Off The Grid

what lite deck looks like when poured. Note if you need deeper vertical "T"s you add additional styrofoam spacers on the top prior to pouring and installing rebar.

lite deck concrete floor design handbook. span tables and rebar requirements.

I just compared notes with a local guy who built his house recently..... we adedd up zip sheathing, studs and spray foam and we're at $6.50 sqft of exterior wall. ICF costs $10/sqft. so 40% more... but much better wall.

I just broke down the above costs for MATERIALS assuming $200/yard concrete costs. Around these parts , the concrete guys charge the same as materials for their labor, so $5000 of concrete becomes $5000 in labor for a total of $10k. ICF blocks seem to be about $25/each. Concrete slab on grade $3.20/ft2 Concrete slab labor $3.20/ft2 Walls (L x W x H) ICF blocks and concrete to fill them $10/ft2 Floor deck (L x W) ICF forms and concrete for floor $8.20/ft2 Concrete labor $3/ft2 for floors. I'm not sure what a stick build house costs per foot. Most stick build houses are assumed to be 8' walls and are priced per square foot of floor space... I'm not sure how much stick built exterior walls cost... but spray foam ain't cheap and building codes require zip sheathing for air ingress. These ICF costs replace studs and sheathing now and insulation that you'd have to buy later anyway. For those new to the channel, I have an ICF 4800ft2 house and my actual measured cost of heat and air cond for the year is $350. I'm using a 3.5ton ducted minisplit heat pump. The SEER rating is 16. ICF may cost a little more but it saves you money for a lifetime.

My kid sister is considering moving up here to the "compound". She and bro in law talking about ICF house like this one but smaller,.. 1200ft^2 each floor and bulding it half into a hillside. From uphill it would look like a house on a crawlspace, but on the downhillside would have a walk in basement. She wants a concrete floor so it is quieter. So I just did some quick math for her..... We can do all the labor except pouring the two concrete slabs.... $ 3,800 concrete for foundation 30x40'. $15,700 various ICF blocks (corners, 45's , straight runs, etc) $12,200 concrete in ICF blocks $ 5,400 LiteDeck ICF floor deck $ 4,800 concrete for first floor decking -------- $41,900 This gets her slab foundation, exterior walls 20' high (it is two story), first floor, retaining wall. Did not include cost of rebar nor the roof. Once she adds a roof, she'd be dried in with 2400ft of heated and cooled space. Expected heating bill would be about $280 a year (based on my house being $350 a year.

From here you can install a minisplit airconditioning unit to keep it at 38F.

Anyone wanting to know... this is how a walkin cooler goes together.

So an opportunity has presented itself. My sister bought a pizza place to gut and flip the building. It's got a walk in cooler and a 2nd chamber that is a freezer. The whole thing is 16' long and 9' wide. I measured every panel yesterday and I can rearrange them to fit. Also, it has two vault type insulated doors and a wall section with a glass door... I'll remove the glass door panel and have enough left over pieces to fill in the gap. (panels with X's are vault doors and panel with V is the glass door). So, for the labor of cutting 4 pieces of foam wall material and trimming the width down to 88" to fit my basement corridor, we'll have a huge walk in freezer/cooler. Final dimension 16ft x 88inches. * left original layout, right modified to fit my basement.

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