building Official for the county issued me a 6 month extension. I have to pay a small fee tomorrow but we are back at it and “officially” building again. I had tried to stay out of the house as much as possible while sorting this out. I am glad they were reasonable in allowing me to push forward even if I am not thrilled about some of it.
I could not have woven my way thru all this without some really good civil servants who were kind enough to help.
Tonight we were running MC cable for the electric for the exterior walls. I have been doing some mock up boxes to test out different connectors and I just discovered Wago connectors last week. I am in love. I bought 250 of them in 3 different sizes and will be using them everywhere. I couldn’t find a ground screw to use on this one.

 

[BigBlue1]

Sorry to hear about your permit/gov challenges. That really is not how it should be. I've spent a bunch of time on a fast-developing city's planning commission and city council and have seen how this can work when it is run more professionally. Rules should be codified and not subject to 'reinterpretation'. But it is what it is. Glad you have worked through it.

Are these Wago connectors basically a new-fangled wire nut? It looks like a pretty decent idea. I may have to check into them.

Rob

 

[ovrszd]

I too like the connectors. Am I correct in assuming you lift the lever to release the wires if needed? Simple push in to connect? I really like their streamline design. Thanks for posting about them!!!

 

[WoodChuckDad]

The Wago pictured is a lever model. They also make a stab connect model. I like this one because you open the lever put the wire in and close it. Opening takes some effort but it snaps **** easily. It can be used from 24-12 g for solid, stranded or fine stranded. It uses a metal bus that connects all the wires across. This means I can wire the thin stranded light fixtures to the 12 g romex with ease and they are smaller than wire nuts. No twisting and easy to fold. They are not really new, just new to me. They sell them on Amazon. But my local electric supply store had them for about the same price. So I got 100 each of the 2 and 3 port and 50 of the 5 port. I spent 96.88 US $. So about 3-4 times what I can get wire nuts for.
5 port was $14 for 25
3 port was $35 for 100
2port was $29 for 100.
There are some good videos out there about them, including overload testing pull out force testing, etc.
I am going to use them everywhere that I can.
They also make some that can handle 10g.

 

[34Willys]

My Wife and I cleared land and built our own hose same as you back in 99/2000. Friends and family help on the weekends, self help during the week after working all day.
Our county was very helpful, as was our inspector. He said he enjoyed owner/builder because he knew we were going to do the best we could as it was our house, not some spec house builder trying to cut corners.
There was a requirement to show progress every 180 days, but they were cool if we let them know what was delaying our progress.
Patrick

 

[buckeyefarmer]

When I built in 1997 my county was very homeowner builder friendly. Now, not so much. I found out when building my barn they had put a year limit on building permits, any excuse for more fees.

Makes it kind of intimidating to build yourself any more.

I’m used to gravity flow septics, seems like a lot of percs now are engineered, or drip systems. More complex and more costs.

Glad they worked with you to get things approved, but it sure isn’t like it used to be.