Building A House

Finished At Last!!!

On May 2, 2014 Bo and I moved into our new home. Five days later the movers moved all of our furniture and Crista, Rick and the children moved in also. Thanks to Chris Unland and all the great subcontractors he hired to build our home. He is a most efficient and competent builder who keeps things moving. In 10 months of building there were only a couple of days when no one was here working. He builds a house for his customers as if it were his own and he was going to live in it himself.

Bo's Garden

We have a lot of windows in our bedroom and three of them look out at our neighbor's fence. Something had to be done. Bo worked with a landscaping company and finally agreed on something that would fit our budget. At our other house we had a water feature of a little bronze girl holding a shell that water recirculated through and we decided to incorporate her into the landscaping at the side of the house. Here is the result.

The garden path

The view from our bedroom

The Mud Room

We had first designed the mud room to have a cubical for each of us, but when we got the estimate from the cabinet company we had to regroup. It was going to be way to expensive. We decided we could live with a lot less. I went on line and found a great web site. ( http://ana-white.com/2012/07/mudroom-locker-and-bench-unit ) Ana White is a young mother who lives in Alaska with her husband and two children. They literally built their house themselves and she has built practically everything in it. So, she decided to share her ideas and started a web site. She has a lot of project plans on her web site. If you are at all handy and looking for something to build, visit her website. I built the bench below from her plans. One caution, the plans are not detail drawings. She gives basic overall dimensions but you have to figure out the size of each individual piece and how to fit them together.

The back wall is bead board and the wall shelf is from Martha Stewart

Google Captures the Construction

A view from Google Earth. Late fall 2013.

What's That Smell???

The cedar closet of course. In our other house we used the attic and a long, built in storage compartment in our bed room to store our out of season clothes. It became apparent after we began construction that we had not planned for out of season clothes storage so, we decided to put in a cedar closet in the basement. With cedar paneling on the ceiling and all 4 walls the smell is a bit overpowering. When I was putting up the shelving I had to take several breaks just so I could breathe "normal" air.

Chris Unland installing the cedar paneling

Ready for clothes

How Do We Get From the Garage to the House?

When normal people build a house they put the garage on the high side of the lot. If there is no slope on the high side, you can actually go from the garage to the house without a step up. We, on the other hand, for reasons too lengthy and boring to explain here, put our garage on the low side of the lot. And the lot slops a lot :-) So the door going into the garage is about 3 feet above the garage floor or five steps up. If we only built steps to the door, getting into the house would be awkward especially if the one entering was to be carrying packages, so...we built a deck in the garage.