His pregnant wife wasn’t wild about the project. There were more pressing household chores than building a 7-foot-high igloo in the front yard.

But the snow called out to Jason Botz, and he couldn’t resist.

He shoveled all the snow from the yard, packed it into more than 100 icy blocks weighing as much as 60 pounds each, then stacked them to form a 12-foot-wide dome.

And this weekend, after more than 30 hours of hand-freezing labor, he finished it: a two-room sleeper igloo, complete with a welcome mat and a skylight made of ice.

“I guess my imagination carried me away,” said Botz, 28, a Kansas University doctoral student in entomology.

He began working on the igloo Feb. 6 as his wife, Erin, waited to go into labor with the couple’s third son. She was four days overdue and Botz wanted to stay at the couple’s home in the 1500 block of Lindenwood Lane instead of working at the entomology lab.

After reading a book to his 4-year-old son, Andrew, about a furry critter who builds a snow fort, Botz decided to build one of his own. He and Andrew went out to work on it together, but the son soon got cold and went inside.

The father was just getting started. He built a rectangular box of plywood and began cramming snow into it to shape his blocks.

This is the same man who built a crouching, 7-foot snow troll in the yard two years ago. Botz grew up in Phoenix and often dreamed of playing in the snow as a child. He said he had a lot of “pent-up snowman” inside.

While his wife prepared to give birth to their third child, Jason Botz decided to build an igloo in the front yard of their east Lawrence home. Botz, shown Monday inside his creation, slept overnight in the igloo on Friday, when the outdoor temperature dropped to 9 degrees. Inside the igloo, Botz said it was a relatively toasty 40 degrees.

“Once Jason gets started on a project, he forgets that anything else exists in the world,” Erin Botz said.

Wednesday, the couple’s son, Thomas, was born. He came in at 10 pounds, 13 ounces. Botz took a two-day break from the igloo, then went back for the finishing touches.

To get the final blocks into the ceiling, he lifted them, supported them with a post and packed snow around the sides as mortar. His mother-in-law, Diane Timothy of Phoenix, helped hold blocks in place.

On Friday night, he hung a piece of carpet in the entrance, put down four layers of bedding including a deflated air mattress to keep out moisture, and slumbered in a sleeping bag wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.

As temperatures dropped to 9 degrees outside in the morning, the igloo’s inner sleeping room stayed near 40 degrees, he said.

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Erin Botz is now hoping her husband will turn his attention to other household work, such as a rusted-through kitchen sink and kitchen countertops that need to be replaced.

“I’m happy that it’s all done,” she said of the snow fort.

Botz credits his wife for never telling him he couldn’t do it.

“I told Erin, sometimes we choose projects, and sometimes they’re thrust upon us,” he said.