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The north end of the house is the garage door at ground level. The slab is poured and set. I will probably do some sort of concrete acid stain finish on it once the concrete has aged some. This will be a nice room-y garage with some storage space on both sides of the vehicle. I have a rider lawnmower that needs to fit in there too. I'm sure I will have to pull the car out to use the lawnmower, but that is no big deal to me.

The south end of the house has a porch off the guest room that is rather high up. It comes straight out the French doors at that room's level.  We will have to build some steps that go down from the porch to the ground level but we will wait and see what blocks we have left over, if any. We can always build some wood steps until we can afford some special DAC-ART ones.

We are fortunate that the house that our riginally poured for had a lot of porches and a lot of columns. It appears that we will have enough of the 15 " hollow column blocks to make all the upper and lower porch columns that we need.

Don gives hand signals to Mike in the crane to pick up blocks from the ground and place them on the porch slab.

Each column block slides over the rebar that is coming up out of the porches slab. They are then shimmed for levelness and to keep the horizontal lines matching the ones that come off the house. The upper columns will stack directly on top of these lower ones.

Someone came and bush-hogged the property next door ! It had gotten really overgrown. I wasn't around when they did it, but they had to have used a big tractor since the terrain is really rough, esp. near our property line where the fence got messed up in the last big storm.

I am sooooo glad that I am building before this 10 lot subdivision housing. I had imagined that I would be having to put up with tons of dust, noise, and lots of workers overlooking my little scene over here, but since my main house is going up first, I will basically have a huge wall of privacy between me and this development.

Real estate transactions are at a near d-still down here, so it may be some time before the investors who bought these over-priced lots can sell them to end-users.

Michael Bates, our electrician came out and we made decisions on locating the electric outlets on the first floor. The men from New Age Stone Builders are cutting into the blocks for the duplex outlets.

One row of blocks that went into the raised pad on the west side of the house for the air conditioner to sit on required that all the blocks be trimmed by 5 inches. This was so they would line up with the rows of blocks in the house walls. We will hold on to these cut pieces to see if they might be needed elsewhere in the construction.

On a warm but overcast day I was able to burn all my wood scraps from construction up until now. It all burned cleanly, with no smoke. I picked a day when the wind was blowing steadily and in a direction away from my house. We had had some recent rain, so dryness was not a risk factor like it would have been up until then. I got a permit from the Gulf Shores Fire Department.

There is so little waste and scrap with DAC-ART construction.

The excess concrete is often left in a plop on the ground into which a cut piece of rebar is inserted before it sets up so that it can be easily lifted by the crane when the time comes to carry them off. See the loop lying on the ground on the upper right.