This is a great site; I've learned a lot from it! Steven in Colorado Spring, CO

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moving along

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 7/30/2008 3:44:28 AM

well a lot has been accomplished since my last post. it's amazing how fast things take shape during framing, seeing progressveryday is encouraging. the walls are up windows and doors are in, stairway roughed in to basement. my cousin is my gc and did all of the framing, I helped set trusses and lift a couple of walls. it had rained so much that i had to dig my footers out by hand, not fun. friends and relatives helped pour my basement floor 23.5 yds of crete went really well, they also helped lay shingles we were able to do one side of the house on saturday and one side on sunday. I backfilled around the house first with about 110 tons of river gravel and then with dirt. we poured  the front porch, turned out real nice we love our front porch it runs the full length of the house which is 48 ft and is covered, it is shaded most of the time, probably spend alot of time on it relaxing with a cold beverage. my father in law is doing our rough in electric right now and i am roughing in the plumbing, this is my first plumbing job so i'm learning as i go, it got pretty frustrating the other night so i called it quits to take a break and i'm planning on finishing it up this weekend, the plumbing inspectors have been very helpful through my project so far even coming out and looking at it before i glue it up so i can make changes before my actual inspection. my brother asked me the other day if it was worth doing so much work myself and if i would do it again. absolutely it has been worth it, the most rewarding thing i've ever done. as if i would do it again, i've always only planned on doing this once because i don't ever plan on moving.

rain

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 7/3/2008 3:54:57 AM

well at this pace we might get the house done before the 1 yr loan expiration. the rain continues to delay things. i have scheduled and cancelled the basement floor pour 3 times now. we did get the floor joists and plywood on yesterday. lumber is to be delivered first thing in the am if the weather holds off we may have some walls today. but it is supposed to rain the next 4 days so i won't hold my breath. it has rained so hard that it has washed about 6 inches of silt around my footer drains, so it looks like i get to shovel some more dirt. we will just move forward whenever we can i'm trying not to get too discouraged, after all i can't control the weather.

when to give up

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 6/3/2008 3:48:51 AM

I have always wanted to do most of the construction on my house and that included laying the block for my basement but after 2 days and about 300 block later I'm going to get someone to do it. I'm not afraid to try anything and I watched some guys lay block and thought it looked fairly easy, was that a mistake. my father in law can lay block but not real fast. I had another friend who is a real good mason and he came over and started the corners for me. luckily my father in law is working for a block layer and concrete guy right now and he doesn't have any jobs right now. I'm supposed to meet with him tonight, hopefully he can give me a decent price and start soon. Oh well nothing hurt except my pride we'll roll with it and move on. I have a new respect for block layers.

making slow progress

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 5/12/2008 10:02:03 AM

once again the rain has hampered progress. we did get about 4-5 hrs of digging done friday night. saturday was beautiful and we worked from about 7:30am to 8:30pm. a friend of mine ran the trachoe and i ran the skid steer. I felt like someone had beat me up by the end of the day. we made alot of progress. my wife took some pictures will have to try and post them. sunday it poured rain all day. i just hope it dries out for the coming weekend so i can get finished up, still a lot of dirt that needs to be moved around. digging the basement has turned out to be quite a bit of work but if it was easy everybody would be doing it. as my friend said to me as we were standing on the mound of dirt we had just dug out of the ground, this time next year we'll be standing in this same spot looking at your house and talking about the day we dug the basement, that's all the motivation i need.

first delay

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 5/5/2008 4:50:37 AM

we started digging our basement this weekend. I was able to get a trachoe and bobcat on friday. that would let us dig friday eve. and sat and sun. sounded like a good set up but it rained friday and sat am so we didn't get started until 1:30 sat afternoon. then about 7pm the trachoe broke. we got about 1/4 of the basement dug out. trying not to get too discouraged, i've got everything set up for the following weekend. if we don't get it done then i'm in a bind my trachoe operator will be busy for 2 weeks. on the positive I don't have to pay for the trachoe so i have some of the basement dug out for no rental fees.

time to work

Posted to dream-home-ohio by greg in zanesville, OH on 5/1/2008 9:26:49 AM

hi all i have been reading  on this site for quite some time now. I read daily. well it's my turn to start sharing my construction story. my wife and i decided about 4 years ago that we would start building in the spring of 2008. after about 4-5 different house plans we are going to break ground this weekend, providing the rain holds off. my cousin is my GC, he is doing the framing and cabinets and trimwork. his drywall guy will be doing my drywall. I will be doing all the other work. a friend and i will be excavating . many countless hours have gone into planning and i'm hoping that it pays off in the form of a fairly smooth, successful construction period. i look forward to updating my journal as i look forward to reading other journal entries.