Just as with the reason for adding a page for the construction of my house, I am also adding a page for the construction of my brother’s house due to it being one of the bigger accomplishments in my life, and because we did also install the plumbing in it too.
In August of 2016, me and my brother, Konrad, were both laid off from Legacy Mechanical. We had both been working there together for about 7 years. I think that my relatively recent divorce from my wife of nearly 30 years had some bearing on my attitude towards Legacy and one of the project managers there in particular at that time. As a result of that, we both found ourselves unemployed. Shortly after we were laid off from Legacy, me and my siblings determined that we should quickly build a house for my brother and his wife due to a decline in my father’s mental health. I’m really shortening and summarizing the story here in order to protect the privacy of certain aspects of my family’s history. But just to summarize, we determined that the best course of action would be to quickly construct a house for my brother and his wife on the property that they owned next to mine. We didn’t have very much time to spend on planning or evaluating costs. We really just needed to get started with building.
My younger brother, Jason, financed the construction through a home equity loan that he took out on his house. And since we were both currently unemployed, and since we needed to build the house fast, me and Konrad both agreed that we’d work on building the house as our primary jobs, drawing only minimal pay from the construction budget to pay for our personal bills and expenses. We finally started construction in October of 2016 after waiting for certain hurdles to be cleared that were required by Douglas county in getting a building permit.
Given that we didn’t need a construction loan, and given that we had a shortage of time, we didn’t put a whole lot of effort into trying to create a professional looking drawing. This picture is basically what we used for coming up with a preliminary plan for the house:
We wanted to build a very basic and small house for as cheap as we could. We basically just wanted to build a duplex for my brother and his wife to live in on one side, and for our father to live in on the other. The Douglas county’s zoning didn’t allow for a duplex to be built in this area though. So we had to be careful about how we proceeded. Douglas county also had some minimum requirements that we didn’t plan on when we first came up with the idea of building a house.
Douglas county required that we have a 2 car garage or carport that we weren’t initially planning to include. And they also required a minimum house size of 1,800 square feet of heated space, which we weren’t planning on doing either. But ironically, by the time that we added all of the minimally sized rooms in each apartment on my brother and his wife’s wish list, it wound up being a little bit bigger than the 1,800 square feet of required heated space anyway.
I refined their initial drawing a little bit after we were able to settle on certain details. This is one of the preliminary sketches that I made at that time:
I know that I made more detailed and complete drawings that also included dimensions, but I don’t know what happened to them.
These are pictures of the underground plumbing that we installed:
(Click on pictures to enlarge)
Forming the slab edges and prepping the slab:
Pouring the slab:
Running the water service up the driveway:
It was somewhere around this period of time when Konrad suddenly decided to take a job working at night at Walmart without consulting with me about it first. He explained that he thought that he needed to do that in order to maintain his credit-worthiness for getting a mortgage loan upon completion of the house. It kind of made some sense to me, so I didn’t argue very about it very much. But after starting to work for Walmart at night, Konrad’s availability to work on the house shrank severely. We wound up only working around 40 hours a week on it when I was originally envisioning working 60 to 70 hours per week on the house. Given that we were now at the framing stage, it would have been kind of difficult (and possibly dangerous) for me to try to work on the house by myself. So that’s what we did for a pretty good while, we just worked about 40 hours per week on building the house. These are the pictures from that period:
The following pictures are from when we installed the prefabricated roof trusses. My younger brother, Jason, and my sister’s step son, Jacob Hallmark, came out to help us install them. And both of my sons, Randy and Jeremy, came out to help too:
Installing the roof sheathing:
I wanted to sub out the roof shingle installation, but Konrad wanted us to do it instead. Konrad’s brother-in-law, who was supposed to be knowledgeable about installing them, came out to help us. It turned out that he actually wasn’t very knowledgeable about installing them at all. Fortunately, the back side of the roof that the brother-in-law laid out and started cannot be seen very easily from the ground, as none of the shingles are in alignment. Konrad also wound up having to tar over lots of exposed nail heads on the back side of the roof since the brother-in-law haphazardly put nails in random places everywhere on the shingle tabs. I wound up laying out the shingles for the front side of the roof, and they turned out good.
Miscellaneous interior framing and house wrap installation:
We used a Hardie plank equivalent for the cement siding.
Miscellaneous interior framing and MEP rough-in:
Installing the septic system:
It was somewhere around this time that Konrad had a near fatal car wreck on his way to work at Walmart one night. The wreck wasn’t his fault, but he wasn’t wearing a seat belt either. As a result, he hit his head pretty hard, which caused severe brain trauma to him. He had to be flown to Grady hospital on a life-flight helicopter. He wound up being kept in Grady’s intensive care unit for a month. He had come very close to dying. He was then moved to a regular hospital bed where he stayed for a while until Grady released him. Then shortly after Konrad was finally released from the hospital, both of my parents died.
This was an incredibly difficult time for me. Within a period of roughly a year, my wife of 30 years left me, I got laid off from Legacy, my brother almost died from a near-fatal car wreck, both of my parents died, and I was stuck trying to finish building my brother’s house by myself.
Fortunately, things did get a little better as time went along. Both of my sons wound up coming through for me. I am very grateful to them for helping me finish the house. Another bright spot was when one of Konrad’s friends, Amanda, managed to find a very benevolent person that was a drywall contractor. Me and my son, Randy, had already hung a good bit of the drywall when Amanda told me that she’d found somebody willing to donate their resources for the house after hearing about Konrad’s situation. I found it very hard to believe that anybody would do that until I actually met the man. He was an Hispanic guy that spoke very good English. He told us that he would have his guys come finish hanging the drywall, and that they would also finish the drywall for us too. He said that he wouldn’t charge us anything for doing it either. He then reached into his wallet and pulled out $900 in cash to give to us. He followed through with everything exactly as he had promised. In addition, he located a substantial amount of paint on one of his jobs that he got for us for free. I am still amazed to this day by his generosity. He was a total stranger, yet he helped us anyway.
In addition, there was another guy that Amanda ran across that donated all of the tile that we needed. He had accumulated it at his home over time from his job. And to top it off, he also brought all of the tile to us. He even got his employer to donate the mortar and grout that we needed. Once again, a total stranger was willing to help us.
And finally, I have to admit that I was almost brought to tears one Saturday morning. I had recently talked to Joe Lenox about my problems with the house, but I never expected what he would do next. We (me and my 2 sons) had come to work on the house as normal one Saturday morning. We were in the painting stage at that time. Suddenly, several vehicles started coming up the driveway. It turned out to be Joe Lenox, Britt Beemiller (my former boss at Legacy), and Julio. All three of them had come out to help us paint. And that’s what they did. They painted all day. And none of them expected anything in return.
I am very grateful to all of these people that donated their time and resources around this period of time.
The following pictures are of us hanging sheetrock and painting. I bought a paint gun in order to prime the interior of the house and for painting the exterior siding.
Installing tile:
I also appreciate Joe Booth for getting us this 80 gallon commercial grade water heater for pretty cheap from Rogers Mechanical:
Konrad could barely get around when he came out to visit as we neared completion of his house. He did what he could to try to help though. He never did fully recover from the injuries that he sustained in that wreck.
Almost finished:
The completed house consists of two separate living spaces having a total of 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, 2 living rooms, 2 dining areas, and 2 laundry rooms, with a total of about 1,880 sq. ft. of heated space.
We hired people/companies to do the following things in building this house:
- Clear the land and level the area out
- Pour and finish the concrete slab
- Install the electrical system
- Install the HVAC system
- Install the septic system
- Install the exterior coil trim
- Install the gutters
Work that was donated by the friendly contractor:
- Install about 2/3 of the sheetrock
- Finish the sheetrock
Work that was performed us:
- Lay out the house and dig the footings
- Install the plumbing
- Prep the slab and form the slab edges
- Frame the house
- Install the roof shingles
- Install the house wrap and the exterior doors and windows
- Install the siding
- Insulate the house
- Install about 1/3 of the sheetrock
- Install the interior doors and trim
- Install the vinyl plank flooring
- Install the tile
- Install the garage doors
- Paint the interior and the exterior
- Install the cabinets and countertops
- Final grading and seeding the lawn
My Dad never did live in the house with my brother and his wife since he died before we finished building it. But my brother is able to able to rent out the apartment, which covers most of the mortgage payment for the house. That helps my brother out a lot since he is on disability and doesn’t really receive very much from that.
David Stauffer 