Our one year building anniversary is today!!!

We celebrated today with homemade Austrian Salzstangerl and Bretzel,

and our last jars of Oma's Marillenmarmalade and Erdbeermarmalade. :-)

It is April 17, 2020 and today we are celebrating one year since we broke ground to start building our home! It is exciting to look back and to see just how far we have come.  We are not yet in the house, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel!  We hope to be moved in, to an un-finished but liveable house, in 5-6 weeks.  It will be amazing to have our own place again- and to have the land to raise some animals and a garden.  This was our hope in moving to Canada, to be able to accomplish this.  Dominik and Jonathan have worked almost every day together during this last year- a construction apprenticeship that Jonathan wouldn't have otherwise had.  He has learned as Dominik has learned, how to do construction and wiring and plumbing and tiling- the list is endless!  We did have contractor help at the very beginning, to get the framing done, but everything else that we could do ourselves we have.  We didn't drill the well or wire the breaker panel, but the rest is our work. We are thankful now that spring is coming (slowly- it is actually snowing again today!!!) because it will make work more pleasant.

We have reached the point now that we are able to put in drywall and tile.  Floors will come later.  Our priority is that we can just move in.  For that we need a bathroom, water, and septic.  The septic should come in early May.  The well is drilled and we are just waiting on the well pump to be delivered.  The hydro is about to be connected.  As soon as it is warm enough Dominik will complete the tiling in the toilets and bathroom/shower.  The bath tub that we would like is hundreds of dollars cheaper in the United States, so we will have to wait until the border opens to get that!   We will paint the plywood floors to help keep them cleaner until we can put in the wooden flooring, which we will make ourselves.  The outside of the house, to be board and batten, will come in late summer or early autumn- depending on whether or not Dominik will manage to get to Austria to work again this summer.

I hope that you enjoy this little look back at the last year of building.  The video is the second one in the process.  :-)

Breaking Ground: April 17, 2019

First view from the roadside

Ready to pour the footings

Footings poured!

Starting the foundation

Working together

Floor joists and floor boards going on

The front door area and floor

The first wall is up!

Outer walls and one inner are done!

It is a family job.

Roof joists delivered

Roof joists are on!

It's beginning to look like a house!

Thankful for help getting the metal roof on.

We had a break in Austria in July for a wedding and for work.

In early September the windows and doors were in.

The kids helped a lot insulating the outer walls.

Autumn came beautifully.  Dominik worked all winter on wiring and plumbing and other details.

Finally we can start drywalling! 

Some ceilings are in!

My pocket-door pantry is closed in.

A WC is almost closed in.

Here is the next video in Jonathan's series. :-) 

From Jonathan:

Just a few more interesting things that were not in the video. The steel beams were dropped by a big truck just OUTSIDE the foundation. Well, they actually slid off the back and the truck just drove away. Then we had the problem of how to get them INSIDE the foundation so they could support the floor. Using a few logs (and five people) we were able to roll them in. Almost like the Egyptians managed to move 40 ton blocks of rock to build the pyramids. Just on a smaller scale. At least we had a winch to lift them up.

Even though every floor truss had to be cut to size and are built to hold a lot of weight, it went pretty fast. Some old multi-storey houses are built without floor trusses, with only one heavy beam across the middle to support the whole house. Otherwise, installation went so fast that there isn´t anything else to say on that subject.

Building code says that we have to glue, nail and screw the sub-floor. So I hope it won´t ever move. If gluing, nailing and screwing still aren´t enough I don´t know what else you could do.

For the framing (putting up the outside walls), several other people came to help. There was a contractor who was half Portuguese who was really happy that we were European. In his words: Europeans know how to work (no offense 😊). There was a bit of a wind going when we were lifting up the walls, so we weren´t sure if the wind was going to blow the wall over the side of the house. Fortunately, there was no problem at all. When we were lifting up the longest wall, (on the south side) it didn´t seem like I was doing any lifting at all. Nor did it to my dad. It seemed that the guy in between us was lifting up the whole wall himself. And that was the heaviest wall of all. We might have been lifting the other walls, but we were both glad that he was between us.

We built the front doorway in 4 feet (1.22 meters) from the front wall, because, who needs a 13 foot hallway (3.96 meters)? Maybe a king. But we aren´t kings, so we don´t need our entry way that long. If we were kings we would probably be living somewhere else. And our holiday resort would be somewhere on a tropical island.

While doing the framing the blackflies were insane. They were very annoying when we laid the foundation, but not this bad. It became even worse because it got very warm during the day and the blackflies still didn´t want to go away. At one point I was debating putting on a bug hat. In the end I just used a thick sweater with a hood. There was something very interesting about those blackflies. They didn´t bite us. They would be in our face and buzzing around, just asking for trouble. But our faces were fine. I didn´t use any bug spray, and the person who was using tons and tons of it had his arm bleeding from the blackflies. On the other hand, he was only wearing a t-shirt or a thin, long sleeved t-shirt. Maybe bug spray attracts those kinds of black flies.

Now I’ll start working on the next video for you!

Take care and have a good week.

Let's talk about the house!

Well, that little burst of writing in December didn't last, did it?  I was teaching and we're building and time got away from me!  Now, I'm home (like most of the world) but we are still building...with an even greater sense of urgency.  Well, we're pressing on with a light at the end of the tunnel.  We hope to move in by the middle of May, Lord willing.  But for now, we're going to take a quick look back because we have a video to show you!  The only real update from the last blog is that we won't be off-grid.  It would have been wonderful, but in the end it didn't work out to be as cost-efficient as to make it worth-while.  The fuel costs to run a large generator, which would need to run every day for a few hours in the winter, plus the cost of the generator itself (and I don't mean the kind from Canadian Tire!) put our calculations over the top.  We are still focused on being energy-efficient but now we will have a much lower initial cost.                                                       -Cathy

From Jonathan:

Finally, after almost 12 months, we have our first video of building our house. When you´re building a house, you normally have hardly any time for other things (like making videos). But here it is: Video number one, of us building our house. Enjoy.

There were also some other steps, that you did not see on video, for example:

1. Before we were able to scrape off the dirt we had to move mple:some frozen cedar logs (in April). The only way we managed that was with the help of the neighbor, who came with his tractor to move them away.
2. We also had to cut down some trees and clear away some bushes.
3. And, (in case you´re wondering) here is what happened to the flat tire that started coming off: We called the rental company and they told us that their insurance does not cover a flat tire. So it´s our responsibility. They recommended somebody who fixes tires though. He pulled up in a bright yellow pick up truck with all his equipment.....and left less than an hour later with a big smile on his face (fixing the tire wasn´t cheap). Then when we were going to park it for the night, we started hearing a hissing noise. Another hole, in the same tire!!! The guy came back in the yellow truck and fixed the tire again, this time (luckily) only charging us 20 dollars for the second fix. 
4. After the backhoe had scraped off all the dirt, it was left at the side of the road by our property for a few days, with the name of the company potrayed for everybody driving by to see. That was some cheap advertising for them. They even got payed for it!!!

From the beginning of the video to the end of it was a time period of about 1 month, because we had to wait for,the building permit to come through, good weather, weekdays (because of helpers) and more good weather. 

The laying of the concrete blocks themselves took about a week, we were hoping for it to take two days, although it looks so fast in the video. 

More to come, if we can find time to write and edit videos.😉