My House Album The Outside

Home Photovoltaic System The Inside The Outside Our Neighborhood Contact Me		On this page I'll include pictures of the house as I built it starting from a bare lot. Here's the empty lot where I put the house. The in-ground plumbing is done and the slab poured. Labor Day weekend 2003, I got nine sailors from the local Navy base to help me assemble the steel frames that make up the structure of the house. The nine frames are complete in four days. Each frame has over 300 5/8-inch high strength steel bolts in it. All the frames are assembled, squared up and bolts tightened flat on the ground. Got bolts? Just one of the nine floor beams. Time to stand the house up. The first frame is the hardest. Standing it up and then tying it off with ropes to keep it up take awhile, but the rest of the frames go up easy. In only one day, four of us stood the entire house up, squared up all the frames and cross-braced to stabilize the entire structure. Imagine the house going from a four foot tall stack of frames to a twenty-six foot tall structure all in one day. At the end of the day, I heard some bicycle riders going by and one of them yells to another, “It looks like some big industrial complex going in there.” The framing goes in easy. The "red-iron" frames make up the primary structure of the house so that the steel studs are all non-load bearing. No heavy headers are necessary over any openings. Hey, the walls are straight. Must not be wood. And they will stay straight too! The view of the master bathroom shower from outside the house at night. Glass block window in the form of a Zia. The front door was hand made and is 2-1/2 inches thick solid wood. It is six feet wide and eight feet tall. Only thing missing here is the front porch. Designs are embossed in the stucco.