Corrections in red. Stylistics in blue.

Some Words About My Father-in-Law (or Mistakes in the Past Tenses)

Every Friday evening I drive my car to the small town of Otradnoe, near Saint-Petersburg.
There stands the house of my parents-in-law, Nicolay and Tamara.
My wife's father served as a pilot in the Soviet Air Force, and after his service ended he stayed in Central Asia. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their family was forced to leave their home in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), and move to Russia.
As a refuge family, they obtained a loan of US$1,000.  I had added some money from my "nest egg", and we bought a small plot of land in Otradnoe, and started to build a little two-story house.
That time was very hard for the Russian people (like the Great Depression in the United States). We did not have enough funds for the building, so we had to carry out the entire work by ourselves. We prepared a project for the construction (it had to be approved by the Architectural Department). We needed a concrete for the foundation.  We built the walls out of brick, we installed windows and doors, we installed heating and water supply systems, we mounted the rafters for the roof...
The work was very heavy, and I was really wondered about my father-in-law: at that time he was 60 years old, but I couldn't keep up to him. He continued to work with a shovel or a hammer when I was ready to fall down on the ground. "Is he made of iron?", I asked myself.
But after we had finished the foundation, he asked me, "How are your hands?".
"Not very good", I answered.  There's pain in my muscles at night".
"Same with me," he replied.  "And there's more - I can't squeeze my fingers to make a fist. They won't close tightly. But I can hold the handle of the shovel... or a glass, for example..."
I understood him, and brought two glasses and a bottle.
One dangerous incident almost happened when we were mounting the outermost roof trusses. One of the trusses began to break away, and we both grabbed it and tried to pull it back. If one of us had let go of the beam, the second man would have fallen down along with the truss. And it was about an eight meter fall...
Nobody let go of his end of the beam. Nobody fell down. Together we held onto the truss.
You understand, that day we took out the bottle and two glassis again...
Soon my father-in-law will be 80 y.o. He and his wife Tamara live in the house, work in their garden (not for a profit, but for pleasure only), and when we go to see them, they like to talk about that hard and interesting time.
And Nikolay sometimes takes down two glasses from the shelf.
Not very often, but sometimes.
He is a real man, I think.