House Project - year 3

This is the page for the third year of the house project. Neither the house nor this page are done yet. I started the year with no anticipation that I'd complete the house this year or that I'd ever get the money I have invested in it back for use in my own life. I had hoped at the start (in May) that my brother-in-law would finish getting the construction loan he had started applying for the previous Fall and pay me back the money I have spent on the project (buying services and building materials). I had planned use that money to hire someone to work with me on the projcet. This would be beneficial to me as I'm losing more money from the time spent not working for pay than I'd lose paying someone to help the work go faster. For reasons known to him, the loan didn't happen. I believe he's paid for a lot of incidental materials and services and two floor pours with credit cards for which he has negotiated a sufficiently low interest and repayment rate as to find it acceptable.

What we've gotten done this past year is the floor poured over the top of the basement (They said it's the first structural elevated slab in Cortland since the prison was built.), the floor poured in the garage, most of the backfilling around the basement, and most of the form construction for the first floor walls.

The unconnected side panels for the horizontally place Rastra that form the bond beam at the top of straight portions of the walls need to be glued up.
Some small gaps where curves meet for vertically placed Rastra need to have small pieces of Rastra glued in.
The wooden rough bucks for a few of the windows and doors need to be built and installed.
The existing window rough bucks need to be modified so as to permeit concrete to be poured through the bottom of them.
Coupling nuts welded to bent pieces of all thread (or thread stock or threadded rod) need to be installed so that they can be used to attach porch awning and floor pour formwork on the outside of the house and cupboards and shelves on the inside of the house.
Fiber reinforced browncoat needs to be applied to the outside of the curved walls to support the foam glue where it fills wider gaps.
All the vertical rebar and a little bit of the horizontal rebar needs to be placed in the walls.
The pieces of horizontal bond beam reabar and their supports need to be placed in the top of the walls.
The inside of the walls needs to be vacuumed to remove any dead leaves and debris that have accumulated during the intervening period.
Bracing for the straight walls needs to be installed.
Wooden beam pocket forms for the heavy beams need to be installed.
The light beams over the partition wall doorways and the guest room doorway need to be installed.
J-bolts need to be installed into the top of the beam over the garage doorway.
Scaffolding to permit people to place the concrete and vibrate the rebar during the pour needs to be installed.

While I was working in Sitka Alaska in the Spring of 2008 I purchased a small camera that is able to save its photos as raw files. My old laptop runs the software capable of editing raw files with pathetic slowness, so I put off working on the photos until the time I anticipated spending at my parents' place in WV over the holidays. Then the economy crashed, and when Bob Walton of Maritime Recruiters called me with a job offer in mid-December, I felt that I'd better accept it as another might not come along soon. I plan to finish this page when I get back to my parents' place where the photos are stored and I have some time to work on them.

As a result of not earning money for more than half of the year for three years and not anticipating an end to the house project anytime soon, I anticipate taking 2009 off from the house project and earning enough to at least repay my parents the money I've borrowed from them to keep up with my own bills during the latter half of the last three years.

Here's photos - words to follow