My wife and I bought a 7 acre tract and have decided to build a new house on it. I bought an old ford 555 backhoe and I've cleared the site and a 400' drive in to it. I dug the basement and footings and and the foundation is now in.
Picture #1 (121K)
I started the floor framing on New Years day. I got the kitchen and dinning room floor framed before calling it a day.
Picture #2 (120K)
My son helped me on Mon. and Tues. We got all the floor system in and all the subfloor on. I forgot how heavy that a 2 x 12 x 16 southern yellow pine is. The builder supply brought the materials out and unloaded them , so we used my son's Bobcat w/ forks to move material around and after the floor system was finnished we sat all the wall framing material up on the subfloor.
Picture #3 (125K)
It sure does make it nice to have some tools like these to make the job easier!
Picture #4 (127K)
I started on the shop at the same time and layed 8 courses of block, planning to frame above that to the 10 height I wanted. The building inspector turned it down, said you can only go 4 times the wall thickness high without having floor joist to tie the wall together, so I have the block mason coming back to run the block up to eve height and I will frame the front wall so the siding will match the house.
Picture #5 (119K)
The kids are grown and gone so Vickie and I will build a small "cabin in the woods" 1080 sq ft. I'll post progress as it happens, Later, Nat