Our lives are full of projects, big ones, little ones, long ones, short ones, and some that will take a life time and beyond. I learned from my Dad that what ever life gives us we can handle it best if we just treat it like a project. A project is something we can step back and look at. It is something that we can tackle and use our ingenuity to figure out how to accomplish.
A Big Project
About 12 years ago we built a new house. We weren’t builders and had no experience but we decided to be our own general contractors. We would also do as much work on it ourselves as we possibly could. That might seem a little crazy, but that’s how my family did things, and my great husband Alex willingly goes along with my craziness.
We decided we could get my brother to help us do the electrical work. We could lay the tile because we had done that before. If we bought a paint sprayer we could do all the painting and prep work for that. And then the biggie was to put fiber cement siding on the whole exterior of the house and paint it. We had no clue how to do it and I don’t know what made me think we could. It was just a project.
Finding People
There was a building boom at the time so anyone involved in construction was booked out and had as much work as they could handle. We couldn’t find anyone to dig the hole and pour our foundation. After calling all the excavators in the book and not finding anyone who could do it, Alex just saw some guys working on another house in the area. He stopped and asked if they could come and do ours too and they said they could. So within a few of days we had the hole dug and the foundation started.
Its kind of funny to think of how we went about it. We didn’t know anything but we figured we could find out. As we found workers to do one project we would ask them if they knew people who could do the next project. We talked to people, looked in the phone book, did lots of calling, and little by little we found the people we needed. There were hangups along the way that set us back, but we found a way through them.
My brother came and helped us with the electrical wiring. It felt like we spent weeks drilling holes in studs and pulling wires through them. Before that I never thought that drill bits were disposable. We went through lots of them.
Exterior Siding
Then we started on the siding. I had no idea what I had gotten us into. We used fiber cement siding. We really liked it because it looks like wood siding but it won’t decay and doesn’t really need to be repainted like wood does.
It came in planks 16ft long and 8 inches wide. To install it you start at the bottom of a wall and nail the planks on in rows with the next row up overlapping the one beneath it. As you are nailing you must be sure that you are over a stud and you must make sure the plank is perfectly level. I got a little tool that sounded great in theory. Supposedly if you got the bottom row level you could use this little tool to keep the other rows level as you went up the wall.
The wall we started with had a garage door and a window in it. We began laying planks up the wall on each side of the garage door, but when we got to the top the two sides didn’t match up. It was a disaster! The tool I had been counting on wasn’t reliable. At that moment I was sure that we had bitten off more than we could chew. I thought about the whole house that had to be done and felt sick. Thankfully my dad was there. He kept his head and started thinking how we could fix the problem on the wall that didn’t match up and also how we could keep it level over the whole house.
It was a big job. Each time we got to a new wall we had to go with levels and mark guide lines for the planks. We also needed to mark where the studs were so we could find them. Every plank needed to be measured and cut to go around windows, doors, and outlets, using concrete saw blades. Also before we could leave a wall we needed to caulk between every plank. But little by little and plank by plank it went on.
We got to the final wall and had to build scaffolding three levels high to reach the last little bit. Every morning I prayed that we would all be safe. It was terrifying up there but we got it all on and no one got hurt. The day the final bit of siding went on was a day for celebration. We still needed to paint it but that would be easy compared to what we had just done.
Interior
By the time we had the siding done our sub contractors had the interior walls ready for painting. Prepping for the painting was a bigger job than I thought it would be. We had to caulk every seam and fill every nail hole, remove the doors and all their hardware before we could paint. We sprayed it all white and then later came with a roller to add color to some of the walls. After that came laying tile, then all the electrical outlets and light fixtures.
My sister came for a visit while I was laying tile in the kitchen so she was working with me. I had my 12 year old son helping us by mixing up the mortar in a bucket using a drill with a paddle on it. She went to the garage to get the bucket and I heard her howling with laughter. I ran out, and there was my son, who was wearing floppy basketball shorts. His shorts had gotten wrapped around the drill and he was stuck to the drill by his shorts. We rescued him and all had a great laugh.
Finishing Touches
My husband made a nice mantel. He wasn’t sure how to go about it so we went to the lumber yard and started stacking pieces of wood and moldings together until we thought it looked good. He bolted the biggest board to the wall and then attached the other ones on top of it. It turned out really nice.
The last project was the fireplace. We were using thin bricks which are kind of cool. They are actual brick but they are only about 1/2 inch think. I just stuck them to the wall using liquid nails in a caulking gun. I drew some level lines to use as a guide so they would be straight. About halfway through this last project my arm started to hurt and by the time I got the last brick in place it was so painful I could barely move it. I had developed a bad case of tennis elbow and couldn’t use my arm for months. I was very grateful that we had been able to finish and now I could let my arm rest.
Moving In
We moved in about 6 months after we started. There were still a few projects to finish but they could wait a bit. We had started the end of April and were moved in by the middle of October, just in time to carve our Halloween pumpkins.
Building a house was a huge project and probably not for everyone. But as I look back I feel great satisfaction remembering the challenges we faced and how we pushed through them. We had to have faith that we could do it and perseverance to figure things out. And in the end it was just a big project.
