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| Unfinished exterior |
My biggest project ever, and the one of which I am proudest, is building a house. An entire house! Woot! Our family qualified for a program with
Self-Help Homes. Our chosen house plan is the
Warm Country. We were in a group of nine families who worked together to build our own homes. None of us had ever built a house before, but we had a supervisor to teach us how to build and to make sure our work is high quality.
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| Being construction workers at our home site |
The Hubs and I were on the wall team during framing. Our job was to construct the basement walls, place and secure exterior walls, and place and secure interior walls, in that order. It was a lot of lifting. Like a
way lot of lifting. The exterior walls were beasts to lift onto the floor. They weighed several hundred pounds each and we usually had four of us (the Hubs, me, and another husband and wife) picking them up from the ground, carrying them to their location, and lifting them on to the floor. The interior walls were like putting together a ginormous puzzle. That part was kinda fun. We left the work site every day totally exhausted. The good kind of exhausted. We did that on eight of the nine houses in our group.
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| Basement walls |
Halfway through putting up exterior walls for our group's houses I discovered I was expecting a baby. That was both wonderful and scary. I was determined not to let something as trivial as pregnancy (ha!) slow me down. I am blessed with fairly easy and healthy pregnancies. The baby mercifully decided to save up all the pregnancy yuckiness until we were done and I had time to be miserable and unomfortable.
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| Interior skeleton |
When we finished our work on the exterior of the house, the Hubs and I moved on to the paint prep team. I spent my time taping windows, standing up doors, covering hardware, and caulking joints. Good heavens did I caulk joints! Anytime I see a new building going up all I can think about is how long it will take to caulk all the doors, shelves, trims, etc. in the new building. I still have nightmares. ;)
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| Ready for paint prep |
After 7 1/2 months of hard work, our homes were ready for move in! Our family waited an extra week to move in so we could repaint to the colors we wanted. A few months after moving in it was time to lay sod and plant flowers. The Hubs did that while I watched the kids and snuggled our new baby. It's so nice to have a home of our own that we love and live in a neighborhood with such great people! What a blessing!
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| After sod, but before trees and flowers |
