Rain and Snow Go AWAY

Arghhh...  I'm a fan of the rain and snow (as long as I don't have to be in it) but when I have been patiently waiting to build our house and it is being held up because of the weather I am quickly disliking it more and more each day.

We were so close to being able to pour concrete in the basement and garage floor so we could start framing and then POW!  all my hopes and dreams shot down.  It rained for three days straight and then Mother Nature had the nerve to send some mini blizzards our way as well.   The weather men say the next nine days should be sunny and in the sixties.  Please, please be right for once.

Life at the in-laws is okay, the little fellas finally have a make shift fence so they can go outside without leashes.  Leashes in the yard?  Yes, yes, I know that sounds funny but they really are not to be trusted.  You turn your back and those little shits will take off.  The nice thing is that Digger quit barking at everyone that walks down the sidewalk.  That could mostly be because there aren't a ton of neighbors around here.  Just the older couple next door who drives around in a golf cart, and she zips around so quick you almost miss her.  Digger hates the wet weather but Scarlett doesn't seem to mind.  Hopefully the big snow storms wait until we are moved.

School is going okay for Kandis.  Math is kicking all of our butts, but everything else seems to be okay.  She will be thirteen on Monday, wow where did the years go?  Work is fine for us.  We are getting ready for a big conversion but hopefully everything goes well, I'm just hoping for something short of a disaster.  The shop has been a little slow this last week, I'm sure it will pick up soon.

Here are a few pictures of the house with the basement plumbing roughed in and the pump in as well.  Uncle Dave wanted to be on the blog so I took a picture of him on the foundation wall.  Vegas, my aunt and uncles Golden Retriever, was scoping the garage out.  We are still working on getting him to poop somewhere else.  He's been used to pooping in my yard, which will come to an end very soon.  And yes, that is a tractor on my front porch.

 Kan's bathroom

 Uncle Dave

 The tractor on my porch

Vegas, the wandering pooper.

Starting to look like a home, I think

The foundation has been poured and if you know what you're looking for, it looks like a basement.  I stood there this afternoon and tried to remember what the plans looked like so I could match them to what I seen before me.  I'm still not feeling the cold storage, right now it just looks like a waste of space, I guess I'll have to get used to it because it is now a permanent part of our house.   The rough-in's for the plumbing should be finished by the end of the week.  The goal is to be framed by the end of the month, I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but not holding my breath.

The back corner of our house, I know, impressive right?

The garage, good thing he's building a shop since it is only a two car.

Is that a truck in my kitchen?

The foundation was poured on Thurday, 10/11/12 (get it?  10 11 12? hehe).  It was so cool to see the forms with concrete in between them, especially after Mark explained that's where it was.  Construction, it seems, is not my strongest area, hence the truck parked in my kitchen, or that's where it appeared to be parked.  Apparently it was parked on the future site of our deck.  The kitchen floor has not been poured yet. 

The forms for the foundation came off today, they still need to backfill and then rough in for the basement plumbing before the floor can be poured.  Gordon, our builder, and Mark keep trying to explain something about a pump and the the septic system.  I know next to nothing about septic, but to be quite honest, I'm a little grossed out that there is going to be a tank of human waste in my back yeard, eeewwww....

Can't really see the truck in the background because of the sun,

but I thought it was in the kitchen

(kinda hard to be there since we don't have a kitchen floor...)

The garage from the south side.

The main part of the house from the south,

this is where the master bedroom and bathroom will be.

The north side of the garage.  It doesn't look that big with the forms...  

Didn't make it to the lot tonight, can't wait to see the foundation walls with no forms.  We're going to take the four wheelers up on Sunday so the girls can ride on the property.  What a strange thought for me, we have enough property to ride on.  I've been told we can ride to my parents house in Farr West, over the bridge to grandma's house we go... 

In by Christmas? Ummmm NO!

I left off with the sell of our house.  It was bittersweet, this was a neighborhood that I had grown up in, this was the only house our dogs knew, I watched Kandis grow up in this house.  We'd been through a few different neighbors, some I would miss and some I would never think of again.  Either way it was time to say goodbye

My father-in-law very kindly offered to let us live with him while we built our dream home.  I thought this was very generous since we have two dogs and a teenager.  So far it hasn't been so bad, he talks to the dogs like they are people and sometimes I even expect them to answer him back.  It is actually very sweet, especially since he calls them fellas and one of them is a girl!

When we got the offer on our house in the middle of July I contacted the loan officer who helped my mom and dad with the purchase of their new home.  She was super sweet and I loved that she let me do everything through e-mail.  I personally never set foot in her office until we closed, aproximately two and a half months and exactly seven grey hairs after the application was submitted!  Let me tell you, I will never, ever do another construction loan.  The lender we went through is established and we actually went through them for our first mortgage.  They will remain nameless because we still have to deal with them until we close on the long term mortgage and they sell us off.  If we were able to break ground the first week of September we would have been in by Christmas, well we broke ground on October 5th.  Needless to say we will not be in by Christmas, I really didn't plan on spending the holidays in my father-in-laws unfinished basement.  Oh well, what do you do?  I truly have no desire to relive the nightmare we went through from the close of our old house to the close on the construction loan.  Let me just tell you that it took five weeks, four trips to loan officers office for Mark, three failed faxes, two buyers for our property, and one angry letter to the bank president to close.  And did I mention the seven grey hairs??

It looks like we will be moving in closer to Valentines Day, but there is a light at the end of our long tunnel.  In the meantime I have to buy all new winter clothes since all of it was packed back in May when sweaters and thermals were something no one wanted to even think about wearing.  Those boxes are at the back of the storage unit because anything that we weren't going to wear in the next six months got stored before the house was even listed.  Grrrrr....

The footings were done on Monday the 9th and we hope to have the foundation poured by tomorrow or Friday. Realistically we should have it framed by the end of October. I have more confidence in that then I did during the whole closing process. We'll see...

 

The flat spot is the garage floor.  The footings and foundation will go around it.



They are standing where the cold storage will be in the basement, I think.

Mark doing yardwork already.  Poor guy misses having a yard of his own.  I have a plan for next spring, flowers here I come!

Decisions

Three years ago we decided to sell our house in a year.  The plan was for us to move the summer before our daughter started sixth grade.  We thought that starting sixth grade at a new school would be less traumatic than starting seventh grade at a new school.

It was a good plan, as the best ones usually are.  Our major hang up was that our basement wasn’t finished.  Not a huge deal, but we felt strongly that we would get a better price for our thirty year old home in a slightly rundown neighborhood if the basement was finished, and we did…  Three years later. 

It took three years to finish our basement and basically remodel the main floor of our 1979 rambler.  Three years??  Yes, that is the million dollar question.  Well, to be quite honest, I blame it on reality TV and my husband’s lack of self-management.  Okay, I could have nagged a little more but who wants to be “that” wife?  I certainly didn’t. 

Three seems to be the magic number, it took Mark three years to build a Monster Truck, a truck that he has driven in competition a grand total of… drumroll please… you guessed it, three times in the five years it’s been completed.  I’m not bitter though.

Reality TV is evil.  Why are there so many people out there willing to air their dirty laundry, or any type of laundry for that matter, for the whole world to see?  Because they are making money off of people like my husband, people who love nothing more than to sit back and listen to some juicy gossip.  The worst has to be those housewives from Orange County.  I’ll be honest; I almost threw the remote at the tv when I heard one of them say that her kids were driving her nuts since it was the nanny’s day off.  Really???  Welcome to the real world Barbie, most of us have real jobs, kids, and NO nannies!  Somehow, miraculously we still function.   

Then there are those repo shows.  I don’t care if you are repossessing someone’s car, if you pull a gun or put them in a headlock it is still considered assault.  And just so I can get it off my chest, who decided Alaska was so interesting?  There are half a dozen shows about Alaska (excluding Sarah Palin’s short lived series), gold mining, truck driving, fishing, air plane deliveries…  Even the state troopers had a show!  Needless to say, Mark thought he needed to watch all of them.   

Three years later, when the house was almost finished we met with a realtor and had the house listed.  It sold, end of story right?  Oh no… Did I forget to mention that I’m married to Chicken Little?  The sky was falling for six weeks while we waited to close.  In those six weeks we still had to paint trim and hang it, fix some doors, help my parents move into a new home, and get our twelve year old registered for junior high.  All of this on top of full time jobs.  Yes, yes, I understand that people do this all the time.  You have to understand, nothing is ever easy in our household.  Never mind that that we were under contract after four days of it being listed.  We had fantastic realtors, surprisingly they didn’t quit on us, which was good because they were actually the second ones that we “interviewed”.  Yes, Mark interviewed realtors.  I shouldn’t complain, as he was only looking out for our best interests and I know he meant well.

 

In the time it took to close on the sell of our house we looked at numerous existing homes but nothing jumped out at us, either there wasn't enough land or the house needed too much remodeling.  We finally decided to build.  We found a lot in Willard, and acre and a half to be precise.   It was just perfect for us.  It was still close to my parents in Farr West and it also happened to be right next door to my aunt and uncle.  The amount of land was mostly for Mark, I would have been okay with a little less but marriage is all about compromise right?

 

The property...  This is from the back of the property line.  The house in the distance is the neighbor across the street from us.