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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... |
| This is what happens when you put management in charge of anything. I ask for a wench. W-E-N-C-H, a comely one. Instead, I get a winch.Oh well, as long as it's here, I install it on the roof and make the task of getting blocks'n'buckets up here much easier. Actually, the challenge of rigging something like this up was as much a mental as a physical challenge. As a DIY kind of guy, I'm not afraid of failure because I get a lot of practice at it. |  |
| Another view of my new hoist. Intended as a winch for the bed of a pickup truck, it's rated at 1,000 pounds even though we won't be loading more than a few hundred onto it.In this photo, notice how we are bringing the cement up over the top of the parapet blocks in order to seal them off. |  |
| As you can see, this thing beats the heck out of hauling stuff up on ladders. For the $120 or so that this rig cost, it's a small price to pay for less wear and tear on the knees and shoulders. Your Humble Correspondent (and Mrs. Humble Correspondent) think it's a pretty good deal. |  |
| Another look at the ferrocement (also called ferrocrete) roof-building process. We've got our Perlite/cement mix troweled onto a layer of 1" mesh wire, which is tautly strung on nails driven into the joists to keep it off the plastic and in the center of the first 1" layer of concrete. After the initial layer of cement goes on, we string another layer of wire along the projecting nails and trowel in another layer of concrete. |  |
| The glamour that *is* home construction and I've gotta be one self-confident fool to be putting a photo like this in public, eh? On a serious note, the amount of dust you can see is typical for working with the extremely light Perlite aggregate. I think I've put on 5 pounds just through inhaling dust, but I'm on a roll and simply will not be denied... |  |
| 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: Cover That Thing Up! Click HERE |
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