Saturday, 16 August, we laid cement for the house footings. That's me in the ball cap working on my "leaning on the shovel" technique in case I want to become a professional road worker.

Hard work, but we got it done in five hours.




We had rented a rebar bender/cutter, but realized we would be a little short, so Tom "volunteered" to cut an additional 90 pieces of rebar the hard way.

Did I mention that this simple project of building a house was not enough for this intrepid builder, and I have added a few side projects just to keep it interesting?

I am also building a small music studio on the side of a hill, putting in a 60 foot by 32 foot garden (complete with an underground wired protection from gophers and other subterranean varmints and a fence to keep out the deer and discourage the raccoons, skunks, etc.) and I put in a fence and gate around my daughter's front yard. We are also putting in some fruit trees, and connected to the house project, I needed to build a pad for a 2,600 gallon water tank.

Here is the 10 by 10 pad for the water tank:




Here is the music studio pad. Tom decided he didn't want to grow up to be a cement worker. (For this pad we mixed 36 bags of pre-mix cement by hand and poured by shovel. Lots of great exercise.)

So finally we are really underway. After several months of figuring all this out on my own, I hired a building consultant that has "been there done that." Paul has been a builder for 30 years and brings a lot of straw-bale experience as well as traditional building experience with him. His son Mike brings additional vision, knowledge, and muscle to the team. My goal is to not only build my home, but find ways to create cost savings. Home building--especially owner/builder home building should not have to be only for the very well to do.

So here we go. We surveyed and laid out the house on August 12 and 13 (a couple hours each day). On the morning of the 14th we brought in a trencher to dig the footings.



On 15 August we cut and laid the rebar and got cleared to pour cement by the county building inspector that afternoon.



The building site was also inspected by my two grandsons.