This morning, as the sun was rising, I filmed a quick vid of the framing progress:
Today we finished our 3rd full day of framing. Our progress includes 9 completed walls and one completely cut, laid out and ready to frame and erect. With each day we make better progress, capitalizing on lessons learned from previous days. Last night at 2230 hours I realized I needed to frame the garage to house wall at a different height. The garage ceiling is at 8′ and the house at 10’/ There is a 3.5″ step down to the garage, and the garage ceiling joists are trusses at 12″ height. Adding all this together required additional calculations and the […] 
OK… this is going to be a really short post. We are on our way to pick up our boys from Mom and Dad’s, but wanted to post a photo of the progress thus far. We have done several short walls, and have most of the wall between the house and garage cut and ready for assembly. The hoist works really well on shorter sections of wall… we even lifted the laundry room wall with the window over the water supply line without any difficulty. We had a bit of delay this morning due to a little rain. We spent […] 
Since we decided to do as much of the framing as we can ourselves, the question about how to lift those heavy wall sections came into play. We decided to try out the use of our engine hoist with an extension to see if we can get some mechanical help. Thinking that we’d like to try it out on a small section of framing first, we used it very successfully on a small section of wall on the front of the house. After preassembling the wall section on the concrete pad, we were able to lift it into place using […] 
First wall almost framed With quotes as high as $14,500 to frame the house (excluding lumber and material and we already have the roof trusses orderd and paid for) we decided to frame the first floor ourselves. Depending on how it goes we are looking at using a sub-contractor to set the trusses, frame out the room above the garage and add roof sheathing. Rather than using hammer and nails we decided to purchase a framing gun. I purchased a low-end Porter and Cable 30degree framing nail gun. The old compressor I had just was not up to […] 
Framing lumber staging area This week we checked everyone’s prices for framing lumber and materials and evaluated services, lumber return policy and service. We selected a local company, Roswell Do it Center, to provide our lumber and framing materials. We set up a draw account to obtain contractor discount on materials and scheduled our first lumber delivery for Friday. We will frame the exterior walls first, then the interior partitions. THis way we will only have the minimum of lumber required on site. More lumber clogs up the site and the longer it sits, the more prone it […] 
We’ve decided there is a direct correlation between concrete pouring on our homestead and rain. As with the main foundation pour, the night before the pouring of our porch and patio, we got a heavy rain. As with the main foundation, there was no problem caused by the rain… We wanted to pour the porches and patio before the framing so that we would have that complete before framing out the large overhang on the back side of the house, which will require load-bearing pillars. Here is a little photo of back porch area after the pour: Porch […] 
For any readers who remember how our pecan trees looked when they were first transplanted, here are a few photos of the progress of their growth after two months. The photos were taken July 12: I’m also including a couple of photos of the nectarine and peach trees that are thriving… and a shot of a bird’s nest in one of the trees. We also planted some calendula under each pecan tree… we expect beautiful flowers soon. Calendula We have modified the watering schedule to three times/day for each tree. As […] 
OK… to be fair, this isn’t exactly on the Homestead, but yesterday I helped pick 4 bushels of Bartlett Pears from my parents’ tree. For the past few days, we have been trying the pears to see if they easily detach from the tree when moved sideways from the stem. Yesterday morning, after a quick trip to the (somewhat disappointing) local farmer’s market, the pears snapped right off the tree, showing us that it was time to harvest. From an article sent to me by a very good friend, we learned that the pears should be ripened in a […] 
Here is a panorama of he completed slab about 30 minutes before the concrete workers departed. The form boards are still in place and we were going to wait a day before pulling the forms off. The monolithic slab is completed! |