YEAR FOUR

The basement tunnel exit, the 4' x 4'x 5' space before its concrete roof was poured and the steel manhole installed. Always a good idea to have a back way out.

This year the entire house finally got all the walls and roofs completed, including the scratch and brown coats of plaster. some interior work was done, generally when the weather outside prevented any exterior work.

Below show s the framing and roof work for bedrooms three and four, the ones that went through the winter exposed to the weather. You can just make out the last of the 7" x 14" roofing beams.


Below is some of the interior work. This shows the framing and sheetrocking of the furnace vents in the utility room.


I built the cabinets out of plywood and 1" x 2" lumber, and even sheetrocked and textured the sides. During this time, this room was used as the temporary kitchen.

The fireplace was a very popular spot. Below is wife doing a bit of knitting all snuggled up to the thing. The mantle had not yet been dressed up with quarry tile... Like the tile on the bathroom floor.



Below shows me installing the flue opening for a "Fire Duke" in the upstairs master bedroom. It was not in the original plans, but the downstairs unit was so pleasing we decided to install this one also.



Wouldn't you know it? Before I could even get the place finished a water pipe started leaking. It took a lot of digging, the pipes were four feet down.



The photo below shows a lot of details of the house. The first floor was pumice block, the second floor framing. The downstairs windows were all hand made from 1" x 4" framing with 8" x 10" panes of glass, and were all double paned. They took so long to build we decided to use aluminium frame windows for the upstairs. I rented two sections of scaffold to work on the upstairs outside to put on the tar paper, chicken wire, and then the scratch and brown coats of plaster.

All those 2" x 10"'s and that horizontal run of 2" x 4"'s? Those were for the future rear porch's ceiling and roof to tie into. It was to be like the front porch, only with seven arches.


Even with the rented scaffold, I still had to use a couple of 2" x 12"s and a picnic table bench to reach up in the peaks.

The below shot shows the entire place just before I started all that plastering.


The Bell tower lasted until it was time to plaster it. I decided that working thirty feet in the air on my rickety scaffolding wasn't worth the risk, so down it came.

After what seemed like forever, the plastering was finished. The plaster on the upstairs had more lime in the mix to make it adhere better to the chicken wire, that's why it's lighter in color. Shortly after this photo was taken, the bell tower was removed. Sorta sad, I still think it would had looked real cool.



Note that the library door has been blocked off and sealed. The place already had more than enough exterior doors.

A sobering point... Just for chuckles I measured from the far corner of the family room across to the far corner of the library... One hundred and twenty-six feet. It didn't look that big on the plans.