Decisions, decisions, decisions!

So, the pressure to get it right, and on the first try, is pretty heavy. We don’t want to screw it up. We don’t want to have to rip something out and start over, even though that happens frequently in projects like this. My motto has become, “Everything is figure-outable. Everything is fixable.” I tell myself this when I feel overwhelmed by all the choices to be made. Or, as I texted Luke today, “No one is dying. It’s going to be OK.” It is imperative that you keep things in perspective. While it might feel like the end of the world if we buy the wrong toilet, it truly is not the end of the world if we buy the wrong toilet.

All that to say that yes, we are still moving right along. The HVAC and plumbing people have been working (and the basement looks like a tornado swept through it with all of the broken up concrete from placing pipes and vents and all kinds of other things). They should be finished soon. The electricians are coming this week. After that, we will be ready for insulation and dry wall.

We made some lighting decisions this week at our new “favorite” store, Menards. I know it’s not a glamorous, prestigious design hub, but we have found a few gems in that store and have taken advantage of their 11% rebates when possible. By purchasing the bulk of our building materials (from the framing to the siding to the decking to the, yes, toilets) during rebate weeks, we have been able to earn 11% of our purchase price back in the form of store credit. We have then used that store credit to purchase more materials. We are hopeful that we have saved some money this way.

A couple of my favorite purchases from this week include:

These wall lights.

Atom 4-Light

These master bathroom vanity lights (2 sets).

Black and Antique Brass Vanity Light

This is the light I would like for my office. Luke didn’t want to buy it yet (because I think he thinks it is ugly), but it will be mine. It will. We aren’t calling it the “Mom Room” for nothing.

6-Light Golden Chandelier

We are also repurposing a couple of industrial work lights from one of my dad’s work warehouses. These are heavy-duty, porcelain coated lights that we will have rewired to be used in this bar/pass-thru area from the kitchen to the great room. We are going to use two of them in this space. We love the idea of taking something old and giving it new life…not to mention, this was another money-saving move for us. These lights were free!

Other exciting updates include our front door being installed (color yet to be determined), the concrete porch and steps for the front entry being poured (LOVE the way it turned out), and the back deck is being built. We are going with a natural-colored composite decking material that will hopefully hold up well over time without the need to replace buckled or warped deck boards. This deck will serve a nice place to enjoy morning coffee, evening wine, or just a great back entry to the great room. There will be a metal railing, and the steps will lead down to the existing concrete patio that we were able to keep from the original house.

Front door and porch steps

Back deck in progress

Luke and his dad have been working hard on the design for the front porch roof. We have gone back and forth on the size, style, and shape of this space, but I think this design is definitely a winner. It’s so awesome having Luke’s dad lend his architect hands to us for this project. We will definitely keep his designs along with many other artifacts from this project so we can remember all the phases and progress.

We are officially just about 6 months into this whole process. Considering 6 months ago, there was an existing 75 year old house on the property that has since been torn down and this has taken its place, I think we have come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. In another 6 months, I pray we are all moved in and enjoying this house that we have poured our hearts and souls into from the very beginning.

Wow. It’s been a month since I have written anything! I guess this whole mama-of-four-while-building-a-house is kicking my butt. Time really means nothing to me anymore. It is amazing how a day can feel like a year, and a week can seem like a second. So anyway, if you have been waiting on the edge of your seat for an update on my life (sarcasm), here it is!

The Tree HousE is coming right along. Luke and I are still married and mostly like each other despite this stressful process, and I call that a win. Of course, per the usual, we have had a couple setbacks over the last few weeks, so I think I will divide this post up into two categories, SUCKED and NON-SUCKED.

First, what SUCKED:

1. Another one bites the dust. I wrote in my last house update that our plumber dropped our project just a few weeks before we needed him. Shortly thereafter, our HVAC guy did the same thing. It is very difficult not to take these types of things personally, especially when it happens twice in a row. And maybe there was a personal problem that we weren’t aware of — not sure. However, you can imagine that curve ball really threw us off and caused a lot of anger, frustration, and worry. It was back to the drawing board, again. Luke spent the next couple of weeks calling more plumbing and HVAC companies, most all of them recommended by friends, in a desperate attempt to get someone who would want to take on our job. Thankfully, after more than a few dead-ends and hiccups, we believe that we have the right people who can help us. Fingers crossed. Eyes crossed. Legs crossed. All of it…crossed. We cannot take another round of “starting over”….but we will do what we have to do.

2. Rain, rain, go away. More rain has slowed down the process of getting the exterior finished up. Weather issues are always so frustrating because there is nothing anyone can do to make them better. You just have to wait it out. Luke has stopped checking weather forecasts in order to avoid depression.

But…what NON-SUCKED:

1. We have siding! It is so exciting to see the actual color of the house! We picked a two-tone look. The majority of the house will be white. The rest will be a dark gray. We are using fiber cement siding for a nice, clean look. We are loving the way it is looking so far.

2. All interior framing is done. Basically all of the interior framing is done. You can walk through and see all of the rooms and closets. This has been so helpful in seeing how the house will look and measuring how everything will fit. As soon as we can get subcontractors in, we will be that much closer to dry wall.

3. We picked vanities, faucets, and other fixtures for our bathrooms and kitchen. It feels so good to make decisions, and I have found that making decisions inspires more decision-making. It is easy to reach “paralysis by over-analysis,” and that is definitely something both Luke and I struggle with. We like to research and analyze everything before making the leap — and sometimes you just have to go for it. You can only talk about things so many times. So, we chose vanities, sinks, and faucets for our bathrooms and kitchen, and it felt good! And we (mostly) agreed!

4. We bought new kitchen cabinets! This was not really in the original plan. The original plan was that we would use the existing kitchen cabinets and refinish/paint them. This was a great plan until our kitchen layout changed slightly, and we realized that we needed to have three cabinets (two corner units and a sink unit) custom made. Luke tracked down a cabinet maker, but even that person couldn’t make new cabinets to match the existing style. It was looking like it was going to cost too much money and be too much effort to get cabinets made to make the existing cabinets — on top of sanding them down and painting them. We decided to go ahead and order new cabinets for the kitchen and then reuse the old kitchen cabinets in other areas of our home (laundry room, office, garage, etc). We took advantage of a sale at The RTA Store over July 4th weekend, and we were able to save 22% off the total price of our cabinets. We went with this cool gray shaker cabinet. Originally, I had my heart set on the marine blue kitchen cabinets I have seen all over Pinterest, but I realized that for our budget, I needed to make a compromise. These cabinets have a really interesting look and will be perfect for us, I believe. The idea behind this site is that you buy everything “ready to assemble” (RTA) and “do it yourself,” but for a little more money, you can get the cabinets pre-assembled, which is what we decided to do. Luke’s plate is already quite full. Adding cabinet assembly to his list of tasks might send him over the edge.

So, it appears that we had more “non-sucks” than “sucks,” and for that, I am grateful. This has been an up and down process since the very beginning, but we get more excited by the day as we continue to see progress.

Alright, things are getting exciting now.

If you drive by the site, it actually looks like a house. While we still have a long way to go before we can live there, we are inching closer and closer.

We have enjoyed seeing the rooms in the house take shape. We can actually envision where furniture will be placed, which is exciting. I can’t decide which room in the house I am going to love the most, but I think it will be a tie between the great room and our master bedroom. I am in love with the tall ceilings in the great room, but I think the large windows in our bedroom will reflect nature’s beauty in all four seasons.

For as much that seems to be going right, we also have had our fair share of setbacks and pitfalls as of late. Remember how months ago, Luke lined up all the subcontractors through a process of lots of emails, phone calls, and site visits? We thought we had all of our ducks in a row, but last week, the plumber decided to pull out of our project. I am not going to share this plumber’s name publicly, but I will happily share it privately if you are in search of a plumber. Because this person waited until 2 weeks before we actually needed his services to back out, we are now in a pinch and starting the bidding process over again. A second company that we already had a bid from (but decided not to go with initially) decided to increase their price by $4,000 just because we needed them on short notice. It is so irritating that some people think nothing of causing a giant inconvenience to others, even after a commitment had been made. And now, because of no fault of our own, we might be forced into paying a lot more money for the same services, or at the very least we are experiencing a lot of stress. I am 100% certain we will get it all figured out because we have no other choice. Luke is meeting with more plumbers this week, and I am praying the right person takes the job (and for the price we had budgeted).

There’s always something with a project like this. For example, the tape that goes around the windows to seal them started peeling off because it isn’t compatible with the brand of house wrap we are using. A couple of windows arrived in the wrong sizes. We had to order more roof trusses because we were short a few.

It’s all part of the process. Nothing goes as planned, and that’s alright. I tell myself daily, “Everything is fixable. Everything is figure-outable. Nothing is an emergency.” This helps to keep me grounded (and to keep Luke grounded, which can be very challenging as he is shouldering most of the stress).

For now, we are thankful for the dedicated crew of builders who have put up with us so far. We are thankful that they work when it’s hot, when it’s raining, and when they probably would rather be doing something else. We are proud of how far we have come since we began in February, and we are so excited to think about where we might be by August.

Here are some photos from the last few weeks!

The last few weeks have been some of the rainiest I can remember. At first, we consoled ourselves by saying, “April showers bring May flowers,” but then when the rain continued into the first 10 days of May, that phrase grew old. Rain is fine and all and necessary to our ecosystem, but when you are trying to build a house? It’s a nuisance.

We knew this project would come with delays. What home project doesn’t? When I last posted, we were anxiously awaiting the floor trusses to arrive from their manufacturer in Terre Haute. We thought they were coming that next week (mid-April), but it ended up being an additional week later. They did at least arrive in time for Luke’s birthday, which he said was the only present he wanted.

Seeing the trusses go over the basement gave more life to the house and made us really excited. The next step was getting them all level, secured, and then laying on the floor decking for the entire main level of the house. This was about the time the monsoons began, so just as soon as the guys would get some work done, they would have to stop for a day or two at a time. Water of course went to the crawl space and basement, which then had to be pumped out. This process repeated itself for at least a week or so it seemed until all the decking could get secured.

This week, however, we saw some really awesome changes when we pulled into the driveway and found a couple of walls up on the main level of the house. You can stare at a set of plans 100 times over and try to get an idea of what the house will look like, how big the house will be, and how everything will actually go together, but until you step up and into a structure that actually starts to feel like a house, you truly have no idea how it will take shape. Our master bedroom walls with cutouts for the windows were standing tall, and that gave us so much excitement. If we can get more than a day of nice weather at a time, I know that we will see a lot more walls in the coming days.

There is a strip of 15 acres at the end of our property that was sectioned off by the previous owner and sold to another couple. We had the first dibs on purchasing this land, but we didn’t feel like we needed an extra 15 acres on top of our 40 acres when we needed the money to build this house. This couple has been working on building their home, and from the road, it appears to be much farther along in the building process than ours. It is difficult to resist the urge to compare…to get frustrated….to wonder why theirs is going up so much quicker, but all those thoughts are just distractions from the journey we are on. They didn’t have to tear down an existing house. They aren’t trying to fit a new house over an existing basement footprint. They have a crew of builders, and it is hard to tell if their home is a custom design or if it is a style of home that the builders have constructed many times over.

Comparison is the thief of joy, and I am not going to let someone else’s progress squander the excitement that we feel at this moment with how our house is coming along. When I say that “we” (meaning mostly Luke) have had a say in every single decision, in every 2×4 that has been ordered, in every measurement of every window, in every nail that has been purchased…that is what I mean. It has been difficult to balance Luke’s job (which requires every ounce of his mental & physical energy), with my pregnancy (which included a 3 day stay in the hospital a few weeks ago and a baby who is likely to come any day now), in addition to raising our three girls and being present for them. On any given night, one of us is not sleeping. I am either awake with late-term pregnancy discomfort or insomnia, or Luke is awake with a spinning mind and a long to-do list of what needs to be accomplished, ordered, followed up on, or addressed the next day. This is a lot of work! But with great risk there is great reward.

This house is a bit of a “homecoming” for us. Luke grew up 20 seconds down the road, where is parents still live, and the home is nestled in the school district where we graduated from and where our children will attend once their time at St. Mary is finished. My mom has been teaching at our former high school for over 45 years. Many people we have known for most of our lives still live in the area and are very interested in what is going on with “that house in the woods.” It is very fun to share our joy, and we are honest about sharing our setbacks (which is why I write this blog), but sometimes being so open can leave us vulnerable to a lot of well-meaning input, advice, and even speculation. We are trying to remember that, again, this is our journey, our process, and we are taking things as they come.

As cliche as it is, the saying is true…life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain. Just please, Mother Nature, a little break would be nice.

I haven’t done a Tree HousE update in a little while, but work is being completed daily at the property. It also seems like Luke and I are making some sort of decision regarding the materials of the house each and every day as well.

Since our last update, we ordered hardwood floors for the main level of the house. We took advantage of a good sale from Lumber Liquidators. We went back and forth on whether or not to use hardwood, engineered wood, or laminate, but we decided that we wanted the real thing for the longevity factor. We know our family will be hard on our floors, so the fact that we can sand them down and refinish them over the next 40-50 years is appealing.

After going to the store and looking at dozens of different types and colors of wood, we picked a 3.25″ wide maple floor made by Bellawood. We are really excited to see what it will look like in our great room, fireplace room, and hallway.

 

We also ordered our front door! Luke and I go to Lowe’s and/or Menard’s weekly (sometimes more than once per week) and just walk the aisles. We happened to be in Lowe’s a few weeks ago and saw that their entry doors were on sale. They carried a brand we had our eye on, the Pulse line from Therma Tru, so we were excited to learn that a door that was going to cost quite a bit of money elsewhere was on sale. You can buy an entry door for a couple hundred dollars, but of course the one we just had to have was the most expensive (as in 4-5 times as expensive as your standard entry door). However, we reasoned that we had worked too hard to make sure this house was the modern vision we had in our head, so we decided that a modern front door was really important. It will be a focal point of the home for people who drive by and for anyone who enters, so we wanted it to be exactly what we had in mind. Hopefully, this will be the first, last, and only front door we have to buy for this house and that the money will be a worthwhile investment.

 

Luke met with the person who will be helping us order our windows this week to begin finalizing our order. This will be our most expensive purchase to date, and we don’t want to screw it up! It is a tedious process…going through each and every room and verifying the size and shape of every window in the house… if we want the window to be fixed or if we want it to open…if we want the window to have grills or be plain glass…lots of decisions! Thankfully, Luke took on this responsibility. We decided to go with black windows on both the exterior and interior of the house to keep the modern look consistent. We also opted not to have any kind of grills (or dividers) in the glass so that we would have unobstructed views of our property.

As for the house itself, the I-joists (I think that is the name….) have gone in for the great room over the crawl space. The basement walls have been framed in, which is really exciting and creates actual shape to the rooms down there. It is fun to walk around actually see where furniture might go or how big the actual space will be. I am still giddy with excitement that there is a room in the basement called “The Mom Room” and it is entirely for my stuff. I can have my desk, my computer, my sewing machine, my beads, my craft supplies, my snacks, my wine… all of it will be there in a room that will have a door with a lock. I am so excited about this, and to see it framed in really gave me something to smile about.

The floor trusses will be delivered this week. These will go across the basement ceiling and allow the rest of the house to have a floor. Once these go in, it will really start to take shape. I am not sure, but I think walls on the main floor will be coming pretty soon, which I am super excited about. We will get our roof ordered shortly after, and then it will really be a house.

Many times throughout this process, I stop to think about how crazy it is that we are actually doing this. A year ago, we thought we were going in a completely different direction with a general contractor who promised us something he couldn’t deliver. When we were told in August that he was no longer interested in this project, we were devastated. In fact, it ranks right up there in one of my top 5 disappointments in my life. I remember feeling like he had punched us right in the gut and that because of him, our dreams could no longer come true. Approximately 3 weeks before he quit the project, he told us that we could be moved into this house by April…as in…right now. It was hard to accept that April would no longer be a reality for us, but here we are…making progress, each day getting closer to the only reality we ever cared about which was living on this beautiful property together with our babies. I know we will look back on the experience and be relieved that “the other guy” didn’t receive a penny of our money nor one word of praise for this project.

Here are some photos from the last couple of weeks.