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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... |
| Windows start going up. We bought ours through an architectural salvage warehouse in Austin that buys out overstock from local building contractors. Their prices are about half of what we'd be paying at the large chain stores. By doing this, we were able to buy larger, better-insulated windows than we would have otherwise been able to afford. After the windows are set in place, we use adhesive to stack the blocks on each side of the windows to hold them in. Later, we'll fill in the vertical columns on each side of the larger windows with grout and rebar. |  |
| Our good friend Sandy shows up to help us lay blocks and says "Gee, even I can do this." We may try building a house for Sandy when ours is finished and make a good, old-fashioned barn-raising party out of it. Makes me feel like singing "With A Little Help From My Friends"... |  |
| We are building an adobe-style house and decide to use an adobe building technique to fill in the small gaps in the wall created by the unevenly-sized blocks. A handful of mud (actually bedding mortar) goes on over a gap. You can see one of the red arrows I made with a construction crayon to mark the gaps. The walls will later be covered (parged) with stucco which contains strands of fiberglass. |  |
| A masonry bit, a drill and a long extension cord get the holes drilled for small conveniences like electrical outlets and faucets. Since the internal walls of the house will be done with traditional lumber framing and drywall, we have designed the house to have most of the light switches, outlets and water faucets on interior walls to keep from having to drill too many holes into concrete. |  |
| The first door frame goes in. There is a matching door which goes at the other end of the entryway leading into the courtyard. We managed to buy these century-old oak doors complete with frames and 1 matching screen door for $90 at an estate sale. We've been collecting house parts since prior to actually having a house plan or even the land to put them on. When you find a deal THIS good, you have to strike while the irony is hot... |  |
| Want to see the floor plan? Want to e-mail us? | |
| Next week's installment: A bag of concrete readymix, a bottle of aspirin and Thou... Click HERE |
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