The Castle Project – Tilt Up Stone – Owner Build

I love to shop local, even if sometimes it means big-box stores. (While they often kill local small business, they still provide jobs for locals).

HOWEVER, after 2 calls to local non-big-box supply stores, and a trip to the local big box, I was sent home with PEX tubing to be used in my radiant heat flooring. When I went to start installing it, I read the fine print on the label and it said “not for radiant heat applications.” Thanks Mr. Big Box for the waste of time and necessitating the cancellation of my scheduled concrete pour.

Enter http://www.pexuniverse.com/ I found everythiung I needed for the install here in one location, and coupled it with a 5% off coupon I found online. I just placed the order, and presuming the order shows up in-time I will leave this post on the blog as a testament to the fix they facilitated for my problem.

I’d also like to throw a shout out to http://radiantec.com for their extremely helpful articles on installation. If they had a do-it-yourself- shopping cart style store I probably would have ordered from them.

We had ~50 tons of rock delivered for fill in our foundation.

Just a quickie, showing us strip foundation wall forms where we framed in an opening for HVAC access.

We poured 15 yards of 4,000 psi concrete yesterday for our foundation walls. It was a bear but thanks to help from my dad we got it done.

After handling over 1800′ of #5 rebar and 1000 bd ft of roughsawn red oak lumber, concrete crusted forms etc (more…)

This video shows how we build the octagonal forms for our north tower (turret).

My kids enjoyed the show as I cut rebar with a Gas powered saw. It wasn’t as dark as the (more…)

We designed & built a rebar tying jig to save our backs and aid in quality control as we tie a gazillion intersects…

Here are some picts of us building it and putting it to use.

Rock on steve!!!!! Thank you for your awesome help today. You know it was hot when it felt like 82 (more…)