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Building Basics: Routine Maintenance The best way to preserve a structure is routine maintenance. Ignoring minor issues allows them to grow into major issues. That leaking shingle will allow water in to saturate the drywall on your ceilings. Loose siding is a pathway for moisture to penetrate walls, resulting in the perfect environment for termites and rot. Cracked mortar around a foundation block will allow water into the basement. All tiny issues but they provide a conduit for your home’s…

Building Basics: Level and Plumb Having good plans and a site with solid footing, the home builder can begin to construct the walls that complete the foundation. In our cold climate it is customary to pour a footer below the frost line and use concrete blocks to build a wall that forms either a crawl space or a basement. Placement of the first block in the first corner is crucial. As the blocks are placed, they must be perfectly level…

Building Basics: A Solid Foundation Countless hours of my high school years were spent in the drafting lab. After the obligatory twelve weeks of mechanical drawing freshman year, I immersed myself in architectural drawing for the balance of available shop and study periods. It is gratifying to create a set of plans from footer to final elevation. That pales to the satisfaction of having an enduring structure built based on those plans. Sadly, many grand structures fail because of an…