Building a home from a BudgetHomeKit

This day of construction the contractors finished  up Phase 5 of the build, putting on the purlins on the roof and porches.  They started Phase 6 putting on the starter studs and top plates. This completed their work. After this the entire build will be up to us.YIKES!! In my opinion it was well worth the money to have them get the house through phase 5 and part of Phase 6 as some of this work was very hard to do and required some additional equipment that had to be rented and some very specialized knowledge and skills. I cannot say enough good things about the contractors from Budget Home Kits. Their professionalism and knowledge was top notch and they were more than happy to answer any of my 1000 questions.  At this stage we were up to page 39 in the instruction  manual. Now its up to us.    

While the contractors were here we discussed the different phases of the build. They said you move some things around such as the roof. We skipped ahead to Phase 8 putting on the porch roof panels. I put the panels next to the porches to help speed up the process. My brother and sister showed up to help and then my neighbor with the skidsteer (which we needed for additional height to reach the front porch due to the slope of the property). The instructions were very detailed starting on page 69 of my book. Careful attention needs to be done to ensure you get the first panel square and ensuring your extended rib faces inward. The first rib needs to be 1 inch off the end of the truss. After this it was an easy process to continue on each panel until we were done. Since we didn't do stage 7 yet, we could not finish the installation of the corner trim.  This stage did not even require 1/2 day to perform. 

The next step for us was putting on the roof over the house. My brother in law is a roofer and brought out his roofing crew to help us on this step.  The first step was finishing the last part of Phase 8 putting on the porch flashing which was very easy to complete and only took a short time.  They thing did most of the installation of Phase 9 putting on the primary roof panel installation. Once again make sure the first panel rib is 1 inch off the end of the truss and is square with the trusses. After the first panel is in place the process is to just keep adding the panels to the other end of the house. The instructions are very detailed and should not be too hard to complete.  We did perform part of Phase 10 by installing the ridge cap on the roof even though it would have to have the ends screws removed to install the rake trim, but that will have to wait until we put the siding up. At this stage we still had not done plumbing or concrete, but now the house was dried ...

This was one of the most critical parts of the build. There are no instructions on how to do this other than the locations on the blueprints. The blueprints had each location marked for every toilet, sink, shower and tub. They use a reference from the outside of the galvanized steel form from two different locations. We ran a string line to get these correct. My brother is a plumber but we still made a mistake on one of the pipes (vent pipe for the bathrooms). It actually worked out great for us in the long run. We didn't know we made a mistake until after we poured the concrete We realized what the issue was and made adjustments to the blueprints that will be explained later. At this stage we still did not have water lines to the house or a septic system in place. We just stubbed the water line and the sewer output line  outside the house knowing where they would be run later on. We did use Pex pipe for the water line and will use it for all internal water lines. All water lines w...

We were now ready for the completion of Phase 3 by getting the concrete poured.  Down in this area of Southeastern Missouri it is hard to get commitments for work to be done. It took quite a bit to finally get someone to come and give me a quote and a timeline to get the foundation poured. We finally got a date set for early February if the weather was good. It took two complete loads to get the entire foundation poured, the first load had too much calcium and it hardened too fast, the second load was too wet and they were there until almost 9PM getting it to set up. Because of these issues the job had issues, the foundation had high and low spots up to almost an inch. That was not really apparent until later in the build process. I couldn't get pictures of the final that night as it was very dark when they were done working by headlights from the trucks and flashlights. At least now we can start the walls after we let it set up! 

After the weather finally got better after a couple of winter storms we were able to start the walls. This would be the completion of Phase 6. The first step was putting in the bottom plates. This requires locations of all the doors as those bottom plates have to be cut for the doors. I think the hardest part of this process was getting the lower plate into the galvanized steel for the foundation. After the bottom plates are secured to the galvanized steel the studs can be installed. The studs are all installed on 2 foot centers. Each window location required additional work to build the frames for the windows and leaving an additional 1 1/2 inches on each stud to install a wooden 2x4 frame for the windows and doors to be secured to. There were only a couple of pictures taken of this part of the build.

This was a continuation of Phase 6. We did the installation of  the 2x4 frames for the windows and doors and getting them set. This process was  pretty straight forward but we had a few issues, I think the doors I bought were for a 2x6 frame not a 2x4, this didn't really show up - at least to me - until we were ready for drywall. The directions were very easy to understand on this stage.  I didn't get any pictures but we also installed the wall band. Somehow I missed the part of the instructions where it said to install that BEFORE the doors and windows. But we got it installed. It is installed 4 feet 6 inches up on each stud. This will be used to secure the wall siding. Make sure to install the screws on the top and bottom of the band so the middle can be used for the siding.