Well, this news is late to the blog…that’s just what happens in a season of extreme busy-ness like we are in!  And a part of that major busy that we are dealing with is that, as we shared a few weeks ago on Facebook and Instagram…we are building our Dream Home!  I’m calling it the #GumFarmhouse even though we sadly are not building on our family farm (this is such a sad reason and truly the ONLY one, but there is no possible way to get high speed internet on the farm and I just honestly cannot in any way do my job without it!  Photo uploads take so much internet speed.).  We are however still very much in the country…and building in the modern farmhouse style, which is truly just my dream!  So I am hoping to share at least a monthly update here about the process, starting now!

First of all, how far along are we?  Framing starts TODAY!  SO they dug our hole, and then we waited (and waited and waited) during a lot of rain.  Then we got walls poured, the basement/garage poured, and now framing starts!  When we  began, the hope was that we would be in by late August or early September, and I hope that rain didn’t push us back too much but only time will tell!

So today I’m going to share a few fun facts about the house build that I haven’t gotten to share yet!

1). We are building extremely close to our current home.  We LOVE our current home (which will be on sale SOON!) but just had a couple of things we wanted to change due to various life things (3rd kid, hosting photography gatherings, ease for aging parents when they visit, etc) and decided it was time to build.  This isn’t the first time we have considered building, but to be candid, my photography business the last couple of years is what has allowed us to do it at this point (and we could not be more thankful for that!).  It will be SO fun for the kids and I to watch the progress daily (perhaps all day long!) this summer!

2). Michael and I, like I said, had considered building before. I was pretty sure (naively) that the process would be easy for us because we have similar taste in a lot of areas, or Michael doesn’t feel too strongly about things that I do or vica versa. There are DEFINITELY parts of the process we are enjoying and I think the overall end product will of course be amazing…but it has still been quite stressful! It is just hard to fit all the pieces together of the budget and allowances, especially when it doesn’t happen at once! So if you decide to go OVER on the windows now, you might be in trouble when it comes to door handles later and you really want an upgrade that you just can’t afford to make.  We are trying really hard to do everything EARLY so that we don’t get stuck anywhere, but it’s definitely tricky.

3). Our house is going to be a custom build…and we literally made up our house plan from scratch!  There is not another house anywhere like it!  After perusing hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of home plans online and settling on one for a few weeks before continuing to look for another, we finally decided to start from mostly scratch and just find a way to get all the things we wanted in the floor plan.  We knew we would have to settle in the area of some finishes/etc…but if we were going to build, we wanted the floor plan to be RIGHT.  And it is SO right! Though we are finding that the more time we had in rain delays, the more small tweaks and changes we were making- I think we will both be glad once it’s framed and there can be no more changes! 🙂  Most builders will tell you to take a print out of a floor plan you choose to an architect and have them draw it up vs buying one online so you can make the customizations easily that you want and it isn’t usually that much more expensive so that is what we did– but with the plan Mike made using floorplanner.com!  Can I just say though that it’s sort of stressful to pay an architect a lot of money to make a house you have never seen the OUTSIDE of?! Obviously, we designed the floor plan but didn’t know what that would mean for the outside, which meant once he gave us his initial version, we literally got to design the OUTSIDE of it as well, which is SO fun! We absolutely LOVE our plan- there are things that I think others will find odd that are so perfect for us!  I will share more of it throughout the process I’m sure!

Ok there we are for house update 1– here are a few quick cell phone shots we have taken of the process so far (I need to get my real camera out for more of this!!)!

Click HERE to see Part II about our build about framing!

Click HERE to see Part III of our build  when we got windows and a roof!

Click HERE for part IV with a drywall update!