Our house

Here in Fairbanks, just about anything goes. As long as you're out of the city limits - which is about a 3-mile radius surrounding the Springhill Suites at the heart of downtown - you don't have to follow building code. At. All.

So! Five years ago, we bought a lovely 1.8 acre lot in the highly-coveted hills which are cool in summer, and toasty warm in winter (thanks to the inversion: the colder it is at lower elevations, the warmer it is at our house. In town, it can get down to about -55 in the worst of winter, but we didn't see colder than 25 below.). We're about a 15-minute drive into town, which was absolutely nothing to me when I moved here. But things are so relative, that now driving the 10 minutes from one end of town to another gets me all huffy and impatient if I have to stop for BOTH stoplights. Kidding. There are many more stoplights. But I definitely do get aggravated by the traffic.

We found a houseplan on ePlans, made some modifications to it, and decided to build it. Ourselves. Which doesn't mean we picked the contractors and bossed them around. Nosirree. It meant that we cut the trees where we wanted the driveway and the house site. The Dirt Work guys came in (since the one thing we lacked was heavy machinery) and grubbed these swathes, prepared a nice driveway, dug the hole in the ground for a level foundation, installed the septic, buried the water and fuel tanks... and left.

We blocked out the footer, and had concrete pumped in. We had a load of concrete blocks delivered. About 500, if I remember correctly. One by one, we carried these blocks from the offload pile down to the footer, and began building up the foundation. Since we both work full-time, construction is limited to evenings, weekends, and spare summer time when Frank was off contract. We didn't work through the coldest of winter. There's just no way that anything productive could be done at 20 below. One winter day, though, I drove up just to take a look at the property. As I approached our lot, I saw something that nearly caused me to drive off the road. The two lots adjacent to ours were for sale. The owners decided not to build here, and didn't want to hold onto the lots. We bought them as soon as we could. We now have nearly six acres of birch, poplar, and spruce trees, and no too-close neighbors looking into our yard.

When we ran out of concrete blocks, I started hauling them in my truck, about 20 at a time. We ended up using nearly 650 of them. We mixed the concrete, gravel, sand, and lime when it was time to fill the blocks for a solid foundation. This was completed in the cool fall rain, the second summer.

I had no clue what I had gotten myself into. None. After working my butt off doing things I never imagined I'd do, including assembling and installing a foundation drainpipe, tarring and putting up a plastic moisture barrier all around the foundation, I basically checked out. To this point, that was the hardest work with the smallest return. Frank pretty much took over from here.

Frank built the subfloor and framed the walls for the first and second floors while I worked with a framing company to have our trusses designed and built. When they delivered the trusses and the full-length beam, my eyes turned into saucers again. The beam was graciously installed with the crane, since there's no way we could ever have lifted the massive thing. The trusses, however, were placed by us. Frank perched on the beam, and I ooched my height-fearing self along the top of the framed walls. Then, Frank carried on essentially alone. I can't even itemize everything he did. He did all the electrical, plumbing, and insulation work. He put up the vapor barrier, installed our beautiful custom windows, and put up the drywall. He mudded it, sanded it, and textured it. He installed our tile floors, built our custom tile shower, designed and built our staircase. We had carpet installed in our upstairs living areas and in Jenna's bedroom. We painted the interior together.

Now, there are few things left to do. The siding will arrive this week, and we will install it ourselves. We also have window trim and baseboard trim to complete. Our garage slab has been poured, and we will begin construction on it later in summer.

Next year we'll do exterior landscaping. But until then, this is just about as close to a dream house as I can imagine. Of all the frustrations that come with a project this size, there is nothing so rewarding and heartwarming as living in a house that is exactly the way we've wanted it. We've had some doozies of arguments, but we've stuck together, and are so happy to have our little family in our home.