The End is Near....

By Steph Davis

By KAVU

October 18^th, 2022

I last reported back in May about the house building adventure I’ve been enjoying, and I’m happy to say we are in the final stretch of the journey! May seems almost like a lifetime ago, so for anyone who doesn’t remember that post, my husband Ian and I decided to build an ICF house in Moab, across the street from the house I’ve lived in for 20 years, with the help of our friends Jake and Lance. We broke ground in December and life has been a pretty wild ride ever since.

Ian and I have done plenty of renovation over the years, but neither of us have ever built a house (at least not one with plumbing and a foundation), and neither one of us has done any sort of concrete work or ICF construction before, so......

it has been a huge adventure to say the least!

The most interesting thing I’ve learned from this project is that concrete is kind of like cats.

Professionals who do nothing but work with concrete will cheerfully tell you that anything you do involving concrete may.... or may not.... turn out anything like you expected. And, they all have lots of stories about the concrete being the wrong temperature, or the wrong something, creating a huge disaster that could not be salvaged. I will agree that concrete is a very stressful building material, and it’s definitely true that it does what it wants.

Luckily ours has (mostly) wanted to do what we wanted it to do. The other thing I’ve learned about concrete is that once you start building with it, you somehow never really stop.

Throughout the summer, I’ve made time to keep normal life going: skydiving, BASE jumping, climbing, getting up into the mountains, and training on the yard walls. But aside from that, house building has been a full immersion experience, and completely nonstop.

So, it’s a little strange to find ourselves now making shelves and doing finish work. We're finding more freedom and creativity in this phase, which has been a lot of fun, as well as our excitement of seeing things get truly done!