Lots of Progress to Report!

It has been a little over a month since I last posted anything.  We've been in somewhat of a lull on the big exciting happenings due to weather, waiting our turn on the framers, etc.  There has been significant progress in the past month though, especially today!

This was taken a few weeks ago right after the basement walls and floor were poured.  I loved being able to actually see the shape of the basement.  I am such a visual person that things don't always make complete sense to me until I can SEE them right in front of me. :P  Good thing my husband and I are opposite in that way!

One of the things that we love about this lot is that there are SO many trees.  If it were up to us we would be completely out of sight from any road in the middle of a woods but buying land like that around here is either entirely more than we want to pay or entirely too far out in the country.  This is a good compromise.  :)  There were a few trees that had to come down of course to build the house but we wanted to preserve as many as possible.  Our builder put us in touch with an arborist who came out and helped us figure out which trees would have to go due to the stress of the equipment, the house, etc.  It was interesting to learn about how far roots go out, etc.  We ended up having to cut down a few more than we would have liked but better to do that now than have them die in a couple of years and fall on our new house!

Tommy is used to having ample space to do his woodworking.  As I have mentioned, our current living quarters are....well...not exactly setup for a wood shop.  But don't worry! We make due with what we have available to us!  Most of the time our living room turns into a work shop of some sort.  Tommy is building the trusses to go on the front of the house and he has built them in the living room of our apartment.  It has been...interesting.  But doable!

Here he is with the final result of truss 1 of 2.  This one had to be finished quickly because it will go up when the house is framed.  This one will go over the front entrance to the house.  He timber framed this and it is held together with wooden pegs.  It is AWESOME!  And HUGE!  This picture was taken before it was stained.

You can see the detail of the wood pegs in this picture.  It's very cool!

Today was a HUGE day.  Today the framing began.  I have heard many people say how incredible it is to see Niehaus Brothers' crew frame a house and they were right!  SO much progress was made today. I couldn't take my eyes off of everything going on.  There were a ton of guys there and they never stopped!  We've been waiting on this part for awhile and I'm so happy that it's happening!  Keep in mind, all of the pictures below were taken in one day - all of this work was done in about 8 hours.

This was the beginning of the day  This is the lower/basement level.  You can see the "man door" and a small garage door.  We will park a side by side in here eventually and this basement will be Tommy's wood shop and my paint shop.

This was taken early in the morning once the walls started going up.  This is the first wall on the main floor - the back wall of the garage.

This is looking into the basement - I love seeing things like stairs going in!!!  The little things make it seem like a real house. :)

This was taken after lunch - this is the garage.  We will actually be parking our cars in the garage which will be all new for us since the garage has in the past been used for Tommy's workshop.  Very excited about this!  :)

This is the truss that Tommy made - it's hanging out waiting to be hoisted up to the roof!  You can see in this picture how it looks now that it's stained.

Every girl needs a hot pink hard hat for construction days!  :)

Later in the afternoon the interior walls started going in and you could start to tell that it is a two story house.

This is the back of the house - this will be a big screened in porch looking out into the back woods.  :)

You can really tell by this picture how much was done today.  You can see that this is the basement wall that I posted up above and now it has much more done!  Now there is the main floor on top and the upstairs being constructed.  The two doors you see up high will be for the kids bedrooms.  They will have a small balcony that they can share for reading (Sheridan!) or playing iPad (Will!) - ha!

This is the last picture that I took today.  This is looking straight on to the front of the house.  The far window on the right will be our bedroom.  The middle is the entry way and then a living room window on the left.  The second story was really taking shape at this point but I couldn't get close enough safely to take many pictures.  Hopefully tomorrow I can!

A lot of progress has been made and we are really looking forward to the next stages of this process.  Hopefully in a few short months we will be able to call this our home!  

Moving Right Along!

There are two things that I have learned during this house building process:

1.  I am very impatient.
2.  My husband is crazy (I say that with nothing but love!)

Okay, so maybe I already knew those things.  Maybe we all did.  But this process just really brings those characteristics out!  Everyone keeps asking how the house is coming and I keep saying, "It's coming along!", and in my head I say, "....but not fast enough for my liking!".  Now that has nothing to do with anyone but me and my impatience.  I KNOW that when you are house building you have to contend with weather, other projects, etc. etc.  And I really like our builder a lot - he is great!  No builder could build a house quick enough for this girl.  HA!  And Tommy, well, he is behaving much better with this project I will say.  No underground garages.  No wiring the entire house himself.  He does still have the occasional crazy idea - most are just thoughts, some are going to be a reality.  Like our indoor dog bathroom - ask him about it.  He will tell you in great detail about the most insane dog bathroom that anyone could ever dream of.  I admit, the thought of NOT having to go outside with Rocko in the winter is very appealing!

Moving on to the actual progress which is my favorite part!!!

About a month ago the digging began and this is a picture of what the hole looked like before the basement walls were poured.  It pretty much looks like someone took a big bite out of the hill.  :)

This is when the lower driveway was created.  This driveway currently is being used for construction purposes but it will later serve as the driveway for Tommy's basement workshop which will store our trailer.

This is a pretty cool part of the project.  In the woods behind Tommy's parent's house was a large hickory tree that had fallen.  He really wanted something from this woods for sentimental value so this giant tree in the trailer will turn into our fireplace mantle.  To say that this was a heavy load in the trailer would be a great understatement!

Tommy then took the lumber to someone local who has a portable saw mill.  That is where the magic happened - where this giant tree became the nice piece of wood that will someday be our fireplace mantle.  It is huge and heavy and gorgeous!!!

This is Tommy and his dad with all of the lumber that came out of the hickory tree.  Some will be used for our mantle and the rest of it will be used for future woodworking projects.

We had two trailers and a truck load full of hardwood floor delivered.  My crazy husband decided we would clear out our dining room in our tiny apartment and store it there (it can't be put in a storage shed due to temperature control.)  After much anxiety I decided I could live with that.  However, in the end it worked out because some amazing people offered to let us keep it in their warehouse!  There are still good people out there folks! 

Choosing the type of flooring for the house was one of the most drawn out decisions that we have made so far.  We both LOVE hardwood.  However, at our last house we had hand scraped teak.  It was beautiful.  But by the time we moved out (which was only after about 3 years), our floor was a disaster because of Rocko and his pesky claws.  When choosing a floor you have to think about things like pets, kids, etc. because that will determine what hardness of wood you need.  We originally were going to do wood look tile.  We ordered samples, we made countless trips to every flooring store Evansville had to offer and though a couple were "okay", none of them made us excited.  So after much discussion we decided to go back to one of our original ideas which is hickory.  Hickory is much harder than many of the woods out there so we are hoping this will hold up for us.  If it does get damaged (which it inevitably will with our lifestyle and our dog!), it can always be refinished down the road.  I think it is going to look great!!! 

This past week was pretty exciting for me because I could see a lot of progress!  The basement walls were poured and that was huge!  You can now really see the layout of the house and it's very cool to be able to visualize the size of Tommy's wood shop and how it will be laid out.

This is the first picture of me "in" the basement!  So exciting!

The plumbing was also done this past week but I have no exciting pictures for that stage of the game. This next week (weather pending!) we will have our floors poured and then we will be on our way to framing!  The framing will all be complete in one day and I can't wait to see that process!!!!

So it is coming along slowly but surely just as any house project does.  I am getting better daily with knowing that it's all going how it's supposed to go and that it's out of my control.  I am a lot more at peace when I can look at it that way.  :)

The Project Officially Begins!

Hey friends!  A lot of people have been asking how the house is coming along and my answer has been for the past few weeks, "It's not!"  That changed this week!  The house itself is not yet "coming along" but we have now broken ground which is a huge step.  There has been a lot of positive progress over the past couple of weeks that is giving me hope that I won't be confined to this apartment forever - HA!

Last week we met at the lot with our builder and the person in charge of doing the excavating.  This was to discuss what trees would come down (as few as possible!), where the driveway would go, where to bury stumps, etc.

There are many things that go into the beginning process of building a new home.  A lot of these I didn't know about because I wasn't "present" last time.  I am enjoying learning all of these things this time around!  The same day we met with our builder, we noticed that both the sewer and the water were in the process of being taken care of.  More progress!!!!

A big part of our time over the past couple of months has been researching, researching, and researching some more.  While it IS fun to pick out all of things to build a new home, it is also time consuming if you want to do it cost effectively which we definitely do this time around.  We have spent a lot of time deciding the things that we want for the house and then researching the best places to purchase these things.  We recently ordered several of our exterior doors from Menards and picked them up last week.  They are now living in one of our storage sheds with the majority of all our other belongings ;)

In addition to picking up the doors from Menards, we picked up our big cedar beams.  These beams will be used for Tommy to build the trusses for the exterior of the house.  He built the trusses for our last house as well and they were absolutely beautiful.  These will be more simple style than the last beams which is good since Tommy doesn't have a workshop to build in right now and obviously he isn't far removed from back surgery.  Our wonderful friends Dan and Linda were kind enough to lend us their back yard this past weekend to work on them a little bit.  :)  Have you smelled fresh cut Western Red Cedar?  It's incredible!

We have decided on Natural Cherry cabinets so one of our next steps was to pick out granite for our countertops in the kitchen.  I am pretty open to anything as long as it has brown tones but Tommy is a little more picky about these types of things - HA!  We thought we had chosen what we wanted but when we went back, Tommy saw a slab that he fell in love with.  These pictures don't really do it justice due to the lighting and reflection on the granite but it really IS a beautiful granite.

Hey!  We officially have our slabs paid for and on hold!  Yay!

Yesterday was the big day - the excavating began!!!  I've been waiting VERY patiently (Not) for this to happen so I was beyond excited to get up yesterday morning and go check it out.  I went out to the lot on three different occasions yesterday to check the progress and it was very exciting to see an actual spot where the driveway and the house would be!

This was the beginning of the day and you can see where the driveway will come in from the road.  As I mentioned we are trying to keep as many trees as possible.  We want a house in the woods!

As you can see, as the day went along the lot changed quite a bit!  Looks like we will have plenty of firewood to use next year ; ) 

Today they were supposed to dig the hole for the basement and finish up the excavating but the weather is not cooperating so not much action today.  The plan is to finish digging tomorrow and then the footers will go in.  

Thursday I am taking a trip to Nashville to look at and price flooring which is our next big decision.  We've gone back and forth on several different options.  We have at least decided that we will be doing wood look ceramic tile throughout the house.  We LOVE hardwood, but we always plan to have at least one bulldog, and someday possibly multiples and our last flooring was ruined by the time we sold the house.  We don't want to make the same mistake this time!  

Stay tuned for more updates!  Hopefully more frequently now that we have officially begun!  

Now Let's Build a House! (Again!)

As most of you know, we've had a pretty rough week or so dealing with Tommy having his second back surgery.  There have been some complications with that but things are starting to look up!  We appreciate everyone who has offered to bring us food, babysit him so I can run errands, etc.  We are blessed to have the people that we have in our life.  :)

Despite the stressful week, we did received some very good news - everything is finished with the bank and we are now ready to start building!!!  For our builder we will be using Nate Mominee from Mominee Homes & Roofing.  We are very excited to work with him on this project!  Everything is in motion to break ground next week.  The excavators are scheduled for late next week and I can't wait to see the process begin!

We have of course been looking for quite some time to decide exactly what we want in this house.  We HOPE that this will be the last house that we live in (though with Tommy you never know right? HA!).  Our goal for this house is to downsize and make it our own.  We will be putting a lot of our own personal touches on this house that will make it scream "Tommy and April live here!!!"  Here are a few pictures of things that have spurred ideas for us.  I think in my previous life I wanted everything to look perfect and I thought I had to choose one style and everything had to go with that. I now know that we can do whatever we want.  I don't have to do what other people would do.  I don't have to do what would look great in a magazine.  I can decorate however I want  :)  So to describe the style of this house would be...hm....rustic boho?  I am not sure.  We love a lot of rustic details but I also love bohemian details - lots of bold colors and textures.  It is going to be so fun choosing everything to use!

I am going to blog as much as I can through the process of this building.  I tried to do that on the last house we built but guess what?  As was the case with a lot of things, my alcoholism got the best of me and I started something I never finished.  So building this time will be a whole different experience for both Tommy and I.  We are in a very different place this time. When the old house was being built was when my alcoholism was in full swing and to say that I was not helpful would be an understatement.  I caused more issues and stress than the building of the house did.  I ended up in rehab toward the end of that building process so I wasn't even physically here for it.  This time will be a whole different ball game because I am sober.  Happily sober.  I am looking forward to working on this house with Tommy - as a team.  Doing this one as a family.  I know the process will be stressful at times but we are looking forward to it.  

Stay tuned for pictures and updates as we move along in the process!  

On The Move....As Usual!

Hello old blogger friends!  I haven't blogged in QUITE some time it seems!  I have the itch to start doing so again so look out!  I love to write, it's just hard finding time to it with everything else going on in my life.  I am so blessed to have a full life today - too many hobbies, not enough hours in the day!  Not to mention that the name of this blog is no longer applicable really because we no longer live IN the Meadow!  I am still trying to figure out what to do with that....

I have a lot of ideas of things to blog about in the near future but I want to start with a post about where we are today as a family.  Literally - where we physically are.  If you know us, you know that we always have projects going on.  And you know that we've moved a lot over the past few years.  I get a lot of questions - Where are you living NOW? Why did you guys sell that house?? When will your new house be finished?  Wait, you went from THAT house to an apartment?!  Hopefully I can answer some of those questions here and kind of give you a brief overview of our journey over the past 10 years as it pertains to houses, condos, hotels, and apartments.  Yes, we've been in all of those (not to mention my one month in rehab living in Nashville!!!)

When we were first married, we lived in a smaller brick home on the east side of town.

We did a lot of work on that house - put down hardwood floor, ripped out carpets, painted, redid the master bathroom, etc.  We started to outgrow that house though as the kids got older - or at least we thought we did.  I think we always want bigger, better, and more right?  We had a lot in Henderson that we had planned to build on in the future BUT as plans often do, this one changed.  We were randomly looking at houses for sale just for fun and we found one in a GREAT neighborhood for an amazing price.  We drove out to look at it and although it was an older home, the lot was PERFECT.

We loved backing up to a woods, we loved the big trees, Tommy was golfing at the time and it was a golf course neighborhood.  We put in an offer and BOOM.  We suddenly had a house that was built in the 70's and hadn't had many updates since.  So we moved in and started making our plans for remodeling.  We had lived there almost a year and had only made a few updates like painting when....

.....the house caught fire from our wood burning fireplace and it was a total loss.  That was devastating and stressful and scary on so many levels.  I will never forget how the inside of the house smelled afterwards.  It was like a nightmare walking through trying to figure out what all had been lost.  Going through and having to inventory everything was so time consuming and never ending.  You don't realize what all people go through after a house fire until you have one happen to you.  The night of the fire, we had nowhere to go so we went to a hotel in town.  We stayed there for a week.  That was interesting to say the least.  Then we had to have somewhere to live temporarily while a new house was built, so we happen to find a condo for rent in our neighborhood.  That would be perfect so we could be close to the building site of the new house that was being built where the old house was.  So, while living in this condo....

.....the old house was being torn down and the lot was getting ready for us to rebuild on.

To keep a very long story short, while living in the condo at the end of 2010 - beginning of 2011, my alcoholism progressed and I became very sick and became a person that I no longer knew.  Alcohol and my lifestyle ruled my life and nothing else mattered.  Add to that the stress of building a new house and our life was very unmanageable.  By the grace of God, my husband offered to send me to rehab in Nashville, TN at Cumberland Heights.  So while my family was still in the condo and finishing up the new house, I was living here for 30 days....

Are you keeping up?  Keep in mind all of this has happened in a matter of 10 years.  Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?!  When I came home from rehab in June 2011, our new home was almost complete and it was absolutely gorgeous.  After it was in the Parade of Homes that year, we were able to move in.  We loved it and it was so beautiful and perfect for us.  So we thought.

While in this house a lot of things happened.  I learned how to live sober which was the highlight of my life so far.  :)  My sister graduated high school, started college, and moved out.  Our kids entered their teen and pre-teen years and started getting busier and busier and spending more time with friends and less time with us ;)  My crazy husband (I say that with love!) had bright ideas to do some pretty big projects.  Including a MASSIVE outdoor fireplace, a flagstone patio, a huge master closet and an underground garage.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Did I mention that we did all of these projects ourselves?  Which then lead into Tommy's back becoming so bad that finally surgery was inevitable.  He had spinal fusion surgery so we got to live in the basement of this house for a bit after that.  :)  I have a lot of great memories of this house.  Truly.  However, we started one day talking about the fact that someday we would want to downsize when the kids got older.  And we thought....what are we waiting for?  Why not do it now while we are still relatively young and can still enjoy life.  Let's downsize and spend less money on this place and more time living.  So, in the fall of 2014 we put this house on the market.  Selling this guy was not easy.  It was a huge house and a nice house and we had put a lot of money into it.  We were not going to get what we wanted for this house but after 6 months on the market, we accepted an offer.  Selling this house was a very stressful process on a lot of levels.  We didn't think it would EVER sell.  In the meantime we had found a lot in Newburgh that we really loved.

There is a whole lot more to that story as well but I will spare you.  Once our house sold, we purchased the Newburgh lot and things were great.  But wait?  Where will we live until our new home is built? Enter apartment living:

This portion of it all has been very interesting because we went from our 5700 square foot house to a 1000 square foot apartment.  The majority of our things are in storage sheds.  We have three of those rented along with some stuff hanging out at various family members homes.  We have only what we need at this apartment but it's teaching us that we don't need HALF of the junk that we own.  And as a lover of purging things, I am looking forward to getting rid of a bunch of stuff.

So that is the cliff notes version of our living situations over the past 10 years.  We've moved a lot.  We've lived in a lot of different places.  We've changed our minds a lot.  We've learned a lot.  We've learned what we do want and what we don't want.  We've learned what is important and what is not.

We are hoping to start building our new home in the next month or so.  We are currently in the process of finalizing floor plans, having our builder get bids, etc.  To say that I am impatient is an understatement.  I'm very ready to just be SOMEWHERE and have all of our stuff in ONE place.  I am not sure what this new journey of building again is going to bring us but I will keep you all updated.  No, I don't think our lives are so exciting that you all want to hear every detail but I do know that people think we are nuts and like to hear about our projects so....here you go.  HA!

I look forward to doing more writing now on this blog.  As I said, I have a lot of ideas.  This is going to be a blog about my life, my thoughts, my world.  And my thoughts can be pretty weird sometimes so just stick with me.  ;)