Lots of Progress!!!

So much progress on the house! It seems like once they started framing, it all started happening very quickly. Things are going really well. All of the rain is NOT happening but I'm just happy that the tornadoes that went through last night near us didn't come about 10 miles further north. That would have been a disaster!!!

It's fun now because I can actually see where rooms will be, where doors will go, etc. I can start better thinking about interior decorating at this point which is going to be fun for me! Tommy has been working extremely hard every day. I'm helping out as much as I can at this point. I'm the official "holder" and "cleaner". HA! We are building the screened in porch ourselves so that is a focus right now. The roof should be on within a week and we will also begin wiring. Busy busy! Here are some pictures that I have taken over the past few days:

This is the looking in the house at the entry from where our front door will be. This will all be open so you will look straight into the kitchen and breakfast area.

Though you can't tell it, this is a very exciting part of the house for me - a piece of my closet! This is where my shoes will be!

Exciting to have windows in!!! This is our breakfast area which will look out into the back yard. Can't wait to watch the deer from here!

This is a small portion of our master bedroom - this little nook is going to be my reading area. This also looks out onto the back yard.

This is the beginnings of our screened in porch. It will have stone arches all around it though you can't tell that now - HA! This will probably be one of my favorite areas of the house.

This is kind of a side view of the house. This is what you see when you drive down our street - the garage, basement and side of the main floor.

This is our front entry from the outside.

Front view! What a muddy mess HA

Oh! It's a house!

Wow, wow, wow! It's amazing how fast this is all happening! One day it was a big hole in the ground and now it is actually starting to resemble a house! It is very cool to see our vision and our floor plan that we designed actually coming to life.

A lot of different things have been going on at once with the house process. Last week Tommy went to Loogootee to purchase the lumber he will use to build the built in's and all of the cabinets and island in my closet. I've never been so excited to see a trailer full of cherry in my life! I mean look at it - can't you envision my dream closet already? HA

This week has been full of progress. The basement floor was poured on Monday which was a big step. The framing began yesterday which is kind of what I've been waiting for - to me, that is when you can really actually start to see your house! It is amazing how quickly it goes once they begin framing. I took some pictures this morning and by this afternoon there was even more progress!

The above was taken this morning - this is the basement being framed. It will be a walkout - this will be a big family room, Tabi's room & bathroom, storage, and our garage on this level.

This is our main floor being built ^
This afternoon when I went back by to see the progress I couldn't believe it! Check this out!

Tonight we were able to go down and actually walk around and see where all of the rooms will actually be. It's awesome to now have an idea of size, etc. on everything. I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!

Look I have walls!

Busy, busy, busy! Lots of things going on with the house. I will say that building a house in the winter has it's challenges as one would expect. Our road is a complete muddy mess but not much we can do about that unless we want to have it cleaned daily - no thank you. The snow hasn't helped things but I have to commend our builder - he had his crew digging our basement with 4 inches of snow on the ground on one of the coldest days of the year. That gave me confidence!!!

The basement walls have now been poured so it's very cool to see something that resembles a part of the actual house :)

I never really knew the "process" of building a house so it's fun to watch all of the different steps take place. Living 400 yards from where it is going up definitely helps!

We now have picked out our appliances, lighting, cabinets, hardwood floor, fixtures....lots of things done! The framing should begin soon which will be very cool - then time for electrical. Tommy and his dad are doing the electrical themselves...which means I will likely be their "assistant" - HA!

Stay tuned for more!

Can I Throw Candy?

Whew! Lots going on as it pertains to house building!

As you all know the house was torn down a little over a week ago. Very interesting seeing pieces of my house driven by in a semi truck. The mess is pretty well cleaned up and now it just looks like a big muddy mess. Looks ready for a gorge house to be built on it!

It feels like Tommy talks to our builder Brian daily about one thing or another - and we haven't even started yet! One of the big things that came out of these discussions is that our new home is going to be in the Parade of Homes in June - woo hoo!

Very exciting for a multitude of reasons. One, Tommy and I are obsessed with the Parade and go every single year. Two, this means that we are on a very strict deadline since the Parade begins on June 11th. That of course makes me extremely happy. Three, and probably the most awesome part is that this means major discounts on a lot of things that go into the house as businesses use this as a major advertising tool. All very exciting!

This week has been a whirlwind of things. Now that we are 100% doing the Parade we have to get into gear on EVERYTHING and fast. This means everything from picking out tiles and knobs for cabinets to carpet to lighting and everything in between. Every night we are working on this stuff - more so Tommy right now than me. I will give credit where credit is due :) When I think about dimensions, scales, etc. my head spins. My husband however is an engineer so that is coming in handy. I am more of an advisor at this point. Yes, advisor. I like that title. HA I will say though he is doing the technical parts of this we have been making every bit of this a joint effort so that we are on the same page about everything. It's extremely time consuming and stressful at times but parts of it are definitely fun.

Yesterday we spent the majority of the day doing house related things. When your builder prices your home, he obviously talks to a myriad of different companies and people to get pricing on thinsg such as doors, windows, appliances, etc. Now begins the journey of US going to these places and getting into much more detail with them and seeing if those people are indeed who we will end up using. We had an appointment at 9am to look at windows and doors at Kight. Windows and doors.....eh, not really my thing to be honest. HA I prefer to just show them the house and say, "Okay, well do it like this picture and make sure they keep me warm in the winter and cool in the summer." We spent about an hour there going over details. Then onto some fun stuff...

In the afternoon we went to Bassemier's to price hot tubs. Now we're talking. We found one that we like but we are waiting to see who has the best price on this. We today went to Spa City and found one that we liked as well. The people working at Spa City had their English Bulldog with them that looked just like Rocko! I think it's a sign. :) To be continued...

Also yesterday afternoon we had an appointment at 1:00 at Ferguson's to look at quite a few things - tubs, toilets, sinks, kitchen appliances, lighting, etc. I was in heaven when I walked into that store. So many pretty shiny things surrounding me! We spent two hours with the lovely Tammy until we had to leave because they were closing. And we still aren't finished! We basically went through room by room with our house plan and picked out things that we wanted for each room. SO much fun! Again, kind of one of those wait and see things once we find out the cost. This is who our builder used to price but that can always change. Tomorrow we got back to look at lighting. I picked out some fab things though! I think laying in different tubs to see which one I want for my bathroom was one of the highlights - HA! I am super excited to go back tomorrow to look at lighting - ready to pick out the chandelier for my closet!!!

The goal is for our builder to come dig the basement this Tuesday but it's supposed to rain so we will see. The weather really needs to cooperate with us on this!!!

Oh, and I bought a pink hard hat today. One must always be prepared when building a house. :)

That USED to be my house

The day finally came to tear down the house. I had never seen a house be bulldozed before - it is quite the scene let me tell you. It is amazing to me that it takes 6 months + to build a house yet the entire thing can be flattened in a matter of 30 minutes.

Tommy woke me up around 8:30 Friday morning to let me know that they were there and ready to go. I dragged myself out of bed because who in the world would want to miss such an event? Not me. In a matter of 10 minutes they began tearing down the house with a giant track hoe. Everyone keeps asking me if I was upset. Honestly, not so much. I am a pretty emotional person normally but we had only lived in this house right at a year. I hadn't made enough long term memories there yet to really be TOO upset. At this point I was almost happy to see it be dozed. I was so tired of going in that burnt house to look for things, etc. I checked out mentally of that house a couple of weeks ago I think. Ready to move on!

The tearing down was pretty impressive. I took a ton of pictures and video which you can see here.

So now what? Time to get this party started! Let's build a house! We have chosen Brian Stevens homes to do the job. He is from Haubstadt and is a second generation builder who comes highly recommended. Most importantly he could do the job in the amount of time needed for the best price which is really what you are looking for in a builder. Super nice guy who we are looking forward to working with.

This week we also had all of the hardwood delivered for our floors and we met with a cabinet maker yestrday in Loogootee. Things are coming along! It's finally starting to get a little fun - picking out what goes into the house is what I've been waiting for!

Here today...gone tomorrow

As suspected the decision was to go ahead and bulldoze our house. This was actually the decision we were hoping for - let's face it, the place was a wreck. Starting over just seemed like the better thing for all involved. Once that decision was made we had to spend many evenings at the house going through things to make sure that everything was out that we wanted to try to salvage. First off, it was FREEZING cold. Second, it smelled AWFUL. There was nothing fun about these trips to the house. Well, I suppose if someone were to have seen Tommy and I before going in they might have gotten a good laugh...

Don't be jealous of our head lights. Those things were extremely handy! Wonder if I can make that a fashion trend...hmm....anyway. I digress. We had to kick it into high gear once we found out that we were tearing down. We had to start interviewing builders, searching for a great house plan, etc. A lot of late, stressful nights trying to figure out all of these decisions. Many long meetings with builders and meetings with our floor plan guy trying to get everything just perfect. It was exhausting. I keep telling myself at some point this will all be fun - we are getting a new house after all!

Finding the house that we wanted to build was a pretty easy decision. We have drooled over a certain house by Garrell Associates for years. We didn't want to build quite as large as their plan, so we found a floor plan that would match up to the exterior of the house that we were in love with. So basically we will be using the same style as the Garrell house with the modified floor plan.

The outside will be similar to this:

The floor plan is similar to this plus a basement:

The amount of custom work we are going to put into this is kind of crazy but we will be doing a lot of the work ourselves. We figure we might as well have everything exactly how we want it. I think we deserve it after this whole fiasco!

Tomorrow is the day when they are finally coming to tear down the burnt house. I have some mixed emotions about it but luckily we had only lived in the house a year so we aren't SUPER attached to it. It will still be very strange though that after tomorrow the lot will just be empty until we begin the new house. Also very strange that there is a giant track hoe parked in the parking lot of the club ready to head down there tomorrow morning....Tommy is quite excited about the big toy. :)

Stay tuned for house tearing down pics and video!!!

I am the new "Chuck Bass"

For any of you who watch Gossip Girl, you will know what this title means. Chuck Bass lives on the upper east side in a hotel. What a life huh? Living in a hotel? Yeah, let me tell you. Not QUITE as great as it is on the show when you are in a Residence Inn in Evansville, Indiana. Now don't get me wrong, we were HAPPY and thankful to have it. In fact, Tabi thought it was pretty awesome living in a hotel - room service, housekeeping, continental breakfast...me? I just wanted a full kitchen and room for us all to get away from one another. HAHA And very happy that they let Rocko stay with us as well. He was nervous for a couple of days but as you can see, he became quite comfy in his new bed in his new temporary home pretty quickly...


So the week after the fire was an insanely busy one. You don't realize what all goes into this process until you are in it. We had a million things going on every single day. The meeting with the insurance guy was the beginning of a crazy couple of weeks. We had several different cleaning companies come to the house to take what they could out to try to clean it. We had the fire investigators there which seemed pointless but I suppose it's all part of the process. :) I think what a lot of people don't realize is how bad the inside of the house looked. The outside didn't look bad on the news so people thought the inside must not be bad. Wrong-o. Here are a couple of pics so you can get the idea. This used to be my front entry way and my family room. Slightly well done, no?

We were VERY fortunate in that there was a condo for sale right up the street from our house and the owner is letting us rent it for the time being. We moved into the condo a week after the fire which was great. Somewhat of a home again! I think we were all happy to have a bigger place to live!

One of the main things at this point that we were waiting to find out and one of the main questions that everyone was asking was, "So, what are you going to do? Bulldoze the house? Start over? Rebuild?" We knew that we wanted to stay on our lot, but we weren't sure at that point whether or not they would just take the house down to the studs or say start over. I think we were just happy that we hadn't started our renovations yet. That would have made it even worse I think!!! Waiting, waiting, waiting...