When I built houses we used an all-terrin forklift to lift the trusses. Probably too late, but if you do it again. Building without a forklift is too hard. We did use a crane for one job - there was no room for a forklift. It took 3 people to keep an experienced crane operator busy. They move fast.

cement is one job I would be careful of. You can do it yourself but there cannot be breaks or mistaves as cement is curing and losing strength all the time.

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mothballed 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There are a lot of breaks and mistakes in my concrete foundation. And I poured about 300 bags of quikrete, mixed one by one, eyeballed with water in a portable electric mixer -- would probably give a civil engineer a heart attack. Fortunately there is no frost heave and rarely freezes, so im mostly relying on just having enough compressive strength which has about a 100x safety factor on my wood frame.

The breaks are tied together with rebar, the mistakes on top were mortared level when starting my run of blocks for the foundation. Got pretty much perfectly level by last run of blocks.

Ghetto? Maybe, but a civil engineer friend said he did cold joints same as I, and the house has held up so far....

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dylan604 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Being from a construction family that did commercial high rises, I learned more about concrete testing than I cared to know. The plans will call for a specific type of concrete mix with a specified amount of rebar. Those plans will be based on how much weight the floor is meant to support, and has specific ratings. When they make the pour for the actual building, they will also pour multiple test slabs of the same thickness and rebar. The test slabs will be put under pressure to test their fail point. One slab is tested 24 hours after pour, the next 48 hours, and however many they do based on the plans. The longer it cures, the stronger it gets. They cannot put weight on it and move to the next floor until it has cured to the correct minimum set. My dad would walk away in shame at what you just described, and I can hear him muttering about it in my head.

	▲	mothballed 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There were no building plans lol, but bear in mind, it's a 1 story light frame wood structure with an average gravity/vertical load of less than 10 psi on the poured concrete part of the foundation, so nowhere near the demand of a skyscraper. I am basically pushing my concrete to 1% of theoretical limitations, never freeze cycling it, and cold joining it exactly how my civil engineer friend did in rigorous commercial project (when asked about this he laughed, large commercial projects usually need breaks because it's too big to do one continous pour, i simply applied same technique) . Let the unpaid contractors mutter from outside my DIY walls... if they stop standing it's more likely a wildfire than the hand mixed concrete.