House Update - NOT so BOOOORING

Another House Update.  This time, its fun and drama free! WOOOHOOO!  This is reason so celebrate.  Picture overload :)

Once the framing got started, we saw tons of progress day after day.  The basement went up SUPER fast.  It took them two weeks to frame the entire house!  We can tell where things will go and the feel of "the lot" has now become real.  We no longer call it "the lot", its our "HOUSE".  It really felt like this was never going to happen.  Its awesome!!!!!

This is our first picture together IN the house.  It was taken on Dave's Bday.  

Only the basement was done at this point.  No stairs yet. 

It was great and slightly emotional to be in OUR HOUSE :) LOVE IT!!!!

Tomi was here and she got a quick glimpse of what the house will sortta look like.  

It was AWESOME to have her here! It was a super short time (more on that on another post).  

Here we are, the three of us, together! :)

You could sit and watch the house come up!  It was pretty awesome to go up the several times a day, dropping off or picking up the kids, and see the progress being made :) 

The upstairs seemed to take a little longer, but not really.  It was still super fast. 

Again, it was pretty crazy to see it go up so fast.  

 This is a view from the "kitchen" into the house, 

you can see some of our rooms towards the back :)

This day was pretty cool.  We have stairs! 

This made it feel like the two floors were finally connected. 

Yay! Roof trusses!!!! The house taking shape...

This week we got our roof, almost done... 

Today we got doors!  The front door, garage door into the house, 

deck door and basement door out to the backyard.  

A LOT has been getting done inside the house.  Plumbing has been put it, we have bathtubs, and showers, rough plumbing in the bathrooms and for the appliances. HVAC has been put threw all sorts of little crevasses. Electrical has been wired and strung all over the place.

LOTS of decisions have been made.  I have picked out the exterior colors, doors, lighting, cabinets, counter tops and lots of little layout things that we were unsure of.  Its been GREAT!

Next week I will be picking out fixtures, flooring, interior colors and finalizing a bunch of little things.  We've had great subs working on the house and that is a cherry on top. 

There is still long way to go, but the light at the end of the tunnel is getting much closer!!!! We are happy and SO looking forward to the next month+ to get in our home.  It will be a year, in June, since we sold our old house.  We never thought this would take this long, but it will be worth it in the end :)

LIFE IS GOOD!!!!

House Update - BOOOORING!

This will be a boring, slightly dramatic, picture-less post. 


Late December we had a call from the bank that we would be doing the construction draws differently than we had been.  (RED FLAG goes UP).

1st week in January a Sub Contrator calls and says, she ONLY wants to send me the invoice and wants nothing to do with our Contractor. (RED FLAG goes UP HIGH).

2nd week in January, I start asking LOTS and LOTS of questions.  The bank answers and then I start calling EVERYONE that has EVER worked in our lot.  Long story short we found out that nobody was being paid from our contractor, BUT, he was taking our money.

Things got from bad to worse, EVERYDAY in January.  It was an extremely difficult month.  It was lonely and depressing and faith-trying.  I took matters upon my hands and while calling and finding things out we also found out that our contractor hadn't paid our permit, didn't have a contractors license for part of our building process, had bounced checks and simply would not do what we asked him to do. He was SHADY, to say the least. 

We started to find out or better yet, make sure that the work that had been done in our home was in fact inspected and passed by the city.  Late January we found out that he had put everything 2feet TOO LOW!  Meaning the footing and foundation was TOO LOW! This was extremely hard blow as the cost to fix this BIG mistake is very costly.  We quickly got a second opinion on things and contacted another contractor (two other contractors) and they spent more hours in one week with us than we had spent since we had started this process with our contractor.  Needless to say, we had gotten screwed. 

Do to legal reasons we had to wait an additional two LONG weeks to be able to sign with another contractor.  We did the work ourselves in the mean time and raised the footing and foundation two more feet (this after talking to our [fantastic] architect and engineer, extensively!)

We started the actual building process at the beginning of November and should be in our home by now, had everything gone smoothly.  HOWEVER, so many good things have come since then. 

We have new FABULOUS contractors.  Nothing but complete honesty and transparency with them, something we had not had with the previous dude.  They helped us solve the "mystery" of what was going on and how to handle it. 

Where is the house now?

We have foundation at the appropriate height, we have a garage floor, we have a porch floor, bonus (unexpected) cold storage, we have some plumbing, basement sub floor and a HUGE storage room under the garage.  We also have a lot of geofoam under our driveway, this is to alleviate some of the pressure dirt would have had on the foundation wall that had to be extended. 

We also have new contractors, a new appreciation for people that have never met us, yet they felt for us and our situation and helped us just because they are real and kind. We have also learned a lot.  We have become stronger and closer together.  We have a bigger appreciation for what we have and the INNUMERABLE blessings we have received despite the "trials" we have had. 

We continue to feel that this is what Heavenly Father wanted for us and for our family.  Everything had worked out perfectly when we started this process and we had faith that this was what we were supposed to do.  We continue to trust that the Lord is guiding us through this and continues to bless us.  We see His hands in our lives daily and we are grateful beyond words!

We see a little light at the end of the tunnel.  Its little but we see it!!!