American construction

                         - backblip-
I wanted to show this to all my European friends, as the way of constructing houses here, and especially in the West, is so different from piling up stone on stone, concrete and metal.
The builder who is sitting in the crane in the upper picture is our friend Greg. He has his own technique of building the walls lying down on the street or the concrete slab, as you can see in the smallest picture. Then he erects them on the concrete slab and fixes them on a frame of the house that he has laid out before and that is anchored to the concrete slab.  This frame is just 10 cm high. (This is called "Sill construction")
Other builders build the whole structure first in an open construction of lumbers (wall framing) and later they fill the gaps by making the walls. Hard to explain but I hope you understand.
The wooden structures are better in these areas of earthquake danger.
In the upper picture you see on the left the huge garage, that is meant to host high RV's too, hence the particular height. On the right you see the future living quarters of the house. Picture number two shows the backside of the garage wall with the beams being laid on top of the walls for the roof. And some of the house walls.
The weather was great and so he and his crew needed less than a week to get the outer house up.
When I first saw these houses being built, it totally amazed me.