Phase Six: Walls!

Once the foundation walls were completed and the dirt spread, a concrete cap and floor was poured on top of the fill. As soon as the concrete floor was dried in the masons went to work raising the walls of the house. This is the current phase of construction and is in day two of a project four-day cycle to completely construct the block shell of the house. I'll update this section the week after Thanksgiving when the masons complete their work. They worked today, Saturday, 11/18/06, and will be taking next week off for the holiday.

That's Mercy's Dad checking out the construction. Thanks for lending scale to the pics, Papi!

Licky the yard cat came over to inspect and gave his comment by peeing on the wall. Damn cat!

Pedro also had to get in on it, but he was too dumb to figure out how to get up from the garage.

By the way, that last shot is the fireplace again. Having never had a fireplace before, I am kind of fascinated by this thing and how it is being built. Can you tell I've lived my whole life Florida, or what!

Phase Five: Foundation

Once the footers were in and dry, the foundation went up in short order. They built the foundation walls around about 90% of the footprint of the house, leaving one opening on the northern end for a large frontend loader to get into the new foundation to spread the fill dirt. You'll notice that as the photos below progress the foundation walls rise, the fill dirt is piled up inside the foundation, and finally the fill dirt is spread out and foundation is closed up.

Phase Four: Footers

The first sign of construction activity was the digging of footers for the foundation. This was a pretty quick and interesting process. I was intrigued by all the rebar and the way it was bent, tied, and formed into the footers. Concrete was poured into the trenches and allowed to set before the foundation began to rise. That square area with all the rebar in it is the footer for our new fireplace.

By the way, if you notice in the first photo, our roof is still brown despite the recent color change. That will be another project in the near future to retint the existing roof to match the new one. I will also be removing and reconfiguring the chain link fence behind the current house.

Phase Three: Scraping, Water, and Marking

With all the demolition and land clearing completed, it was time to turn things over to the construction contractor to start the house. Surveys were conducted and the new house was officially plotted on the property. The contractor then sent in a tractor crew to scrape the lot to clearly identify where the work would occur and to prepare the site for footers.

In this series of shots you'll also see the existing house so that you get some perspective on where all of this work is occurring. You'll also note that we have recently repainted the house white with black trim to match the house that is being built. Also in this series is a shot of the water pipe that I had run to connect the new house to our existing well on the extreme east side of our property.

Phase Two: Clear the Land

With the old house demolished, it was time to clear the land where the new house would sit. This phase of work consisted of hauling away a massive amount of junk and debris that had accumulated on this patch of land over the past 60 years. It also involved clearing out about 14 smaller trees of assorted varieties that included a couple of pecan trees and what I suspect was a very large oleander tree. Between the junk and the trees, I filled up 14 of those large construction site dumpsters. You can see the dumpsters in some of these shots. This phase took me several months to complete and I got to log a lot of hours running assorted equipment, including two different sizes of track hoes, two different sizes of front end loaders, and a small tractor with bucket and backhoe. I also improvised with my pickup truck and garden tractor from time to time to get one job or another finished. At one point I also had to hire one of those wreckers that hauls semi trucks to come out and pull over some large tree stumps.

Speaking of those tree stumps, that was a sad development. You will see two nice oaks in some of the early photos. These trees were originally going to be in our new backyard. But, a blight that has been killing off my oak trees got these two as well and that ended my grand plans for those trees. So, we decided to punt and backed the house up about 50 feet from our original plan. These trees were not exactly giants, but they were good sized. It took me 16 hours of track hoe time to dig out the root balls around them enough for the wrecker to be able to pull them over. After that it took several weeks of work to cut up those two tree trunks and haul away the debris. The two root balls were a project in and of themselves. In the end these two root balls were too much for the front end loaders I had access to (despite them being medium-sized loaders) and I had to bring in the pros one more time. They drove in one of those large loaders you see on construction sites and tossed the root balls into dumpsters and finished that part of this phase.

A bit of dirt (five loads) and some tractor work to spread it and this phase of the project was done. Completion of all this work meant that house construction could begin. Total time spent to get to this point was roughly nine months. Enjoy the photos!

Phase One: Demolish Old House and Clear Junk

This project started at the beginning of 2006 when I demolished an ancient house that stood on the corner of our property about 100 yards west of our current home. Knocking down the house was easy as I hired a company to come in with their heavy equipment and do it for me. They also loaded most of the old house into dumpsters and hauled it away for me. From that point on the job was in my hands.

Here are some photos of the house before it was knocked down. You can also get a sense of the magnitude of the junk that I had to contend with in these shots: