I don't think we will win any races at putting siding up but steadily we are getting the job done. We started on the East side of the house and have been working our way around, going as high as we feel comfortable and today we made it around to the North side (having hit the South and West already). Yeah! After we get everything done that we can easily and safely reach with ladders then we hope to rent some scaffolding and do the high areas. I was hoping that maybe we could do that this next weekend when we would have Memorial Day available for working too but we shall see.
Ken has been diligently working even during rain as we have been having a lot of that lately. I am not complaining about rain though - we needed it and fire danger is much lower now!
I have been dealing with sickness lately and so haven't been as big of help this weekend as I would have liked but I did get out there for a while today. The sunshine felt wonderful but I did not last so very long once the rain started.
I hope to have both energy and good weather to get the rocks finished soon too. It will come I know. I just need to be patient. We are enjoying seeing the house with siding. Getting that close to done has set us to dreaming about landscaping. There is always something to keep us busy!
What did you do this weekend? Where you inside or out? What sort of weather have you been having lately?
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3 comments:
Hi,
I really enjoy your blog. I'm amazed by the amount of work your family on the home construction. I was just wondering if you have figured out how much money was saved as a result of the work you've done yourselves. My husband and I bought land a few years ago and plan to build soon. We want to do many of the finishing details ourselves like siding, floors and painting. Any advice would be appreciated. Lisa
At what point was the contractor told of your desire to complete some of the work yourselves? Was he very accepting?
Thanks Lisa!
I wish you the best with building your house! It is a lot of work but pretty fun too, to see something come together just like you wanted it. We talked to quite a lot of contractors and with all of them we told them right away that we wanted to do some of the work ourselves. Some were more accepting of the idea than others. That helped us weed some out. Mostly they were pretty accepting. We discussed with them how much different things would save us money if we did it ourselves and that was a deciding factor on whether we would do some things or not. How much we saved doing various things varied from contractor to contractor a bit. I am not sure of the total of money we saved by providing our own labor (Ken might know better) but the figure that I remember for doing our own painting and priming was around 5 to 7 thousand. The contractor figured I saved around $2,000 by tiling my own shower (And so I was able to get the supplies for less than a fiberglass inset but end up with a much more expensive shower because I put the labor into it). Because my Brother-in-law volunteered to build our stone fireplace (and we hauled all our own stones) we also saved thousands of dollars there. Doing all our own siding and flooring is saving us tons as well but I don't remember any exact figures.
One thing to be careful off is to be sure you know what the contractor is doing and what you are doing - that you don't end up getting left with a bunch of things that you didn't plan on. Normally the contractor will give you a completed house but when you start wanting to do things yourself they don't feel like everything has to be finished as much it seems. Ken tried to carefully write out a detailed list of everything to be done (stairs, trim, windows, gutters, plumbing, etc) and it was carefully marked who was doing what. There were still little areas that I thought the contractor was taking care of but we ended up doing instead - such as all the finishing work (staining and varnishing) on the stairs and any other place that needed painting - I decided our contractor definitely didn't like any sort of finish work. There was also a wide window ledge in the kitchen which I thought fell under trim work but our contractor thought otherwise and so we took care of it. There were other little things like that. We didn't really argue over it just went ahead and did it.
I hope that helps. Feel free to contact me if you have any other questions. This has certainly been a learning experience.
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