Well the kids are now in school for the year (yeah!!!!), that means work will and won't be easier. Traditional house building takes many people to do, but me and Silver are doing this all ourselves; if we come to something that needs extra help we will wait until the kids are home and use them to help out. We are planning on the kids to learn as much as we can teach them about all parts of the building process.

Now when I say their is a diffrance from "traditional" building and what we are doing, is because well... we live on a fixed income, Silver is disabled and I still have to find work out here in Missouri. Once the building is done and our growing area is set up his pay will be more than enough for the family but right now we are struggling with costs. So we are building with that in mind. We are going to use pole barn style consrtuction, it requires less of the expensive types of wood. We are also asking around at local lumber mills to see if buying from the scource would be cheaper that from (gasp) Loews.

We are going to check out a local discount building supply store to see their prices and also to ask about fiberglass dairy panels. If they are what Silver belives they are we are going to use them in the initial construction instead of using OSB for the walls and possible use them on the roof instead of metal as they advertised them at $4.99 a panel. Next year or a little after we are planning to use the slip-form masonry to face the house afterwards, so we'd only have a fiberglass house for a year or two.

Silver was also going to try to save us some money on our posts for the construction. He was originally thinking of using some of the trees we cut down as the posts. Do you know how hard it is to find a draw knife when your internet is limited to trips to town (which you limit because you want to save on gas money)? So Silver has come up with a better solution. He is going to make the posts himself from smaller wood and some pressure treated peices where we have to have them. All of the building manuls say you need pressure treated to touch the ground, OK; no problem. The last foot of each post will be pressure treated and the tops will be two 2x4's glued and screwed together with the pressure treated peice also glued and screwed on at the bottom. We will pay half the price on our posts this way, then to furthur protect them we are going to buy so cheap paint and coat each post in paint to semi-weather proof them. I'll get some pictures as we make them to show the whole process.

On a side note I have some advise to all those people out there who might think that using a chain saw alone would be a good idea. When we were still cuting up the area we were going to build on Silver was cutting one of the trees down. Now the wind was blowing in the direction he wanted, he notched the tree properly, and was standing in the spot it wasn't suppose to fall in when he finished his cut. The tree turned 180 degrees and fell towards him, if I had not been there to watch him when he was cutting he'd been squashed by the tree. He had to dive to the side and threw the chain saw in the process so he would not land on it. So please be careful when cutting in the woods folks, the unexpected happens; when you lest expect it too.

Be well all, and Blessed Be...