DIY House Progress

I know I have not updated in awhile about our house progress but we have just been soooo busy.  I am busy writing other content for the blog, taking care of the house we currently live in and carting the kids here, there and everywhere and Hubs has been in charge of taking pictures of the house progress.  Hubs is at the site regularly, I am not.  Right now Hubs is doing the drywall so I am not taking Baby Girl out there as much, mostly because of the dust.  It's filthy for Baby Girl and I end up running after her the entire time, constantly worrying that she'll get hurt.  Recently I have been staying home because it's easier on her and me.  Hubs likes when I come out to keep him company, bring dinners and so on but I have had a harder time with sticking around for too long, given the phase of construction.  For another thing, I have allergies; with the dust I end up a complete wreck.

My New Getaway Room

I was walking through my new master bedroom today at the new house to get a sense of size, furniture placement and decorating ideas and told Hubs that the walk-in closet was a little too large and overpowering the space.  Can you believe I said that?  My wardrobe is far from grand and definitely not enough to fill that closet so why waste the space.  Hubs figures he'd like to put an island with drawers in the center of the closet with a bench so we can sit and pull on our socks, pants and the like.  This would be a nice feature but not at the cost of intruding into my reading space.  Hubs doesn't realize that my intended reading nook in our master bedroom will be my salvation, my getaway.  I should have suspected as much, Hubs isn't much of a reader; I on the other hand am an avid reader and enjoy relaxing with a good book.  Currently I am on book 5 of a 7 series novel set, each books pages number around 1000 or more.  Hubs absolutely hates when I'm laying beside him with what he calls a "spot light" on reading; it's just a reading light attached to our headboard...it is quite bright and I can't say that I'm very fond of it either. All the more reason to have my own reading nook where I can curl up in a cozy chair with the perfect reading light. 

House Progress - Second Floor Walls Up!

With all the lovely weather we've been having we have had a tough time, or rather hubs has had a hard time, working on the house so it's taking forever....maybe it really is supposed to take this long anyway and I should relax a little.  When I go out to the build site and see nothing, in my mind, more done than the last time I was out but hubs has been out there "working" on the house all day until midnight, I get a little testy.  The wind has not allowed for much as far as standing walls go, especially on the upper floor, God forbid a wind gust would come along and swoop up a wall throwing it far into the farmers field....and yes, that would be our luck! 

We have had one of the coldest and snow filled winteres that I can remember in a long time with stretches of temps in the -20's- to -30's and the windchill warnings to follow of -38 or colder....brrrrrr is all I can say!  The groundhog  should be shot!  So much for him being a sign of winter coming to an end and an early spring; last I heard we are supposed to have colder than normal temperatures for the next 3 months, well into spring.  Again, this would be our luck.  If you think I'm joking or being dramatic, I'm not.  It never fails, whenever we have to do something big like move from one Province to another, build a house, book a holiday or whatever, it seems that the weather is always bad.  When we were packing the uHaul truck, temperatures were, no word of a lie, in the -30's and -50's with the windchill. Anyone who says that the windchill doesn't make the temperature colder should try standing outside dressed like an Eskimo for five minutes.

Our 2nd floor walls are up! Look how tiny hubs looks.  ;-)

House Progress - Main Floor Framed

Here's a brief update of the house progress.  I thought I'd include a slideshow to show you some of the work and the awesome(sarcasm) weather we've been having.  My husband, bless his heart, has been working his little tush off to get this house moving along and has been fighting the wind, snow and extreme cold all the way along.  The balmy weather picture, is a view of what the elements have been like, usually worse.  I'm sure you can imagine how easy this has been; nothing seems to go well. 

House Framing - Progress

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The progress of our house build has been a slow one.  We have had so many delays and to top it all off this winter has offered terrible conditions for building causing even more delays.  Pictured here is the walkout basement ICF foundation with the walkout part framed in and main floor joists on. 

As you can see there is a mountain of snow which incidentally had already been snow blown out on more than one occasion.  This makes it very difficult for my husband to build our house in a timely manner.  I am soooo ready for this winter to be over!

I'm pictured all in black above, my husband is bent over nailing the floor on and if you can see our eldest daughter climbing up just below him, she's blending in a little.  The picture isn't the best; it was snowing and somewhat of a blizzard....brrrr.

Here is our house to date, the main floor is nearly framed in completely with the only wall left to build being the back wall of the house which is mainly windows, similar to the basement walkout frame.  The bottom foot of the walls will be boarded as well, this was left so that the walls were easier to stand.  The walls were built on the floor and raised into position after. 

The rest of the main floor and the 2nd floor joists placement should be finished by next week, weather permiting.  I will be sure to post our progress as we go.  Cross your fingers for us that we will have decent weather, mainly with little to no wind, for the rest of our build.  These -20 degrees celcius temperatures with the windchill bringing it to -34 or worse is crazy; I have no idea how my husband can stand it.  I was out there in those temperatures to get an idea of room locations and size for no more than 5 minutes and my forhead was nearly froze through; I tried to kiss my husband and couldn't feel my lips.  I pray he can get the rest of the house framed in quickly so that he at least has some protection from the elements and has a place he can put a heater to get warm.

Building our House - Day 1 & 2

It's official, we started building our house!  I don't think I've ever been so excited to see a hole in my life.  We hired a worker to dig our walkout basement with a track hoe, if you could've seen this guy work you would've been impressed.  Not that digging a basement is impressive but the fact that this man could use such a large machine and use it to dig a very precise level hole was very neat.  I'm sure hubs would be rolling his eyes right now if he knew how I was describing the excavation process. 

Here hubs and I are standing in front of the basement while the track hoe digs.  We look tiny.  When hubs had staked it out I thought it looked small; no wonder he shot me an if looks could kill look.  Hehe.

We also hired the local grid road maintenance workers to build up the road and most of the lane into our yardsite with a Yuke tractor and thank goodness we did because we misjudged how much dirt there was to move in order to have the correct slope from our walkout and away from the house and ended up hiring the Yuke worker to excavate our walkout and landscape around the yard.

Our New Adventure - Building a House Startup

I'm sure you have noticed that I haven't been around much lately and I appologize for that.  I promise you that I am not ignoring you all; in reality we have been busy getting things all arranged for the start of our house build.  With this and the starting of dance and hockey for the 3 kiddos all the while carting an infant around; it's been hectic, to say the least.  I decided I would blog about our experiences with building our dream home; hopefully you will find it informative and somewhat entertaining.  We have one year to build; I welcome you to post comments and look forward to conversing with all of you.

Me & Hubs in front of where our front door will be...welcome to our dirt ;-)

A Little History

We started thinking about building our house last year about this time when my husband was working and living in his house located 7 hours from our current location.  I still had a residence in our current city, bought after my divorce from my first husband and before my hubs and I reconnected and later married; I cannot believe it's been 2 years of marriage already, wow how time flies.  I won't get into our long life story but I will say that after a lot of long distance driving and a pregnancy with our first baby girl together, we decided it was best if hubs sold his home and moved to where I lived, especially with my joint custody arrangement with my 3 kids dad.  We actually only lived together on every other weekend which was so hard.  Huge changes for everyone but luckily hubs found a great job, his house sold quickly and we had my house to live in after his move. 

With the expanding family we have quickly run out of room in my small 3 bedroom house; this meant we either had to upsize by buying a home on the market or build.  Luckily hubs parents offered us 10 acres of their land about 10 miles outside of the city for us to build our home on.  Hubs, a Journeyman Electrician by trade but definitely a jack-of-all trades, convinced me that he would be the General Contractor for our house build and could then do a lot of the work himself and save us a lot of money.  Afterall, this will be the third house he's built.  Now I will say that I was a little reluctant, not because I don't think my husband can do all of the work, he has that natural ability and skillset, but because I know my husband.  Hubs is a work-a-holic so he will take on any and all projects, even if he has not actually completed that type of job before; he will research what needs to be done and materials needed and then get to work.  Luckily he is very good at doing this and is why he has as many skills as he does, beyond his official electrical trade, BUT he does work full-time and since I am now a WAHM, he is the main bread winner for our family.  This means that he will be working full-time, minus some time he'll need to take off from work in order to get the bigger jobs completed, while he's building our house.  When I say he's building our house, I mean he will be pouring the basement foundation, framing the house, drywall, electrical, cabinets and so on.  I have convinced him to hire a few jobs out such as the excavating of the basement and some basic landscaping during this dig, the roadway leading to our acreage, the septic and cistern, the roughed in plumbing, geothermal heating installation (except the in floor heat which hubs says he will do himself) and the duct work but as for the rest, he seems to think him and his dad can do it all themselves.  He does have a few friends in trades that we will need for specific parts of the house build that he could call on to return favors, favors he has done for them in the past so this will definitely help.  So I was convinced this was the route to take; we would sacrifice a tiny home with our baby needing to stay in our room as there is no other space for her with the other 3 kids, 2 already sharing a room, and hardly seeing my husband for the year that it would take to get the house built. 

We went to the bank, already preapproved for more than we would be asking for, and were assigned to a Mortgage Advisor because with a self build mortgage there is a lot of time involved....that was December of last year.  Long story short our financial lives under a microscope and a lot of complaints filed at the banks head office, I won't mention which bank we're using, it's taken this long to get our self build mortgage finalized.  I'm suprised the bank didn't want me to give them my first born as well.  Sheesh!  Now trust me when I say that if it weren't for the fact that we would get our penalty pay out money back from the sale of my husbands house if we stay with the same bank hubs had with his last house, we would've ditched this bank a long time ago.  Yes the penalty pay out was a hefty one and worth trying to get it back and although the normal 3 month period for porting a mortgage is long past, the bank has honored this anyway because they messed us around so long.

Did I mention that hubs wanted to be the General Contractor, the one whom is supposed to make all the phone calls, get all the quotes, book the jobs, speak to the inspector, coordinate permits and so on?  Hmmm, well it seems I might have taken on a lot of that role and I suppose I should've known since hubs is working while during business hours.  I did not sign up for this job but rather was dragged kicking and screaming into it.  Well maybe that's a bit dramatic but I'm not sure how hubs figures I can squeeze that into my schedule with everything else that I have on my plate....umm, can I go back to work please or is it too late? *chuckle*  Although it will be challenging, we are in this together and it will be an exciting and worthwhile journey....love you hunny!

Here we go...