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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... |
| We're making pretty good progress, as this photo of the East wing shows. We are standing at the entry doorway and looking through my humble domain (storage and recording studio) and into The Wife Zone (dressing area and site of Feminine Mysteries). The partial block walls provide good acoustic insulation for my recording area and will be topped out with acoustically-treated wall materials. |  |
| The first course of parapet blocks have rounded the corner of the house and are steadily making their way along the north wing. I keep multiple projects going at the house site simultaneously to make the most effective use of whatever time and materials I have at hand during each working day. Such as... |  |
| ...the walls for the laundry nook. The washer and dryer will be tucked in against the long wall. We'll be using blocks for this area because of their excellent noise insulating qualities for this sometimes loud area of the household. I mix up a batch of mortar to lay the first course of blocks, but seem to have some left over. Hmmmm..... |  |
| Mortar mix, which we call mud, is basically cement mixed with extra sand instead of gravel. It's smooth and therefore an ideal wall patching material. Closing up chinks in the walls caused by uneven block dimensions is an ongoing chore. Here, my incredibly charming and beautiful spouse uses up some more of my leftover mortar mix. |  |
| I still have a bit of mortar left, so I'm laying out a slope for an exterior window sill to shed rain. These will be covered with stucco when we do the rest of the exterior walls. I'm smoothing the concrete out with the aid of a rubber float. A member of management supervises from the background through the laundry room window. |  |
| Want to see a rough floor plan?Want to be notified when we post new pictures? Just e-mail us! Want to see the rest of the story? Click on Gimme Shelter Home Page. |
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| Next week's installment: Turning the corner Click HERE |
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