One of the realities of putting in lots of sweat equity and paying as you go: you can actually own your house at the end of a relatively short pertiod of time. No gigantic 30-year mortgages here.

Another reality of that approach: sometimes you run out of money and have to step back from building to make some more... I just finished one of those phases. It's a relief to not be so close to zero, and also a relief to be hammering some nails again...

I scheduled this week off of work to get things moving again. I've got a good start in the first two days, but I'm definitely feeling the race with winter heating up. I need to make some epic progress in the next five days to stay in the running.

Kicking things off right with some dutch oven goodness. It adds a little liveliness to a one-man construciton site to have a bit of awesome-smelling goodness bubbling away off to the side... a little bit of hearth makes it feel a little bit more like home.

I was wishing I had built the two footings in the breezeway, between the garage and where the house will eventually be, when I was doing the rest of the concrete work. It would have been minutes to fill these forms then. Now, it was a good half of a day of mixing bagged concrete mix in a wheelbarrow and building these footings. Either way... I got it done and I'm moving on now. Learning the lessons but not dwelling on it too much.

A little fun with my rebar bender. These bars hooked through the column base and tied it into the footing below.

The dutch oven has been fun. A handful of charcoal briquettes kept this pot of food simmering for over four hours. The pork fell apart when I touched it with a fork.

Footing number one. This one took six 80-pound bags of concrete. That's a lot of hand-mixing. I'm just a little irritated that I didn't square the column base more precisely with the concrete... another instance of learning the lessons but not dwelling on them. 

Footing number two. This one fell just about in line with my sewer pipe, so I had to dig it down about three feet to allow room to route the pipe past it later.

Finally finishing the stairs a month later. Here's a progress shot.

...and some more progress. Getting close.

I finished the stairs with plenty of daylight to spare. Now I'm ready to start nailing the second floor framing in place tomorrow morning.