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Our Sixteenth Week of Wall Building The Project: A 2,163 square foot house utilizing dry stack concrete block construction with a central courtyard and based on the Spanish colonial-era missions in San Antonio. The Challenge: Can a forty-something married couple design and build an attractive, efficient and mostly paid-for house while remaining sane, solvent and married? With no actual prior construction experience? Hmmmmm - let's check in on our Contestants and see how they're doing... |
| The east wing of the house is progressing nicely, as seen from this shot atop the entry way. I continue to fill in the outer walls up to the 15th course and still need to set up and pour the window lintel beams for this wall. Note the sharply reduced amount of sunshine coming in through the windows onto the floor as opposed to the unfiltered sunshine on the interior wall - the energy efficent windows will help keep the house cool during Texas summer heat. |  |
| The bulk of this week's work goes into the west wing. One of the management team's priorities for the west wing was a pet door, seen here, which will have a dog washing area next to it. If you live in the country, you've got to have dogs and if you've got dogs, a concrete basin to wash them in helps keep the great outdoors where it belongs - outdoors. |  |
| We'll be adding another couple of cedar beams to the living and dining areas this week. Here, we've felled a couple of trees and trimmed them with the chain saw. The trees stilll need to have the bark peeled, so I set up shop on the back of this truck. Setting up a good work station is important, especially if you're doing the job with no additional crew. |  |
| At risk of making an adze of myself (yes, that was a terrible pun), I use a machete to scrape and peel the bark from the tree trunk. What we call the cedar down here is also called the juniper, and can suck 50 gallons of water per day per tree out of the water table - a huge amount for a semi-arid environment. We will be cutting and using a LOT of our own cedar in the construction process. |  |
| The west wing, with all three beams up. We continue to bask in sunshine as Christmas approaches and the weary owner/builder ponders what finishing this house will mean to the family fortunes for the coming year. May peace, progress and prosperity come to all for Christmas of 2002. |
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| Want to see a rough floor plan? Want to be notified when we post new pictures? Just e-mail us! | |
| Next week's installment: Don't wire until you see the whites of their eyes... Click HERE |
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