Building a home is no simple matter. First and foremost, it is hard work requiring long hours and just about every spare penny you can find. It requires a single-minded dedication to the task that many will never be able to muster.
Our home took eight years to build. Weekends, holidays and vacations... All were used up in the building process. Money for permits, tools, material... There was never enough.
When I started the place, I was single, had a decent 8-to-5 job which didn't pay much(not many jobs in Santa Fe did), and had just turned 31.
One fine Saturday afternoon, I went with two friends to a place called "The Turf Club" on the Albuquerque Highway south of Santa Fe for a couple of beers, and the new waitress - unbeknownst to her - instantly changed my life.
That evening, I went to my parents home and informed them that I had met the girl I was going to marry, and that we would need a place to live, so I intended to build a house. Since I couldn't afford a nice new place in one of Santa Fe's few subdivisions, I would build it myself.
For whatever reason, this did not seem unrealistic to them, so they decided to deed one acre to me on which to build the place. They wanted to meet the young lady right away, but I told them she was not, well... fully aware of my intentions at the time, and that it would be awhile before the "come meet my parents" occasion occured. That didn't seem to bother them much either.
I had been fiddling around with some house plans for a time, so I drew up a builders set of plans, took them down to the permit office and got my construction permit. In those days, it was that simple.
However, to get a permit to wire the place myself, I had to take and pass the State Electrician Journeyman's exam. I missed one question... I had been an Electronic Technician in the Navy. That made the test easy for me.
Three things we did not do ourselves:
-1) The gas line hookup. It was cheaper to have a professional do it.
-2) The final color coat of plaster. Since it took me weeks to put on the scratch coat and weeks more for the brown coat, we had professionals do the color coat all at once so there would be no variations in the color.
-3) The asphalt driveway and road.
Everything else we did, with a bit of help from friends and family when the hard stuff came around like the 7" x 14" x 25' roofing beam installations, concrete pours on foundations and floors, etc.
What is to follow on this blog is our photo record.
The finished home
That's a big house. I can see it taking that long, easily.
ReplyDeleteI've got some friends up the road whose only "business" (if you call it that) is buying land, parking a camper on it, and building a new home. When everything is good to go, they sell it and start over, living on the proceeds of the previous sale (tax free, of course as it is their primary residence in every case and it always takes them more than two years to finish it.)
They're in a bit of a bind now with the collapsed real estate market, but they had made a lifestyle of doing only that for a living.