The Blog

Well, we are building a house. Custom. From scratch. On 11 acres. I fully intended to document it all, but things got, well…complicated. We seem to be back on track, so I will start anew, documenting this exciting time, but before I do that, I feel like a little consolidated update is in order. Because, well, it has been adventurous(not in a good way) to say the least.

So let’s start with the land. It is 11 acres. Wooded. Think damp leafy mushroom-y shady forest floor. Covered with vines, pricker bushes, ferns, and thick vegetation. Old growth tulip trees with vines to swing on. Creepy huge millipedes. It is not really rural because it is sandwiched in the city. Not a bad thing seeing as we wanted to be zoned for city schools. It is more like a little woodsy pocket-enough land for our adventurous little boys, that is for sure.

August 2012-

Architect drew up the plans. Had a few re-draws to get it just right. These plans…for the past year I have been referencing them nearly daily. Joe told me that I should just frame them.

September 2012-
They cleared the land.

October 2012-
They dug the basement out.

November 2012-
I found my counter top. It is a quartzite. So, the look of marble but more durable than granite. Perfect.

December 2012-
We had a few delays because of rain and snow. Some kinda record rainfall for TN. The house site eventually became a pond. When it dried a bit, we decided to bring in some shale to speed things up. Only there was a HUGE issue. On the day the foundation was to be put down, the engineer came out to sign off on it. Only he did not. He noted that although we were not on a sink hole, we were too close to a sink hole. We could drop 50K or more to stabilize the house, or we could move the home site. We chose to move the home site. The thing that I am most sick over is the forest we tore down. It stinks that we wasted money clearing and digging out this home site that is not useable. But what really hurt me, down to my soul, is that we cleared so many beautiful trees on this huge lot. Old growth. Gone. And then we had to do it AGAIN to make room for the new home site. After we got over that, it rained. And snowed. And rained. And then snowed again. So we just waited. And waited. In our tiny un-liveable rental. But we did get out to enjoy the snow at our land.

January 2013 through present-
It took several weeks to get started on the new site. We had to do everything over again(get a new permit, have city inspect land, etc.). In March 2013 they dug the footers at the new site, and they tell me that they are laying block this week. And I did take some pictures of the new site. I will have a separate post about that in a bit! So, moving forward. Feeling inspired and excited again. Eager to share. Here we go!