Rebuilding our house

Plan for Rebuilding - It is now 16 weeks after the fire.
Week one of May 1-5 Return from week of youth Camp on Friday and assessing fire damage.
Setting up housekeeping in the garage building, "the honeymoon cottage."
Week two of May 6-12 Inspection of fire by local authorities, moving all items out of the house (some to storage at our church center) and begin removal of damaged wooden upstairs. The downstairs is made of plastered cement block using support poles and these poles were duplicated and have become part of the new construction. All of the wooden upstairs was damaged and had to be removed. Wood is being kept for future use such as door frames, church furniture such as pews and pulpits.
Week three of May 13-19 Continuation of the removal of the wooden house walls and ceiling and clean up of rubble. Removal of three large trees was necessary to accommodate construction of rebuilding as one storey building entirely out of steel and cement.
Week four of May 20-June 2 Building starts with the installation of 5 new support poles and initial work for footings. Removal of old flooring, drop ceilings, wooden portions of the stairs--no longer needed.
Week one of June: 3-9 Preparing for pouring the new floor cement including laying reinforcing steel mesh.
Week two of June 10-16 Building 6 roof trusses. Week three of June. 17-23 Setting trusses and welding everything in together.
Week four of June 24-30 Roofing the entire structure begun. We are using insulated steel roofing with large overhangs to aid in cooling on hot days.
Week one of July, 1-7 Building cement block walls enclosing the addition, sawing lumber into windows frames, setting windows and door frames.
Week two of July, 8-14 Removal of "interior walls" that had windows. Begining the interior walls for a bathroom and bedrooms. West Soffit and north gable openings enclosed. Front and back doors are hung.
Week three of July 15-21 Finish the back gable enclosure and begining the plastering of walls.
Week three of July 22-28 Our bedroom and bathroom nearly completed. Ceilings started. Continued to plaster inside walls.

Month of August Rains slowed down progress during August. Still, we were making progress plastering all of the interior and exterior walls. The bedrooms and bathroom ceilings were installed. Initial electrical and phone connections were installed and the bathroom and bedroom completed (other than paint). During August we moved our bedroom into the finished bedroom and removed the temporary ceiling in the old office preparing for remodeling these rooms.

August 19, 2007
Rain (which the local workers depend upon for rice planting) continue. More finish work has been accomplished during the last week with just two workers. We have decided to remove the kitchen walls since they were poorly constructed originally (kind of "shaky!" and crooked) and redo the kitchen to make Gail's domain more comfortable and useful.

What is left to do in September and following?
Electrical wiring (lights, plugs, fans, and so on).
Screens, antitheft bars, glass window panes for some of the still unfinished windows.
Remodeling Thai style bathroom.
Ceilings and floors in the auditorium.
Remodeling of Office and kitchen
Painting and trim
Landscaping (this includes clean up and leveling property)
Using up wood for furniture (before the termites get it!)

Another project we would like to do as the Lord supplies, is to convert the temporary living quarters which was our garage and storage building into living quarters for Miss Kaew Petchompu, the single co-worker and her mother who are our helpers at the Baptist center. When this is finished, we can save monthly rent and other expenses of our rental property, which is where our church presently meets.

This future project, while smaller, will mean we will have to install more doors, walls, plaster walls, install new electrical wiring, an additional bathroom and drop ceilings and a new parking area along side to replace the present garage which will be part of the converted