Building a House with Scruffydog Construction LLC
This page only depicts the first year and a half or so of our project. If you're interested in the later pictures, they're only a click away.
5/25/2002 - The first time I got to the construction site, the hole was already there. My dad claims that to build a house, you just dig a hole and then fill it up. So I figure this means we're a good bit done with the project.
We built these forms, shown here in mostly complete. It's pretty tricky, because the tops of them have to be at a pretty precise elevation, and we're working in very rocky ground. This picture was taken from atop the large rock and dirt pile that created by the excavation.
5/28/2002 - A few days later, we did some more work with fortifying those footer forms, then we moved on to moving rocks down into the hole.
My dad is using the backhoe to move some big rocks out of the way, so it's easier for him to drive from the stone pile on the driveway to the ramp down into the pit.
This is me, complete with badass farmers's tan, down in the pit, wielding a shovel to make a nice, level surface with the rocks after my dad uses the backhoe to dump them in.
5/31/2002-The next step was to actually pour the footers. It's at least a four man job, and we had my dad, grandfather, Tom Smith, and I. We spent almost an hour in the morning playing catch, waiting for the cement truck to show up. This involves quite a bit of concrete, and some action shots would have been fun, but there was no one else to take those pictures.
Tom, with my dad and grandfather (Both doctors, MD and PhD respectively) in the background, cleaning up after we finished. The kid has a staple gun, so look out.
Early June-My dad and I laid the pipes that'll run under the basement, hopefully preventing the buildup of radon gas. Nasty stuff, it is. Anyway, it rained before we did this, and digging the wet mud out so we could put pipes in was perhaps one of the least fun things we did all summer.
Yup, pipes.
Most of June/some of July-Ok, this is where I sort of slowed down with the picture taking, because we were doing the same thing every day for a long time. I would mix mortar by hand in a wheelbarrow (very hard work), carry blocks to where my dad would use them (hard work), and set up the scaffolding he'd stand on. (Compared to the other jobs, pretty easy. On its own, it's pretty hard work.)
This is my dad putting a block into place. You'll notice the use of high-tech straight line technology, in the form of a piece of string.
My dad (with hat) and uncle Phil laying blocks, about 2/3 of the way up the wall.
Uncle Phil, with a bunch of blocks to lay in front of him.
Action shot of my dad and uncle Phil laying some blocks. Note the perfectly mixed mortar they're using. That was all me.
Mid July-Tom showed up to work for a few days as we were working on framing the first floor of the house.
After the first full day of work in the hot sun, I actually diagnosed Tom as dead. His condition was later upgraded to dead tired.
Here we are trying to figure out how to do the framing on a particularly tricky window configuration. It's harder than you'd think.
And another picture of us working on that framing, just a bit later. Tom is swinging a framing hammer he named Mongo. An interesting fact about Mongo is that my dad said he'd kill Tom if Tom attempted to steal Mongo. Everybody loves Mongo.
Fall Break(Late October)-I came home for fall break, and spent two days of that long weekend working on the house. Significant progress has occured since I was last around, with the framing basically wrapped up.
I spent like a day doing this. I was putting up pieces of wood in between studs called blocking. They're useful for when you need something to nail into for your insulation/sheathing on the outside of the house. Note the sweet pneumatic nailer I'm using. Takes some time to get used to, and maybe it stings your hand a bit, but it'd awesome, trust me.
My dad finishing up the last few pieces of framing.
We've got two shots here of the second floor of the house. I think it looks pretty cool. Note those big beams for the roof. They're easy to pick out, the big red things. My dad got those up there by himself. That's some heavy stuff.
The down-the-ladder shot from the second floor to the first. You can see into the basement too, with its freshly poured foundation.
Here's my dad checking the stability of a ladder. That's pretty important, because he's about to carry a 4x8' piece of plywood up there to use as sheathing, and you don't want a wobbly ladder when you're doing something like that.
From the back of the house, actually standing in what will become the kitchen and looking at the front door, this shows most of the first floor of the house.
This is the view from the road. High winds tore up that tar paper you can see on the roof. Let me tell you how much fun it was being up there on a cold, windy, rainy morning with a staple gun to fasten it all back down.
I think the Scruffydog Construction sign is pretty sweet. It looks just like the business cards Tom and I made for my dad, actually. If you don't have one, ask him, he's giving them out.
Here's some of me working to fasten down the sheathing. Notice, I'm still using the badass pneumatic nailer. That's very important.
Winter Break-Tom and I came out to work for three days right before Christmas, December 20-22. We did a variety of things, including framing walls in the basement, putting up a row of siding, insulating the bay windows, putting skylights up, and finishing off shingling the roof.
We got there in the morning, and my dad showed us what to do to put up cedar shingle siding.
See, when he's doing it, it's just this easy...
Of course, once we get started, a blizzard with hurricane-force winds blows through. Good times.
This job was also not so very much fun, putting fiberglass insulation up into the bottoms of these bay windows. As it turns out, our shoulders just aren't designed to operate a power driver over your head while crouching.
It's not all bad, though. This is Tom and I doing a little cloud watching during break time.
Here we are, the three of us, up on the roof, nailing shingles down. There are nice views on several sides of this house, though none are really visible in these pictures. We put those skylights up earlier in the day.
Three views of the house. First one is the front, taken from down near the road. Second, I took from the big dirt/rock pile, and shows the front and side. The last one shows the back of the house, taken from the smaller dirt pile back there.
Spring Break 2003 -
Dave "Finch" Bartholomew and I spent a few days over Spring Break working on the house, mostly doing more work on blocking on the ceilings, to help hang drywall later in the project.
Summer 2003 - My summer was interruped by at least one bout of driving around the country, but I still found plenty of time to work on the house before and after that trip.
Plenty of time goes into cedar shingle siding. I kept saying, "Looks like about two days of work left," and I kept on being wrong. Only a few times did that high-ladder work get dicey, though those mini-roofs are harder to work on than you'd think. Be sure to notice the nifty butane-powered Paslode Impulse finishing nailer that I'm using.
A house went up on the lot next to us during the summer. It was mostly an Amish crew doing the framing. I took a few pictures of them putting the roof on with a crane, pretty cool stuff. Looks like a pretty nice place to work, actually. They have a radio.
Plumbing (and wiring, up next) are both actually pretty fun. There's a fair amount of figuring out where things should go, basically it's not very repetitive work, and you can rapidly improve at it. I was around for the whole drain/vent system, then left on my trip while my dad did the rest, including the fancy water supply and the water heater and all that.
At least now Uncle Phil won't feel as bad about the Kubota. We had some problems that day...
I returned from Places West and it was time to do some wiring. By my estimates, a house of this size has about 500,000 kilometers of wire in it by the time it's all said and done, and a lot of that has to be pulled around corners, oftentimes in ceilings. Dave was also around for a few days of this job, before we headed off to the beach. The last picture is where all the TV and cat5 cables will come into a box in the basement, for all your TV, phone, and home network needs.
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By Dylan Flipse, 