Yesterday, when I left the land, I locked up our house. It's not a slab anymore, or a slab and walls... the roof is on so it's dried in, and it locks up...it's a house. A bit on the primitive side, granted, but it's now a house for all intents and purposes. It was kind of a big deal emotionally, oddly so (for me), to turn the key and hear it lock.
Dad came up again for a long weekend and Kenny came up for a couple days again to (I love those guys!). They've both been a Godsend, and I couldn't have built this house without them.
Dad came up on Friday, and it was pouring rain most of the morning. We erected a kind of tent inside the house to work under, boxed together a temporary support beam, and then set it up. Then we began cutting the roof beams and putting them up. The process to put those initial ones up was: Dad would take the center on the scaffold, and I'd walk the other side of the beam up the ladder and then toenail it in place along the outside while he did the same on the inside.
Saturday Kenny came up, and we finished out the beams and joists. We started covering it with OSB the next day and finished up that night. Monday, Dad stayed up and we went and got the doors and windows and put those in, and laid out our horizontal support beams for the second floor. I'm going to pay someone to put tin on top of the roof (I've determined I don't like being that high off the ground in my old age), but aside from that the majority of the major stuff is done!
I can plink around during my free time and finish out most of it from here on out. This is really a momentous occasion, it's no longer "the land" but "the house". There's no way to communicate the depth of feeling that inspires to someone who hasn't gone through the entire process of conception and creation to any large project.
Anyway, without further ado, enough rambling and more pix! These are roughly in time sequential order, so if you do the slide show thingy, you can just go through and get a picture time line in fairly accurate order.
View from top SE window
Temporary Shelter while we make the temp support beam...and the temporary support beam
Starting the beams, then the joists
Putting on the OSB (plywood...)
The House from the front, roof on, but without windows or doors.
From the inside with windows and doors...
And the outside...
It's coming together nicely! I've still got a ton of stuff to do, obviously, but this felt like a huge milestone. I feel very blessed, God is good.
More to come later, thanks for reading!-Jj
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