By Our Own Hands or None - Site Prep and Footers
In Spring of 2019 , my wife and I finished making preparations to build our dream home. Dream home is almost a cliché at this point, a real estate agent's catch phrase to get someone to buy into a neighborhood with white picket fences and an HOA. In our case, we'd spent three years designing the house from the ground up, paying off what we owed on the land itself and hammering out all the fine little details. Initially, we expected the project to take us about twelve months, as we were going to do the majority of the work ourselves. With us throughout the entire experience was my father, whose expertise in building construction made the entire thing possible. Along the way we received help from friends, my brothers, and various good people who did honest, quality work. I've decided to do a sort of post-mortem for the whole house build. It was absolutely a unique experience, full of satisfaction and frustration. Now, as I sit in the study we built with our own hands I remai...