Monday, September 09, 2013

our little piece of heaven



One of the things I planned to document when I started this blog was building our house.  We haven't started yet, but we are shooting for next year.  Our original intent was to start building this year, but that has been put on hold til next year.  Between the accident and buying the house that we currently live in, our timeline for building the house got pushed back a bit.  We had absolutely no intention of buying a house, our plan was to live in the house that we rented from Joe's parents until our house was built, but this deal came along that was just wayyy too sweet to pass up.  We're looking to sell next year, hopefully we will have some of our house finished by the time we sell.

When Joe and I first got together he would take me down to the old brickyard turned subdivision on the Little Vermillion river.  There are several lots in the subdivision, but only one has a house on it.  In 2010 we looked a little more closely at buying one to someday build on.  We had to look into the school district (Tonica schools), fire protection, garbage pick up, digging a well, getting the soil tested for septic, there were all kinds of things we had to take into consideration before we purchased one of these lots.  There are no utilities except for underground electric.  We will need a well, a septic, & propane.  After carefully thinking it all over, we decided to purchase the biggest lot in the subdivision.  It's 1.5 acres, it's not actually on the river, it's across the street from it, which we kind of preferred once we got to thinking about having kids, flooding, etc.  We took out a five year loan & planned to pay that off before we started building, or at least have most of it paid off before we rolled it into a construction loan.  

our engagement photos were taken on our property, some with this sign representing our future <3

Right now we spend a lot of time there camping either in our tent or pop-up.  We host bonfires and cookouts pretty often.  We are very excited to start the building process.  After scouring through many house plans both online and in books, we never really did find anything that we loved, so many houses now have the master bedroom on the complete opposite side of the house from the other bedrooms and I think when we have kids, we will want to be closer to them at night so Joe drew up our house plan himself and then drew it in a Design CAD program online.  The next step is to show the plans to our builder to make sure it all works out ok.  I'm sure there will be some minor changes, but all in all, our plan should work out how we want it to.  

There is so much that goes into building a home.  I try to gather all of my design thoughts onto my pin board building our dream home so that everything that I like and all of my ideas are organized together. But there is so much more, there's the house plan, all of the utilities, the placement of the house, energy efficiency, just a lot of other things to think about besides paint colors and counter tops.   Let's be honest, I'm not looking forward to spending money on a leech field for our septic tank, how unappealing does that sound?  But it is necessary in order for us to be able to live, such is life.  But the designing part will be totally worth it, picking our appliances, windows, paint colors, flooring!  Oy Vey!  Here are some of my must-haves:

a nice open kitchen with a beautiful archway

a corner tub & separate shower with tiling 

a fireplace with built-in shelving, just like this one

some stone & some siding, preferably in these colors or similar

everything about this amazing kitchen

as many windows as possible, we have great scenery to be looking at, we need windows


This past weekend we camped there on Saturday & we started looking at some of the trees we were hoping to keep & Joe continued working on clearing the lot.  I can't believe how close we are getting to actually building our forever home!

6 comments:

  1. So jealous that you are building your own home, what a dream! Love the gigantic archway into the kitchen and obviously having a gazillion windows :)

    Megan
    IG: megawat
    Hello Newlywed Life Blog

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    1. Thank you, yes we are very excited!! Thanks for stopping by!!

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  2. Hey lady! First I wanted to say thank you for nominating me for a Liebster award! You're a "no-reply" blogger so I was unable to email you back to say thank you! So awesome you are building your own house! Looking forward to following along!

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    1. No problem!! Your blog is adorable!! I didn't realize I was a "no reply" blogger, do you know how I can fix that??? Thanks for following!! Much appreciated!

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    2. http://anyonecandecorate.blogspot.ca/2012/09/are-you-no-reply-blogger-how-to-fix.html
      :)

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  3. I like that you guys camp and host bonfires/cookouts there - such fun! I hope you take plenty of photos to look back on the pre-build days :)

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