24x30 Wyoming NOT-Saltbox

melwynnd · May 21, 2006, 09:25:50 PM

Hi everyone. I thought I'd update on our progress with our little home:

Here's the exterior elevation of the house

Here's the first floor. We're running the front door through the sunporch and turning the entrance room into a big pantry(gotta have somewhere to keep all the wine and cheese I make

)

Here's the second floor.

We rented a backhoe to excavate for the foundation. We've hired out the actual concrete work. Here the forms for the footings are going in.

The foundation is done and waiting for backfill. We've started putting on the sill plates. The contractor put the bolts for the plates about 1/2" too low and we're having to chisel out each one to get the nuts on.

This is the view out the front door of our trailer house.

Amanda_931 · May 21, 2006, 10:14:13 PM

Aaaaahhhh getting started!!

What a nice thought.

jwv · May 21, 2006, 11:39:04 PM

I like that plan, congratulations on getting started. What kind of wine, what kind of cheese??

Judy

glenn-k · May 22, 2006, 12:18:34 AM

Looks great, Sherry.

jwv · May 22, 2006, 11:00:57 PM

Party at Melwynnd's!

We were in the Star Valley in Wyoming a few years back (Olympic wrestler Rulon Gardner is from that area) and had some good ice cream and cheese at the Star Valley Cheese factory. The coolest thing, and something our boys will never forget was seeing a cattle drive happening all around us. The cowboys and girls on horseback were herding the cattle right on the road in front of us. We could only go as fast as the cattle would allow and it was great, most people were patient but some Californian (not that there's anything wrong with that) in a motor home apparently had places to go and acted like a... well like the south end of a north going cow. Didn't phase the cowboys. At one point a couple in a little truck from Wisconsin got to talking to a cowgirl and you could tell the driver was saying "C'mon, let me try." She got off her horse, he got out of the truck and jumped on the horse, she got in the truck and he got to be a part of the drive for a couple of miles! It was one of those great moments.

Judy

Amanda_931 · May 22, 2006, 11:23:32 PM

The cattle drive sounds like it was fun. I really like happenings like that.

CREATIVE1 · June 13, 2006, 11:30:19 PM

Cute house! Do you have any other exterior renderings?

glenn-k · June 14, 2006, 12:16:42 AM

Welcome to the forum MIEDRN--- glad you found us again.

Amanda_931 · June 14, 2006, 09:49:19 PM

That looks like a design from Drummond. And I think they are in Canada. If it's Eastern, same kind of climate as Michigan.

So it may not be as awful as it could be.

ShawnaJ · June 25, 2006, 01:17:48 PM

I saw this on eplans.com, when I was looking for plans for our really Big house

someday...

I really loved the exterior look of it...but I would have to rearrange the whole inside, I didn't care for the kitchen, it's not big enough by far....

Sassy · June 25, 2006, 01:32:05 PM

Have you looked at the saltbox house John designed & built that they are living in? Really nice & looks like quite a bit of room. Awhile back, I had to look up where the term "saltbox" came from.

"The Saltbox house plan is named after the Colonial salt container it resembles.

Take a typical Cape Cod style two story home. Now extend the roof slope downward at the back of the home, to a one-story extension of the basic Cape Cod box, and you've got a Saltbox Colonial house -- so named because of its resemblance to an old-fashioned Colonial-era salt container. The Saltbox house plan is an elegant and simple way to expand the interior space in the home -- a feature that makes it popular with those seeking to maximize livability without breaking the bank. The extended space at the rear of the Saltbox home lends itself to the modern desire for an open design for a family room or combination kitchen/dining area, while still presenting a simple, traditional look to the street. The Saltbox house plan is often without ornamentation, with shingle or clapboard siding." (eplans.com)

melwynnd · June 27, 2006, 08:34:31 AM

It's taken us a while, but we are back on track. We had to wait to see just how high the water table goes when everyone irrigates around us before we could put the concrete floor in the crawlspace. The water table crawls up to within 1 1/2 foot to the surface. The only thing that saves everyone's bacon around here is the fact that 2 1/2 foot below the surface is a bed of pure sand and gravel. Great for keeping things from shifiting, HORRIBLE to dig water lines in

.

Our center beam and the three whole joists we got on last night. You can see our cement floor and the sump we put in, just in case.

The view out our front door.

You can see just how close to the trailer the house is. At least we don't have to go far to build!

Hopefully we can get some more joists up tonight. We've found that if we just consentrate on the next step rather than think about building a whole house, it's less intimidating.

Sherry

glenn-k · June 27, 2006, 09:32:35 AM

That's the way Sherry --later add the one things up and you'll have a bunch of them. Good on the progress.

melwynnd · July 24, 2006, 08:09:43 AM

We've made some more progress the last few weeks. Since we both have jobs, the farm, and just plain life keeps happening

, it seems we only have a few hours to work on it a day. We had a bit of bad luck two days after we put up our first wall. A microburst came out of the south(the wind never blows from that direction here), picked up two sheets of plywood from the ground and flung them at the wall support hard enough to break one completely in two. There was a large BANG and our lovely wall was on the ground, top and bottom plates split beyond repair :'(. What's more, we used ring shank nails, so we can't get the remains apart. We decided that was a practice wall. We may be able to use part of it as a deck.

I took a weeks vacation last week and my 13 year old daughter and I worked on the walls morning and night. My husband has been so busy in his body shop that he hasn't been able to help too much. He helped with the first, nailed the second, and then built us a lever to fit over the 2x6's so we could straighten them to nail them by ourselves(the air nailer is my best friend

). So we build the third and fourth wall all by ourselves. My daughter is much more excited about the house now that she's actually building it.

Three walls up, but not squared yet and the fourth finished on the floor. The mess on the ground is our "practice wall".

A better view of the walls. Hopefully we can get them squared and the fourth up this week.

Sherry

melwynnd · July 24, 2006, 08:19:10 AM

MIEDRN,

I just went through the old posts and found your questions.

We didn't have to get approval on the house plans as there isn't any zoning(yet) out of town here. We had to get a residence certificate, but we did that when we put in the trailer house.

We are not using the windows as per plans. We are going with Jeld-Wen 30x48's($128.00) everywhere except over the kitchen counters where we are using 30x30's($108). We got rid of the north sliding glass door and just put a window in that wall. The east sliding glass door is a 36" nine light door with a window next to it. We put two windows in the living room rather than the full wall window. We figured that if we kept all the windows the same size, we'd eventually be able to build the frames for them without messing up

. We are glassing in the veranda and put a 72" 10 lite french door between the sunroom and the living room.

There is another dormer you can't see in the provided pictures on the north side in the master bedroom. We are tempted to put two in(I think it looks lopsided with just one) and put doors instead of windows in them and add a balcony going across. I think that would add a lot to the house with not too much extra expense.

Sherry

melwynnd · July 27, 2006, 04:07:27 PM

We got the three standing walls squared and nailed down only to find out my daughter and I built the 4th wall 5 1/2" too long

. Carpenters we're not.

Sherry

glenn-k · July 27, 2006, 11:12:07 PM

I think you're doing good just for the fact that you can build it, Sherry. As my sister once said, "Everybody makes misnakes." :-/

melwynnd · July 29, 2006, 09:20:12 AM

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm sure it won't be the only snag.

We've decided to put a couple of shallow wells in the crawl space. One will connect to a hand pump at the kitchen sink and the other will connect to an electric pump. We are currently hooked up to a shallow well a couple of hundred feet away and it's hard to get water pressure. We don't use this water for drinking as it's pretty hard(think scummy coffee), but for everything else.

I think we're going to just drive sand points fifteen feet or so down. With the well in the crawlspace, at least we shouldn't have to worry about the pipes freezeing.

Sherry

Amanda_931 · July 29, 2006, 09:36:50 AM

Auto parts people believe that a mistake a day keeps them from being obnoxious--any more obnoxious than the job requires, anyway.

Nice to see progress.

I can remember my mother's "old family home" had both a hand pump and a regular faucet at the kitchen sink.

glenn-k · July 29, 2006, 09:48:43 AM

I haven't heard of doing that in years, Sherry. Great idea. Please let us know more about your kitchen pump well project. You can develop it with air to open it up and clean the water. I don't know what is normal procedure to do in your area. Is this common there now?

24x30 Wyoming NOT-Saltbox

melwynnd

Amanda_931

Dberry

jwv

glenn-k

melwynnd

jwv

Amanda_931

CREATIVE1

MIEDRN

glenn-k

Amanda_931

ShawnaJ

Sassy

ShawnaJ

melwynnd

glenn-k

melwynnd

melwynnd

melwynnd

Jimmy_Cason

glenn-k

melwynnd

Amanda_931

glenn-k