My House

Sorry about the long break again. I wasn't planning on that, but having the computer in the same room as the baby didn't work so well once she learned that the typing sound she heard while asleep meant that someone was in her room. She kept waking up at the most inopportune times, so I lost a lot of my computer (and blogging) time. However, we are now in our house (YAY!!!!) and the computer is in the office, not sharing a room with a now 1-year-old. I've been REALLY busy the last few weeks getting everything settled, painted, etc. but now we're starting to calm down a bit. My next few blogs will be about our house, since that's been the big focus for a long time. I thought I'd start by putting in a few things generally about the house in this blog, then put up pictures as we get rooms 'finished'. Not that any of them are perfect yet, but when I get to the point where it's 'good enough for now' I'll show it off.

I thought I'd start by addressing some of the comments we've gotten over the past 6 months or so as we've built the house (they broke ground exactly 4 months ago today, by the way). The biggest question/comment we've gotten (or noticed people trying really hard NOT to ask) is "How can you afford to build" given our 'large' family size, only one person working, and so forth. Well, after looking carefully at our finances and the housing market in the area, we realized that to get the house we wanted and be able to afford it, we'd have to build. With the incentives from the builder and lender, we were able to get more of the things we 'wanted' along with the floor plan that we (I) loved best by building instead of buying. There are/have been 2 houses on the market with the same floor plan as ours in the past few months, but we couldn't have afforded to buy them.

The second question is "why would you build instead of just buying something else?" And the reason we decided to build is allergies. Joe has terrible allergies to almost all plants and animals. In several of our apartments (including the last one), he would get awful rashes on his legs just from walking around without shoes on. We wanted a place where he could come without having to worry what had been in there and may be lingering in walls, floors, and air ducts. So far he's been able to get through the worst of the allergy season without extra trips to the dr. Hopefully it will continue... (fingers crossed here)

Those are really the biggest questions. And the only other answer we would give to them is that we want a space that is only ours. We've been living in apartments for 8 years now, and are just fed up with dealing with other people's left-over problems. Granted, that's part of renting; you don't know who or what was there before you, and you (sometimes) feel really bad for the people you know are coming after you are gone. We just wanted a place of our own that didn't have anyone else's messes left in forgotten corners. That isn't to say that I can't appreciate your historical house or anything, it's just not for us right now. I respect your choice, now please respect mine.

Now, on to the fun part. Here are a few pictures of the house, with explanations.
Here's the picture of my front door from the outside. It's got the vented screen door on the outside and the windows on the side.









Here's the door when it's open. That way you can see the cool glass details a little better. It's kind of hard to tell with the lighting, but it's a navy blue color of paint on the outside.











This is what the interior doors look like. They're all white with white frames and all that jazz. They look really good, and are a nice change from the basic 6-panel door you usually see.








Here's the doorknob closer up. They aren't the ones that came with the house. The builder wanted a crazy amount for the 'upgraded' knobs when we were making all the final choices back in January. So we bought all of these at Home Depot for less than the ones we were thinking about getting. And I like them better. Joe spent a whole day switching them for me, isn't he just great? And if anyone needs a bunch of silver door hardware, I've got about 20 doorknobs in a box in the basement! :)






Well that's longer than I thought this post should be, but there it is. I've got more pictures and things I'll try and do later. But for now it's back to laundry, lunch and crazy munchkins!