Last Day of the Construction (Day 10)

After a very productive day yesterday, all the was left was putting the very large overhead doors into the garage portion of the barn.  They'll finish that today and all just in time as I'll leave for the airport in an hour or so and be there late tomorrow.

Tomorrow when I get there, it'll be pretty late at night, so just time to say "hi" to everyone, have a nice glass of wine out on the deck and then find a bed.  It'll be about 32 hours from now getting there so a very long day.   When we get going Sunday morning, Bob already has the tractor setup with a large trailer backed up to his garage so that we can load every conceivable tool we'll need for the next three weeks as we build out the outside walls of the house.

Don't you just love those old classic Ford 8N tractors?  I think that one is Bob's but mine is almost identical so they're a little hard to tell apart.  Getting excited now for the trip.

Day 9 of the Construction of the Building

The shell of the building is virtually done.  The walls are completely up and you can see that when these pictures were taken, there was only a little of the ceiling left to cover.  I'm sure that by the end of the day, they will be completely done with everything but mounting the large overhead doors.  The opening for these doors is clearly seen in the pictures.

Nice view looking through a nice grove of trees toward the west side of the building

Inside of the building - looks like an airplane hangar right now

The workers' truck uses our porch for a carport

East wall of the building.  Plain Jane but not a common view

East wall from the northeast.  Decent view

The previous few pictures were taken around 9 AM so they made good progress at the end of day 8 and early on day 9 to get the roof almost done.  You can see in the following picture taken after lunch that they are down to tiying up the construction (see the worker on the roof of the porch).  Also, note that the local doves have taken up a perch on the porch - like the building is now theirs to sit on.

These may be the last pictures I post prior to flying to the US.  I'm out of the house within 24 hours.  The Chilean volcano ash is still acting up in the area, so let's hope that we can fly in the morning.  Right now, all the mainland Australian airports seem clear but the ash is hovering over Tasmania and NZ.  Air NZ (with whom I'm flying) has been flying all along during the ash problems, so let's hope they don't have a change of heart.

Day 8 of Construction of the Building

We had quite a rain last night and this morning, apparently.  I had a couple of middle of the night phone calls (most people in Texas don't know I'm in Australia - they just call my 830 area code number) from the Lowe's delivery truck asking if I wanted the lumber and supplies delivered today as it was raining.  I asked if they could call back after lunch to see if the weather changed.  A quick look at the radar for San Antonio (don't you love the apps on an iPhone) showed me that the storm should be through the area by noon but I couldn't tell if there was another behind it.

They called again four hours later and said they were going to deliver, so I called Bob and fortunately, he was home and could take these pictures.  The first couple show that there's been a lot of progress on the building walls.  In fact, they appear to have the entire wall done on the east and south sides and only have the small open areas on the west side remaining.  Notice the water on the floor.  Since these pictures were taken midday, it shows there was quite a bit of rain last night and this morning, which is good since there's only been less than an inch so far all year.

Not too long after these pictures were taken, the Lowe's truck showed up.  Rather than get the big truck through the narrow gate and down to the building, they simply left it parked up on the main road, unloaded their little fork lift truck and transported the lumber and other material down to the site.  They put them on the porch on the north of the structure which gets the material out of the way and under a roof to protect from future rain.  The forecast also calls for a potential for more rain tonight and tomorrow.

Only 48 more hours now until I board the plane from Melbourne through NZ to LAX.  We've had a lot of flight problems here this week due to the ash from the Chilean volcano hanging around the sky in the Southern Hemisphere.  It's on its second lap of the globe right now and has really fouled up the flights in and out of Australia this week.  It looks like they are clearing mostly today and certainly tomorrow.  With any luck at all, we'll be on time Saturday morning.  Can't wait!

Day 7 of Construction of the Building

We're starting to see something other than just the framework of the building.  Doors and windows are appearing along with a little bit of metal.  In this picture, you'll see that they've finished doing the welding and are doing the final painting of the framework of the building:

The large porch area appears to be done, including the roof of the porch.  The possible exception is the corner of the porch closest to the camera.  If you look at the picture, you'll see that the entire porch area is in shade (that's why they've parked the large Ford pickup on the porch - to keep it in the shade) except for the corner area where it looks like sun is still hitting the concrete through the porch roof.  Other than that, the porch is done and looking good.  The windows are mostly in and the "man doors" into the garage area are completely done.  In one of the pictures, if you look in the far corner, you'll see a bit of the metal for the exterior wall of the building going up.  The last of these pictures was taken about 3 PM so they'll still have a few more hours of work left in them today and I hope we'll see some more pictures later in the day.  If so, I'll add them.

Day 6 of the Construction of the Building

After a hopefully restful weekend, the crew is back to work in earnest on Monday, June 20.  Althought it doesn't look like they've done too much from the pictures below, they had spent (by 3 PM when these pictures were taken) a good 8 hours of welding, grinding, cutting and painting.  The steel framework for the building should be mostly done and we should be seeing doors, windows, roofing and siding coming very soon.

Day 4 and 5 of the Construction of the Building

Overall, a pretty slow weeekend.  It is a Father's Day weekend and I hope all the building crew spent a pleasant relaxing (and cool) day with their families. 

The exceptionally hot weather continues with fire in parts of the State as well as all over the Southwest.  The building is pretty well ready for windows, doors and the steel walls.  You're looking at the North and West walls of the building.  The large porch goes all the way across the front and is 52' from, the corner closest to the camera to the edge of the porch down the west wall.  A very nice, large porch.  All the area under the porch will not be clad in steel.  Rather, we will frame that portion in to be part of the house.  Looking forward to seeing the walls go up next week.  Heading out in five days!

Day 3 of Construction of the Building

After two days of highly visible progress, today's progress is a little harder to see.  Mostly, what you see in the following pictures is a lot more steel in the large porches on the front and right side (as you're looking at the front of the building) and steel for the wall of the main building which includes doing windows in the areas that are steel walls.  This includes the windows in the master bedroom and bathroom which are the second and third pictures.

Bob Denson tells me that it's been 103-104 C every day they've been working there and that the heat is now taking its toll on the workers.

As I'm typing this, exactly one week from now, I'll be on a plane between Australia and California.  I don't know if they're going to be working Saturday there, but even if they don't, I figure that 5 more days of good work is sufficient to get the building done or at least done enough that we will be able to frame out the front portion of the building.  That's the area you see on the first picture beneath the porch.  I'm sure you'll see in future posts that the metal walls of the building will cover all but the portion below th porch and that we'll build out with lumber to be the outside wall of the house.

A New Truck for the Homestead

After several years of renting cars (expensive and not very helpful) plus borrowing trucks and cars from Bobby and Jodi, we figured it was time to get our own vehicle.  Also, our camper trailer is only capable of being pulled by something the size of an F-350 and we've wound up borrowing John Denson Sr's dually a couple of times to move the trailer or for the kids to take it to the beach.

No more borrowing but the John Denson clan (Sr and Jr) have had a hand in this one.  I found several trucks on CraigsList and John Jr voluteered to check this one out.  Others checked out a couple of others.  She's a 2001 Ford F-350, V-10 with a really good towing rear end, so she'll do the job and now that we're moving ahead on the Barndominium, when we leave after this trip to Texas, both the truck and the camper trailer will be parked inside the barn.  This should add life to the trailer which, for the past few years, has been outside.  We'll be really happy to have the vehicles inside and given all the construction and other activities, having our own truck is almost an essential.  Time to be a little more self-reliant.  Sorry about the gas mileage.  The vehicle we drive the most will either be a hybrid or very high fuel efficiency vehicle.  The truck will be a short haul, towing or heavy cargo specialty vehicle.  Here's some pictures.  The truck will be at John Sr's house when we fly into Texas, so a quick taxi over to his house and we'll head to the "ranch" with the new truck.

Day Two of the Construction of the Building

The construction crew made a lot of progress on day one (other than knocking over a couple of mailboxes and letting the horse out of the gate).  Day 2 continues the progress and as you can see from the pictures, they are getting close to being done with the steel framework.  It'll be fun now to see the steel skin go on the building.

The first and the third pictures are almost exactly six hours apart, so you can really see the progress made during the heat (and I mean heat) of the day.  The third picture was taken around 3 PM local time and this crew seems to work about 12 hours a day.  It now appears that the roof trusses are completely done and they are finishing the framework for the large porches on the north and west sides of the house portion of the Barndominium.  The following pictures show the progress pretty much at the end of the day.  They appear to be just about done with the porches as well.  In one of the pictures, I see some of the galvalume that forms the roof.   It is on the ground in the foreground in the first picture, so it appears they'll either start the roofing either tonight or probably first thing in the morning.

Day One of Construction of the Building!

Now the real excitement begins.  So far, everything that's been done (and a lot has been done) is at or below ground level.  And while that work is vitally important to the success of the project, it has been hard to see progress.  Pouring concrete was pretty exciting, but now that the building is going up, it's really exciting.  Before the work could be done, though, the steel had to be delivered and that wasn't without problems.  Check out these pictures:

Seems the truck took out the mailboxes on the other side of the road and finally had to remove our mailbox to have room to swing the very long trailer into our relatively narrow gate.  But that wasn't the end of their problems.  Once through the gate, the managed to get the truck stuck in the very soft sand around the building.  We've apparently only had 3/4" of rain all year so far and to say the ground is dry would be an understatement.  Even when there's a relatively normal rain, the soil on the property is as sandy and soft as any you'll see anywhere.  No one seems to believe you when you warn them either:

But they got the steel unloaded, truck out of the sand and then got to work in a hurry.  Lots of activity today.  Here's the pictures:

They have a pretty neat way of putting the trusses on the poles.  The next few pictures show how they use a hoist rig in the back of a pickup truck to hoist the trusses up onto the poles where they connect via slots to the poles.

The only problems today were problems associated with having a new crew at the site.  They knocked a mailbox over at the neighbors, got their truck stuck and left the gate open so that our daugter's horse got out and was difficult to persuade to come back in given all the noise and activity.  The horse is back in, the gate shut and hopefully the neighbor's mailbox repaired.  All in all, a lot of work done in one day!
It's pretty exciting to see all this work going on.  I can't wait to see the batch of pictures from tomorrow and days following.  And then I'll be heading out a week from Saturday (assuming this Chilean volcanic ash doesn't continue to cause flight problems in this part of the world).  I ordered a bunch of wood and materials this morning from Lowe's.  That'll all be delievered on the 22nd so that it's all there when we get there.