House build

Finished the lean-to on the back of the house over the holiday weekend; just a simple ~16x24 covered area for keeping the tractor, generator, etc, out of the rain. One side benefit is that it also puts shade on the concrete outer wall of the storm cellar. It’s a south facing wall and this should help take some of the load off the air conditioning in there, in addition to its main function of sheltering the things under it.

Still have some additional work that needs finishing underneath it, like mounting the permanent inlet for generator power & storm-cellar backup battery recharging, another electrical receptacle on the concrete wall, adding & spreading some gravel under it, etc; but structurally it’s complete & done.

The horizontal cable on the far end is to help support the farthest leg. The ground is so rocky & hard, it literally takes a jackhammer to break it up where an auger can do anything, so to avoid needing to hammer & drill a third hole for the third post, I used an angled beam off the retaining wall as the last roof support on that end. It’s angled that way because the lean-to roof comes out not quite 16 feet, and the retaining wall only runs about 11-12 feet. It cosmetically looks odd, but it keeps that end area cleaner for mowing (not having a vertical post stuck in the ground 4 feet from the retaining wall), plus it saved hours of installation labor. The cable is probably unnecessary, as it did fine even with my heavy behind walking around up there before the cable was in place, but it’s up out of the way and provides some extra peace of mind.

Believe it or not, still working on this silly project. We poured the footings in mid-2017 and moved in just a few days before Christmas of 2018. At that point it was 75 or 80% done; with a big walkout basement completely finished (which is what we've been living in), and the upstairs completely in the dry but just an open & insulated steel building with no interior walls or finish-out at all.

Due to numerous things coming up, construction (and a lot of things) got put on hold literally days after we moved in. Won't go into all the details and drama, but a distilled synopsis: my wife's father died just days after we moved in; so that put a hold on things for a little bit. Then as we were getting things cranked up to get back to work, our builder died suddenly, with no warning at all. He was not only our builder, he was my wife's uncle; the last living uncle on that side of the family. So she ended up helping with his funeral and even his estate issues some; which held things up again. Shortly after that was when covid shut down pretty much the whole world, and at the same time my wife's doctors substantially adjusted her chemo dosages; so we just let things be as they were instead of continuing to try to fight the craziness that had seemingly taken over the whole world.

Approximately 3 months ago I managed to sell our business, and after taking a month or so to do pretty much nothing, I started working on finishing out the upstairs. Strictly by myself so far, although I'll definitely be hiring out the HVAC and drywall work when that time comes.

So I'll be adding more junk to this thread, just to document the rest of the process; after a 4-year or so hiatus.

Started framing the interior walls in April, tying them to the red-iron walls with hurricane ties to keep everything basically monolithic. The insulation behind the wood-framed walls looks ugly because it’s actually doubled up. The building already had normal amounts of insulation, but I added to it along the perimeter walls of the living space.