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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... |
| The Wife, ably supervised here by a member of the management team, starts the massive job of worksite cleanup and trying to get the workbench organized. Why? Because we've started on the roofing work, it's time to start thinking about the next step after that, which will be building out the interior. Hence the need for a clear workbench and gathering all the tools scattered hither and yon. |  |
| Let's take a closer look at how our roofing flatwork is done. Last week we started with our pieces of insulating foam board, topped with lightweight ferrocement. Here, we've laid down a layer of nylon mesh netting (in this week's fashion color: Embarrassment Red). We will trowel in a finish layer of cement to make meshcrete. The red arrow shows the pitch, or slant, of the roof for purposes of rain runoff. |  |
| We bring the concrete up the side of the roof parapet to form our built-in rain gutters. Note that we are also bringing the meshcrete up over the top of the parapet to help seal the tops of the walls. You can see the water feature which surrounds the house on 3 sides in the background. The water feature is stocked with minnows to keep mosquitoes down and catfish for my dinnerplate. |  |
| An even closer look at the composition of our roofing. The insulating foam board is topped with a ferrocement substrate which uses Perlite as an aggregate to further insulate and reduce weight. A finish coat of meshcrete helps seal the roof and smooths out the finish to eliminate areas where water might tend to pool up and potentially cause leakage. We will eventually seal the roof with an elastomeric, reflective coating. |  |
| The final step for today's work is to spread a cheap blanket over the top of the cement. I will soak this blanket with the hose to provide plenty of water to help our finish coat cure stronger and with no cracks - an important consideration for a roof. We will leave the wet blanket here overnight. At this point, management says it's time to go home for lunch... |  |
| 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 installment: Running The Marathon Click HERE |
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