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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... |
| Seven thirty on a Saturday morning. Asleep? Not your humble correspondent/intrepid DIY builder. Or a bunch of our friends, who decided to participate in a barn raising of sorts. Here, Chris and Kenny show off their baseball batting skills using just their hammers. Neither one paid attention to my suggestion that they change their name to (Editor's note: bad pun immediately follows) Plank Aaron. |  |
| With all my time going to construction, the weeds and grass in the courtyard had grown until it looked like a set from Jurassic Park. Dan graciously offered to clear out everything over an inch tall all around the house site - a job that badly needed some attention. If I'm a stalk of Johnson grass, I don't want to get on this man's bad side. |  |
| Bill and Easy Money show some leg while they put joists up over the south wing. They came, they saw, they hammered! |  |
| Daniel (one of the few musician friends of mine you'll see awake this early unless they haven't been to bed yet) and Rodney, owner of the world's dryest wit, get busy with the mitre saw, cutting joists as they're called for.Besides the Cutting Crew here, we had the work force divided into two framing gangs which each took over a wing of the house and built towards the barrel vault arch in the center of the main wing. |  |
| Chris here elects to put his best foot, uhhh, feet, uhhhh, knees forward. The place looked like a hairy leg convention.Anthony, who actually has construction experience on his resume, did a great job organizing the crews while expressing reservations about the sanity of your humble correspondent. A true friend is someone who will help out, even if he thinks you're certifiably crazy, and that is our object lesson for this week. May everyone reading this be similarly blessed with such friendship. |  |
| 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: "The Tour de Ed" or "Pedal It Elsewhere" Click HERE |
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