This spring just keeps hanging on. The temperatures at night are still getting pretty close to freezing, and when it’s cloudy, the daytime temps don’t get much above 50 F (10 C). But, the summer building season is in full swing.

My husband is a general contractor. We build custom homes, garages, shops, and hangars. with the occasional small commercial building thrown in.

This year people are very eager to get going, and my husband is very eager to get going. We just wish the weather would be eager to get going too! But, whether or not the weather cooperates, it’s time to start building.

Our sons, who have helped quite a lot the past several years, are out of country serving missions for our Church. One is in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, part of the Winnipeg, Canada mission. The other is in Muriae, Brazil, part of the Juiz de Fora, Brazil mission. They are doing fantastic, but it leaves us without help.

So, I get to go to work most days. This often means burning the candle at both ends for me as I still have to make meals, clean, and run my own business. My business is not super busy in the winter, mostly working for others creating merch for their shops, as well as the occasional commissioned artwork to paint and I have to keep my skills up, so I try to paint my own stuff as much as possible.

With summer coming though, the markets will be starting. I have one this Saturday to kick of the summer season. It’ll be held at Northern Spirits Rustic. I am super excited! I’ve been asked to come a couple of times and have had a lot of success with sales, but also with networking, and I look forward to Saturday’s kickoff.

My husband does a lot of the various parts of building himself. We have trades come in for the things we’re not licensed for, like anything plumbing or electrical. We also rarely do sheetrock although when we have time we do occasionally.

We started about 2 weeks ago getting a foundation for a hangar prepped. There was a pad of gravel that had been put in last year, so we had to level, compact, and then dig the footings around the perimeter. This particular building will have what’s called a slab on grade, so no deep foundation walls. We then laid out styrofoam for floor insulation, and then our part was finished until we were ready to place the concrete, the home owner is installing in-floor heating pipes and getting things prepped for electrical before we pour the concrete.

After we got that done, we moved on to our next job, a foundation for a local business. This will be a building for gathering and eating during tours. It’ll also have restrooms for guests. Friday and Saturday we prepped the ground, installed form boards for footings and placed rebar. This morning we poured the concrete. Tomorrow we will strip the forms and then move on to the crawl space walls which will be build using a foam insulated block, kind of like putting together Lego’s. This is one of my kids favorite parts of building.

We will be building the second job most of the way, the first job we will come back to put the roof on. Somewhere in between we will be adding a shed roof to a garage we built for someone in Talkeetna about 8 or 10 years ago. We also will be building a small house, and possibly another hangar this summer.

All this work is going to make us very busy and the summer fly by. I am just hoping it doesn’t go too fast! I only got pictures of the first job, but I will occasionally share what we’re doing as the summer goes along.

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