Building our Home – Travels and Trades

House Progress (4 years in the making)

Our house is nearly nearly there. We started building about 20 months ago and it’s just about finished. I was lucky to have gone to school with one of the best Canadian architects (in my opinion) and he agreed to design this one for me.

The design is amazing. We just told him we wanted three pods (separate living spaces) that integrated with the outdoors but also were connected by a top floor. This is what he came up with

Thanks Joe (fellow Trading Dominion user) for taking the pics in my absence!

Hopefully will be in by October/November.

Mar 16 – Construction Progress

It’s coming along. We’ve got the grade beams poured for two of the buildings. Not much else going on.

Feb 26 – Construction update

We’ve completed the piles and next up is the grade beams. We should have a structure in place by June.

We’re about 10 days into the process and we’ve only had one headache. I was told 2 days before they began piling that they needed water hooked up on the site. Normally that takes about 2 weeks. We didn’t have 2 weeks since the pile machine was already rented and only two exist on island. We had to pull some “west bay connections” and got a water guy in to connect the day they arrived. So far so good. I hired a construction manager to tend over the process so I can alleviate most stresses but I am expecting many!

Breaking Ground!

I figured I might as well post my house building journey here since it’s one of a kind and I can try to immortalize the experience in this blog.

It was a long long process but we finally have broken ground on our dream house here in Cayman.

Our friend and brilliant architect designed it for us. It’s essentially three pods attached by an upper floor which creates some nice usable outdoor space. It’ll be completely net zero using solar.

We’ve just put in 51 piles going about 25 feet deep. The next step is the slab and eventually the ICF (insulated concrete foam blocks). We’re hoping to have the structure up in about 4-5 months and the entire process should take 12 months to complete.