Ok. friends. It has been a little bit of journey getting to where we are with the house today. It has been so fun FINALLY starting to build. I want to make that clear, and also how grateful we are to be in this process. But, I would be lying if I said it has been easy. There has been a lot of things that haven’t gone our way and have made us have to make changes to our floor plan that are not in our favor. So! With that being said let’s dive in!

 

What we have encountered so far…

So our hole was dug, footings and foundations walls were poured all within a week. We were over the moon with how quickly everything was going. We soon realized our first “problem” we had to shift a part of the garage to fit better on our lot. By shifting the garage it ended up taking 6 inches out of a pop out that we have in our garage. 6 inches doesn’t sound like much right? But it ended up making it so we had to take out 2 different windows that were originally going to be on that pop out. Erick was bummed because this pop out was where his work bench will be in the garage and he was looking forward to the natural light. I was bummed because every window was placed in thought of what it would do for the appearance of the exterior of our home. At the end of the day we were both glad that it happened in our garage and not somewhere else.

We also had our basement windows all above ground making it so we didn’t have to have any window wells. Well. That ended up changing too. Because we could get a better seal on our windows if we did do the window wells we ended up deciding that would be better than getting future water leak in or basement from the windows. ( There is a lot more that went into this, but I am trying to save you from all the really boring details! haha)

From there the garage and basement were backfilled and compacted- rough plumbing soon went it which brought our next set of problems. The sink kitchenette was plumbed on the wrong wall in our basement and the freestanding tub in the master was plumbed for the wrong kind of faucet. Both of these luckily were pretty easy fixes- just ended up pushing our timeline a little bit.

Now for the big mama problem. First, as I am writing this I feel like it is coming across as a lot of complaints and bad things. Which, I want to clarify that I am not complaining. Just simply wanting to share with you this crazy roller coaster ride. So, Erick went and put in the foam, wire mesh and radiant floor in the basement and garage. After he was done, he was told that he forgot one spot footing that needed to be exposed. He had to go back and expose existing footing, which imagine cutting away styrofoam it was kind of a mess. But, he got it and we wish that could be where the radiant floor and foam story ended. Lo and behold a huge wind storm ended up taking out the garage radiant floor system, and blew away foam on the main floor. The foam was all over the neighborhood and broke into a ton of pieces. Erick had to piece together foam remnants, and put radiant floor back together. They finally poured the cement on the garage and basement which secured the foam and radiant floor which Erick was so ready for.

Then if mother nature hadn’t already set us back enough another wind storm hit and took out all the foam and radiant floor on our main level and Erick yet again had to scour the neighborhood and lot for the foam and re puzzle it together with the radiant flooring. You guys? Can you even? I seriously felt so bad for Erick. He had put together the same project several times before it finally had cement poured on top. Praise the heavens that that is over and done.

So what’s the latest?

They just started framing about 10 days ago and have now finished the basement and have started on the main floor. As they have been framing we have already run into other problems making us have to shift some walls in original basement floor plan. In the next month we are hoping that the whole house will be framed and we will then start on the roof, setting windows and exterior doors.  Even though we have come across more problems that we bargained for, we have learned that even though we spent months into perfecting this house, no matter how hard we try it isn’t going to turn out EXACTLY how we envisioned. But it is going to be pretty darn close and we just can’t wait until we can call it home.