Building a stick frame house in the woods in 90 days

[murphy1244]

Awesome thread Pete, Thanks.

 

[Diamondpilot]

They began excavating for the foundation yesterday. Below are some pics of the progress.

In this first picture, you can make out the Blue Ridge Mountains behind the trees. This is basically facing North. Once I clear those, it will open up a very nice view I think.

And here's a view facing East.

Outline of where the attached 1 car garage will be. White flag is where the meter base will go. There will be a service rated transfer switch mounted next to it for the whole house generator. The 200A breaker panel will be about 30 feet away in the center of the Eastern basement wall.

A view from what will be the rear deck, looking back at the house.

Oh, and the trailer (and truck) handled that first load of cut logs that I took to the mill very well. I hit the scales at 29,180 lbs entering the yard and 14,060 lbs leaving, so my payload was 15,120 lbs, not bad. The trailer is rated at 22,500 lbs, so I could have loaded even more logs, but being that my truck's official GCWR is 23,500 lbs, I'm probably good sticking with about 15,000 lbs per trip. I do have the MaxBrake controller, which connects to the brake lines at the master cylinder, so the trailer brakes are controlled very tightly and proportionally with those on the truck itself. Much smoother than the Prodigy controller I used to have back in the day.

That Max Brake is the next best thing to the factory controllers like the one on my F350.

Chris

 

[Verticaltrx]

I'd be careful about clearing too many trees for a view, which direction is your prevailing wind?

 

[pclausen]

Day 16

Well, it's probably coming from the north, which is where we want to cut trees for a view... There are a couple of other houses with open northern faces on the street. They are still standing.

They pretty much completed excavating the basement today. Here's what the approach looks like now.

View from the garage. In the background he's loading up just about all the rest of the stumps for the night burn.

Couple other angles showing the basement.

 

[forgeblast]

Looks great.

 

[MarkV]

I'm enjoying the thread, great documentation. Where do we stand on the 90 day count down? I think we need to add a "Day #xx" to the updates.

MarkV

 

[murphy1244]

Yea, What day are we on? This s the best thread going. Thank you Peter

 

[sld]

Awesome work and thanks for the detailed documentation. This is better than watching TV!

 

[pclausen]

If you right click on any of the images and choose "save as" you will see the day. Like this under windows 7:

So January 22 was "day 1", so that makes today "day 16".

But excellent idea about adding "day x" to the daily updates. I'll do that.

In all fairness, "Day 1" isn't supposed to start until the foundation is done. But the builder claims he'll be able to complete a 1550 sq. ft. house in 60 days. We'll see...

Here's the floor plan:

 

[mjncad]

Outline of where the attached 1 car garage will be.

I'm sure your Mom has only one car; but is there any reason you're not building a 2-car garage? She could park her car in the middle and be able to get in and out of the car easier. Also a 2-car garage is more marketable when the unfortunate time comes that you have to sell the house after she passes away, which I hope won't be for many years.

Thank you for documenting your project, especially with all the things you've no doubt got going on with this build and life in general.