That's me and my 70Hp Perkins diesel MF tractor starting on the driveway.
I started in the middle and worked my way toward both ends. All I had was a two bottom plow and the loader bucket. I plowed the top soil and scooped it up with the bucket. Took a little longer than a bulldozer, but it sure was cheaper.
I'm halfway to the road.
Now to go the other way to were the house is going to be built.
A few objects that got in they way needed removing. This was one of two stumps that needed to be removed. I'm sure glad for hydraulics. Makes this kind of work easy.
Ah, the first load of gravel.
Needed a drainage pipe thru the field. That car and trailer hauled a lot of building supplies.
Thirty three (yes 33) loads later the driveway is complete up to were the house is to be built.
The Tonka Toys are finally here to dig the big hole.
Say dear, did we give the right plans to the builder? That's an awfully big hole.
The architect and his son making sure that everything is square. The basement needed to be very close to the dimensions do to the fact that the house would have panel walls installed.
The forms are all set up ready for the pour. The walls are 10" thick poured concrete walls. Unfortunately I missed the pour. Your looking down the cellar stairs from the garage. A straight shot into the basement for those sheets of plywood.
Here come the panels for the outside walls and the ceiling. It'll be clearer in the next few pictures how this system works.
The panels were off loaded onto a mobile home frame for storage. We wanted to keep the panels off the ground. Notice the two different thicknesses. The thinner ones are the wall panels, 5 inches thick. The thicker ones are the ceiling panels, 8 inches thick. The panels have horizontal wire runs in them at the appropriate heights for plugs and switches, plus vertical runs every four feet.
The completed basement walls ready to have the cap installed. Notice how big an area I'll have for a model railroad
The cap almost completed. The square hole in the center is for a circular stairway. They take up less room. The basement is fully accessible through the garage, at the top left of the picture.
The outside walls going up. The windows and door openings are cut in later, No studs are used for the outside walls.
Here you can see how thick the ceiling panels are. The inside walls are regular stick built walls. You can just barely see the holes in the wall panels to the upper left of the hole in the floor.
Here you get a good view of the ceiling panels going in place over the master bedroom. Notice the vertical holes in the wall panels. This lets you run wires from the basement to the attic. BTW those panels can support a lot of weight over there full span. The roofers used one as a scaffolding when putting on the roof.
Standing in the attic over the kitchen you get a good view south of how big the attic is. The panels serve well as a floor for the attic.
This view shows the roughed in house looking northwest. As you can see it looks some what like a railroad station with the hip roof line and large overhanging eves. The windows are yet to be installed. Then it's all mine to start the finishing work. It's about late August at this point.
I'm putting up a skeleton for the fake beam that will run the length of the great room. That's 13ft in the air. Quite nerve racking on a step ladder and scaffolding.
This is how the house was kept warm the first year. It worked pretty good. It kept the house at a 45 to 55 degree temp. Luckily it was a mild winter. The following year the heat was installed.
The wood working tools are starting to show up in the basement to start on the kitchen and bath cabinets. All are made from cherry. The cherry comes from my father-in-laws woods. It was all rough cut and staked in the basement to dry out.
When I started to lay the kitchen out the wife could not picture in her mind how it would look so I decided to mock up the kitchen using 3/8 inch square wood and news paper. The wood was glued together with hot glue and the paper was glued on with it also. Worked great.
All done, in news paper that is. You won't believe how many people leaned on the paper and fell thru. My dad almost laid his camera on it. This view from the great room.
This picture taken from the garage entry.
The radiant floor heating stapled to the sub flooring with plastic staples. The reflectors are only needed around the perimeter of the house according to the manufacturer,
A 5/8" hole thru the joists is all that's need to go to the next run. There is close to 3000 linear feet of tubing running thru the whole house. The house is zoned of into several zones so different areas can be heated to different temps.
That's my mom and dad doing some brick laying. The whole house is to be brick faced when done. No painting for me.
And this is how much they got done in one year working a couple of hours in the morning for about two months. When dad fell off the scaffolding we told them that we would take over from there. This is as far as it has gotten in nearly 5 years time.