Well within 15 days I should own a piece of the Niagara Peninsula. About 2months ago I placed an offer on a piece of property 63ft by 200ft on the edge of the town of Virgil in the middle of the Niagara Peninsula. On 15 Aug if nothing goes wrong it will be mine. Then will start the task of slowing building a house and detached garage. This Blog will follow the trials and tribulations of this task. What might it even harder is that I will be the General Contractor. Now just a little about me. I have just finished 27yrs with the Royal Canadian Air Force and then another 5yrs with the Royal Canadian Air Force Reserves. I have now retired from the Military and have decided to build my Retirement house back in the area I grew up in. My Mom and sister still live here and my brother is only 2.5hrs away. While in the Military I lived in Trenton Ont, Comox BC and Victoria BC. During my time in I also owned 5 houses and had 3 of them built from scratch. This will be the 6th house I've owned and the first one I have built from start to finish. My Dad was involved in Finish Carpentry all his life and I grew up around this stuff. As a kid I went with Dad to work and watched the framers, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians etc etc work in the Subdivision. I even managed to help them out from time to time. During my Military career I was always helping people with their home improvements and even helped a few people build there own houses. I've been very handy with my hands and therefore look forward to doing as much work as possible on this new venture.
To let you know what I am getting myself into here are a couple of pictures of the task at hand. First picture is from Google Earth and shows the property outlined in Black. The red outlines will be the house and detached garage. House will be 34ftby54ft with a 6ft porch across the front and a 10ft porch across the back. The garage will be 24ftby32ft with a small shed attached in the back. The house to the right of me is gone the property is cleaned of and that piece is sold to another couple to build their house.

Here are a couple pictures showing the house from my El cheapo drafting program.

I've been involved over the last couple of months in fine tuning the design with help from my Brother and Sister and their spouses. As well I've been talking to people who would be willing to be sub contractors on this house. At the end of the day this house will not be the cheapest I've owned however it will most likely be over built in certain areas. I am also trying to make it as energy efficient as I can. With this in mind I had thought to use Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) for the basement however the cost became to much for me. So we are still doing a Standard poured basement however I will be studding the walls out 1" from the concrete and then having Closed cell spray foam sprayed around the entire basement and into the Rim Joist cavities. On the main floor I will be using Structural Insulated Panels (SIP's) for the exterior walls. These panels are two sheets of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) separated with 5.5" of Foam insulation. This wall will have a true R29. the only exception will be around window and door openings and where we have to let 2by6 studs into the walls to support beams for the porch roofs. The Roof structure will have energy efficient truss design with the extra heel at the walls to allow more insulation at the wall truss joint.

As we continue with this project I will update this blog most likely on a weekly basis as to what is happening and what I did during the past week to facilitate this build. And during this all I am scouring the want ads looking for deals on products I might need.
All the best and talk to you again.