Building a jig bench

Hello there guys it's now July 1 2015 and it is my 2nd week of the build. I just finished digging up the lot for the preparation of the foundation of the house. My project for this day is to make a jig bench so that I can make some rib bar for the house footing of the house. This house footing is very important because this will make the foundation of the house stronger. 

I googled some images and found this one from wikipedia.org and this is exactly what I wanted to do. I never made one before so I need to research it first before attempting to make one.

First stop I needed to make a decent jig bench from and old bench some old steel I bought from a junk shop for Php 10.00 and two small pipes that I am going to use for bending rib bars.

Old bench from our apartment I dig a small hole and place fee
t of the bench in each holes for extra rigidity 

the bench 6 small metal and the pipe

My tools in making this jig bench

Jig bench finished and ready to go

after half day of work I made 6 pieces of rib bars

 for house footing 42 more to go 

that's all for now it's lunch time!

My first step in making an affordable house in the Philippines: Research Research Research

I still remember when I was in my high school days when our science teacher bombard us with research papers and home works. We need to research one subject before we discuss this subject in class so that all of us have an idea on what the teacher are going to say. Well I can finally apply this research thin in real life situation. This is the first thing I did before I decided to build my own house here in the Philippines. I research the best materials my money can buy (that means it is cheap and at the same time it is quite strong). I also research lots of house designs. I google search some small house or tiny house out there and there are thousand of designs out there. I also research some building material prices on the web there are lots of online sellers who offers cheap building materials but I don't really have a plan to buy from them I just get their price so that I can have an idea. 

So lets have a recap this is the list of things I research:

• Design of the house
• Basic building terms (wall footing, stiffener etc.)
• Materials
• Prices of building materials
• Google Sketchup (This you really need this one I'll explain it to you guys later on)
• alternative building materials (this is if some materials are not available or it is too expensive in your area)

  

My first post

Hello there guys. This is my first post in this blog. After renting an apartment for 1 year me and my wife decided to build a small house. We have a limited budget in this major project but we have a lot of time in our hands. We decided to not to rush things and take it slow and learn the mistakes of others. I've been working on our house for about two weeks now and there are lots of things I learned from searching on google and asking some friends on how they build their house. I will going to update this blog as often as possible. I am a Filipino and I will going to record all of the materials I purchased and all the problems I will going to encounter and it's solutions. So good luck to me guys and I hope this blog will going to help you weather you are a Filipino or foreigner  who are planning to build their own home here in the Philippines.