I have some exciting news.
We’re pumped.
And no, I’m not pregnant (MOM).
We are in the very early stages of building a house!
EEEEEEEEEK!!!
Ben and I have always planned to build a house together. When we first got married and moved into our current fixer-upper, we said we’d be here 2 years, tops. And then reality hit. And by reality I mean bills. So we said we’d wait until we felt comfortable with the idea of building or until we ran out of room in our current living situation.
And we have arrived.
About 5 months ago when Ben and I were thinking of adding to our family, we started assessing our living situation. We live in a two bedroom house. And PB’s bedroom is really small. We also have ONE closet. Yep. One closet in the entire house. And currently, that closet houses my clothes, Ben’s clothes, our shoes, and lots of PB’s clothes/shoes/blankets/accessories. We also have only two interior doors in the house. Yes, two doors. One in our bathroom and one that separates PB’s room from our room. We have a ‘painter’s drop cloth’ curtain for our door, and PB has no door on the front of his room. His room, coincidentally, is just on the other side of our closet. And in a tiny house like ours, his room is essentially ‘in’ our closet. So when he makes even the slightest peep, Ben and I wake up. With no doors in the house, the sound carries too well.
So why don’t you just put doors on your rooms?
That sounds simple enough, but the major problem we have is that we have no central heat or air (no heat pump). For air, we have two window units. And for heat, we have a gas log fireplace. In order for the heat/air to circulate throughout the house, we have to keep the doorways open. If we shut (or installed) doors, someone would freeze to death. We already have a small heater in PB’s room to supplement the gas logs, since his room is further away from the fireplace. We keep that running, along with our fireplace and I still worry about the temperature in his room.
So when we found out we were pregnant in November, we immediately started panicking about our living situation. We would obviously need to keep the new baby in our room for a while, but what would happen when that baby was ready for a crib? PB’s room is SO small, there really wouldn’t be any room to put a crib and a baby bed in the room, along with the drawers we MUST have since PB doesn’t have a closet. We then thought about putting the crib in our room. We could do it, but nobody in our house would sleep. EVER. Since we’ve got the door/heat problem, we’d have to keep the closet door to PB’s room open (like we already do). That would be the equivalent of having two parents, a toddler, and a newborn in the same room. Any cry or peep made would wake the whole house. Plus our storage is already out of control (who knew babies needed so much?), and with one more, I can’t imagine what we’d do. So we felt like the time was right to look into building.
And then I had my miscarriage. Gosh, that still seems like only yesterday.
We stopped talking about a house for a while after that. We needed time to heal and focus on our family.
And then about two months ago, we reevaluated our housing situation. We know we want to build. The only question was ‘when’. We realized when we were planning for our second baby that our house would be at capacity soon. It would only be a matter of time. We need more space. Lord willing, we would like to grow our family. And when that time comes, we want to be prepared. Financially, we finally feel comfortable to build. Do we have the money to build a house right now? Well, no. We don’t have that amount of cash in our pocket or in the bank. But would we ever have ‘enough’? If we waited until we actually had the money to pay for our house, PB would be almost grown. I want him to be able to enjoy his home. So after several months of crunching numbers and analyzing bills and potential payments, we finally felt comfortable with the thought of building.
My parents have so graciously given us land to build on. The land is only a mile from where we live now, and it’s at the end of the road we currently live on. We just had it surveyed a couple of weeks ago…. two beautiful, secluded acres, with a great view and a nice yard. We just got our septic and well permit, and will (hopefully) get our deed this week.
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| standing in our front yard with 282174 dogs. |
I had no idea that building a house would be such an enormous job. There has been so many little things (and expenses) I would have never thought about. There’s also too many decisions to make! We’ve got a floor plan that we like. We are leaning towards doing a modular home. We found a ‘site-built’ plan that we liked and we ‘modularized’ it. We haven’t etched it in stone yet, so I’ll wait to share.
I hope to document this journey as much as I can. We are so excited, and I hope to share more ‘happy house’ news soon!
Have a blessed Monday 🙂
