by Alison Moore Smith | Mar 11, 2010 | Design Your Own House, for Home
The floor trusses are up and the plywood for the base of the main floor started going down yesterday. It's supposed to be finished today. Since the new house plans have the garage in the basement with living space above (instead of the reverse in the old house plans),...
by Alison Moore Smith | Mar 10, 2010 | Design Your Own House, for Home
The fibrous concrete panels we are using to build the house—stacked up and secured with polyurethane before being filled with concrete—were something of an aesthetic mess. Bumpy, lumpy, and uneven, the walls didn't much lend themselves to being easily stuccoed. Eames...
by Alison Moore Smith | Mar 9, 2010 | Design Your Own House, for Home
When we finally closed the construction loan last November, I was sure we had missed the good-weather window and would be sitting around in our rental house watching the snow fall for a number of months. To my surprise, even the famous Utah snow doesn't completely...
by Alison Moore Smith | Mar 8, 2010 | Design Your Own House, for Home
There's nothing better than driving up to the building site to see a raft of cars and a buzz of activity. Today the crew started installing the main floor trusses. We're going to be pouring cement for the main floor surface, so these trusses are substantial. Belinda...
by Alison Moore Smith | Mar 4, 2010 | for Money
Auto repair is a sticky business. Most of us don't know what we're looking for and can get easily scammed. Haven't we all seen the undercover recordings of unseemly auto repairmen cutting wires and breaking parts…just so they can fix them later? With all the auto...