Hacking a Home: Driveway, Insulation, Cabinetry


It’s now been over a year since we last checked in with operation home hack, and … drumroll, please … we have a home! As I write this, we’re in the throes of moving and it’s still surreal that my family’s multi-year dream is finally a reality, but we’re in, and it is glorious. I’ll happily take you all on a tour of the finished product once it has emerged from a sea of boxes. In the meantime, I wanted to look back on a few of the more important hacks I learned through the construction process — from learning how to operate a standard excavator, to insulating our home to quad standards, to finding an inexpensive way to customize our kitchen’s accessibility.

Playing in the Dirt

So, it turns out that excavators are surprisingly quad-friendly. I found this out by happenstance. We had a general contractor friend, JP, who flew down from Alaska to help us out on the interior of the house just before the ’rona shut down the world. Since he knew how to operate an excavator, we convinced him to help us do some dirt work around the house — setting drain tiles at the foundation perimeter, digging a trench for underground power and even installing a septic tank and drain field.

We rented a John Deere 35G Mini Excavator, and two weeks later JP had almost everything done. Watching him work, I noticed that he never used his legs. Curious, I hauled myself up into the cab. Easier said than done, yes, but once I got the multi-step technique down, it wasn’t the most difficult transfer I’ve ever done. Up in the seat I confirmed that everything could indeed be operated with no legs and very undexterous hands. If you were ever a kid who played on those sit-on-top, metal sand-scooping contraptions, you’ll understand my excitement. Here’s a video of me climbing into the excavator:

JP gave me a run through on the controls, and I was off — very slowly — chugging across the yard. He sent me toward a dirt pile, and I practiced moving buckets full of soil from one pile to another. I was herky-jerky and highly unskilled, but sure enough, I could do it.

I extended the rental for another week, and when JP flew back to Alaska, I set about putting our driveway in. Whereas a skilled operator likely could have done it in a day, or two max, it took me a full week of labor. By the end of the week, I had a rudimentary feel for scooping, moving, scraping and leveling dirt — and I had a driveway built with my own two hands. It was damn satisfying. Plus, given the cost of dirt work, it saved us a few thousand dollars and gives us a lot more options as we continue to work on the property in the future. My son, Ewan, for one, has already started petitioning me to rent another one so I can build him a mountain bike track. “Like a pump track?” I asked.

“No. A jump track,” he corrected. Obviously.

Insulation Situation

For the past three years, my family and I lived in a 100-year-old house with minimal, if any, insulation. As a quad with piss-poor thermoregulation, this sucked. I was either hot or cold all the time. We knew that we wanted a well-insulated, draft-free home. But many of the more modern insulation techniques require either skilled professionals or extensive planning and integration into the building design.  Our pole barn shell [see Hacking a Home, Part 1] was a standard design with a standard setup process so that we could minimize the labor time and costs to construct it.

After extensive research and waffling, we decided to use a hybrid insulation technique. We hired a spray foam company to coat the entire interior shell of the building — walls and roof deck — in 3-inches of closed-cell spray foam. This was not cheap. For our 1,500 square foot home, the bill was over $8,000. That didn’t even get us up to code — we still had to add another layer of batt insulation to the roof. Instead of standard fiberglass insulation, we chose mineral wool — a byproduct of steel production — because it’s denser, less prone to breakdown over time and more fire-resistant.

I spent a lot of time second-guessing the amount of money we were going to spend on this combo. We were aiming for an inexpensive house, but we didn’t want it to be cheap. Putting extra effort and funds into the structure of a house you plan to live in for multiple decades is rarely something you’ll regret.

So we went for it, and my quad bod couldn’t be happier. We have a heat pump for heating and cooling, and the house is so well insulated that we did something weird when we moved in. We turned the pump off. It hasn’t been on for 48 hours now, during which time the outside temperature has gone up to 80 and down to 45. Outside I’ve gone from shirtless, to a long sleeve with a sweatshirt over it; inside has been all T-shirt, all the time. This does not suck.

Kitchen cabinets with roll under sink
Custom Cabinetry for Ikea Prices

Originally, we were planning to go with Ikea cabinets for the kitchen because they were within our budget. When you’re trying to make a kitchen work for a wheelchair user, custom cabinets go a long way, but after seeing what cabinet makers typically charge, we figured we’d have to make do with what we could afford. After poking around at an Ikea store though, we weren’t exactly excited about particle board.  Plus, a friend who purchased from Ikea for a kitchen remodel told us that you have to spring for the installation option. Have you ever tried assembling a bookshelf from Ikea? Yeah, imagine doing a whole kitchen like that.

After a deep dive into the internet world of “ready-to-assemble” cabinets, I happened on a company, Barker Cabinets, that built theirs out of solid, ¾-inch plywood with sturdy components. What’s more, you can customize the measurements however you want. Need to lower a countertop by a couple of inches? No problem. Need to change the depth so items are easier to reach? They can do that.

In our house’s division of labor, Kelly does most of the cooking and I do most of the dishes. We opted to keep counter heights and depths the same to easily accommodate standard appliances, but we ordered a 36-inch-wide board in the same wood as the cabinet doors instead of a traditional sink cabinet. The board covers the sink front, giving a built-in look, but allowing me to roll under the sink. After more than a decade of twisting my body to do dishes at a standard sink, I can’t tell you how nice this is.

To save money and get the look we wanted, we opted to order unfinished maple for the cabinet fronts and stain them ourselves. All-in, we probably spent about 20 hours staining and then assembling the cabinets. This was straightforward work that anyone, including me, could do. To stain the cabinets, we set a couple of long boards atop sawhorses and then a row of cabinet doors on top of the boards, putting them at perfect height for me. My mom took over much of the work after we developed a system, but that was for speed, as I could only work on weekends — the whole process was well within my functional abilities. Assembly was straight forward and took maybe a half an hour per cabinet.

We ended up spending less than $5,000 on our kitchen cabinets, which, absurdly, is less than we would have spent at Ikea. The extra staining and assembly effort was well worth it because we never would have afforded the same quality or accessibility otherwise. The only downside to ordering cabinets this way is that you have to nail your measurements and your design, because any mistakes you make are on you.

That’s kind of the deal with DIY house building though. You have to be willing to make mistakes, and put in a whole lot of extra effort, but the rewards are well worth it.

*****

Not a Threshold in Sight

Any wheelchair user knows: Door thresholds are terrible. Especially when you’re trying to roll with a cup of coffee from your kitchen to the living room and you’re barely awake to manage yourself, let alone piping hot liquid. We built our house on top of a concrete slab foundation, and instead of covering the slab with hardwoods in the living room and something more waterproof in the bathrooms, we opted to just let the slab be our floors. Other than a small bump getting in the front door, there isn’t a single threshold in the house. Once sealed, concrete is easy to clean, has no problems getting wet and hides dirt like a dream. You have to be cool with an industrial look, but otherwise concrete is an ideal flooring material for wheelchair users.

References
Hacking a Home, Part 1
Hacking a Home, Part 2


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JP Wood
JP Wood
2 years ago

Your house sounds awesome! When we renovated our existing home we did the same thing for sink access, and a floor with no transitions was a huge priority (we were successful except for the exterior door). I am impressed with your insulation success.

tuffy
tuffy
2 years ago

Oh my gosh! That glass roll door, flooring, and kitchen is absolutely amazing! Dream house!! That’s a great space foe me/anyone on a chair!! Thankyou for posting this story!!

Jo
Jo
2 years ago

I keep hearing how the pandemic has sent the price of construction materials sky high.
Has this affected you at all?
I would LOVE custom cabinetry in our kitchen to suit our access needs, but I worry that the cost is just going to be prohibitive. Especially when we don’t even own the place