This week the crew is finishing up the shingles on our roof.

The back is almost done!

Windows and doors go in TOMORROW while they finish the last of the work on the roof and the siding will be added next week. Also next week: drywall. (But not until Thursday so you’ll have to wait two weeks for the pics since I’m doing this series on Wednesdays. Bummer.) I can’t wait to see it all walled in! I think that will really help give us a good idea of how it will look when we live there.

This week the crew also finished a lot of framing work, like adding supports to our roof trusses, fire stops to the chimney and sealing/insulating a lot of seams and around the electric work and plumbing. The pool company also came and painted the outline for the pool so they can start excavating next week. Eddie ran some speaker wire to the back porch so we can have music playing in the pool area and he also ran the wiring for surround sound in case we ever agree to do that in our living room. (I’m not a huge fan of spending the $ for surround sound in a room that’s not that big, to begin with, but it was way cheaper and easier to run the wires now that it would be later.)

We passed our initial framing, electric, and plumbing inspections. Yay!

Only 6 or 7 more weeks to go!

Tip: This week we went around the house and took pictures and videos of every wall so that we could document how the plumbing and electric work is run. This was a trick my Uncle Sonny shared with us. He said that he always recommends doing that when you are building new construction. That way later when we want to add built-ins or if we do something more complicated, like remove a wall, we will know what is inside the wall.

This week there has been a lot of progress inside and out.

The crew has started to lay the shingles on the roof and the electrician and his guys were in for a few days running all of our wiring. We got to walk through and decide where every switch and outlet and recessed light would go, which was fun and a little overwhelming. 

The kid’s tub and the shower in our master bath are in place.

The stairs have been built.

We received special permission from the school board for Nicholas to start school in the neighborhood where our house will be (even though we obviously don’t live here yet). School starts today.

Only about 8 more weeks until we move in!

This week the crew is continuing the roof. We have a very complicated roof, apparently, and they are working really hard, but it is kind of slow-going. Thursday will mark one calendar month since they started the roof and we still probably won’t be ready for shingles.

Thankfully, they are now to a point that enough of the house is under the roof that work can continue, even if it rains. Since we did get some rain this week, the guys started framing the interior walls.

I LOVE being able to get a better idea of the sizes of the rooms. There is nothing quite like the feeling when something that has only lived in your head and on paper starts to come together in 3D!

Just a quick update on the house. Not much has changed this week.

Our building crew is on vacation for one week, so things are sort of at a standstill on the home front.

We do have a meeting on site today with the company that will be installing the pool. Hopefully, the installation will begin next month, as long as we are granted the building permit.

And we are expecting a big delivery on Friday.

I am expecting things to start happening very quickly once the crew is back. This whole process has been quite a test of patience. With our new expected schedule, it will have been a full two years from the time we found the land until the day we move in.  At least the heatwave has finally broken and the last time Eddie spoke to our builder he said that they were finally at a point where enough of the house is under the roof that they can continue to work even if it rains, which will be a big help because we were getting very frustrated with losing time to weather. It still looks a lot like this, although there is more plywood on the front of the house now.

I am on an emotional roller coaster, feeling very excited/grateful/blissfully happy one minute that we are fortunate enough to build such an amazing space for our family and the next minute feeling very frustrated about our family being displaced for almost an entire year. I’m also a little nervous about our finances. We have done the budget a thousand times and on paper, it always works out, but right now it feels like we are just bleeding money.  The money is there, and I know it was reserved for this purpose and we are staying on budget, but watching it all disappear at the same time is more stressful than I thought it would be. 

We also have a little bit of guilt about having the ability to have such a nice space when we recognize that so many people don’t. Eddie says that we just need to recognize it as a blessing and a gift and make sure that we are being hospitable and sharing as much of our space as possible as often as possible, but I still feel guilty, which might be silly, but it is how I feel. 

On a lighter note, while this doesn’t have anything at all to do with the house, it does have to do with building my dream: I have shared with you before that I am working with a publisher to release a children’s book next year. It’s a long process. I signed with them in December. We have worked through all the edits, the promo copy, the author bio, and this week I was finally able to start collaborating with the illustrators, which is super exciting! They had me fill out a long, very detailed questionnaire about my characters and the style that I wanted the illustrations to be. In a few weeks, I will be getting my first preview of the characters. Squeee!!

I forgot to update you on the status of our Ikea kitchen. I know you’ve been holding your breath, right. 😉

We did decide to take the plunge and order our cabinets from Ikea. They had the best warranty we could find and their prices saved us almost $3,000, which means I can get a nicer counter top than the builder-grade laminate that was originally in our quote AND we can add a wet bar to a different area of the house and still stay on budget.

We are currently storing them in approximately 80 million different places and slowly putting one cabinet at a time together as the builder works on finishing our roof. We were rained out several days last week and now we’re in the middle of a killer heat wave. The weather just won’t cut us a break and is making our progress much slower than we originally anticipated.

There is no way we are going to be in by late August, like we originally hoped. At the start of construction, we were given a four month schedule. We started in late April.  This weeks marks the start of month 4. That ain’t happening. At least with the roof coming together, it is finally starting to look like a house.

Sigh. I’m just SO ready to be settled. I may or may not have had a mini break down last night (totally did) complaining that Penny is only 18 months old and she will have lived in 4 different places by the time our house is finally ready. Between our last house, which we had to sell before we could start construction, living with the in-laws for 7 months, this temporary apartment where we are for the time being, and eventually our forever house-which I am never leaving, ever-that is a lot of bouncing for a baby. For all of us, really. I’m over it.

We know it will be worth it in a very short while when we can finally go home and stay there. FOREVER.

We’re trying to stay positive and focus on things we can control, like the kitchen. Our kitchen is smack in the middle of our house and open to just about every living space, so it’s a crucial part of the design.

I used Ikea’s online kitchen planner and worked with a very helpful and knowledgeable designer in the store. She talked us through a lot of things, like how to adjust the cabinet that will hold our oven so that it could have more drawer space and save us money on parts, and how much clearance should be on top pf the refrigerator, etc.

We decided to order our cabinets, sinks, and all of the appliances except the frig from Ikea. At first, I thought I would go with different appliances because I didn’t want that “Ikea showroom look.” The more I thought about it, the more that seemed like a dumb reason to miss out on the opportunity to save 20% on my appliances (since we were placing a large order during the kitchen sale) and get appliances that came with a better warranty than the other ones we were looking at. Especially since I actually think the Ikea showroom kitchens look pretty nice in the store. However, I hated all of their refrigerator options, so we bought our frig from hhgregg at the same time that we ordered our washer and dryer. 

We want a solid surface counter top and found Ikea’s counter options to be really over-priced, even at the sale price. (Unless you want butcher block, then they are a great option!) We will probably go with acrylic or granite or a mix of both, for the island and main area, from Lowes or Home Depot when it is time to install the counter.

That’s why in my design you don’t see a counter.

I won’t be able to decide on hardware or a back splash until I choose a counter top, but for now, this is what we decided for the kitchen:

We will build a custom range hood, like this one from Miss Mustard seed. Eventually. There’s that word again. It seems a lot of things will happen eventually.

I don’t plan to paint the kitchen blue (but never say never) I just did that in the program so I could see contrast between the cabinets and the walls. I like the 3D view because  it gives a better perspective of what it will feel like in real life. Again, this version is missing the counter and refrigerator because we bought those from different places. The Ikea planner only shows what you will buy from the Ikea store. That white wall on the right isn’t there in real life. That space is totally open to the living room. The doorway next to the oven is open to the dining room.

We will have hardwood floors like the picture, which I am a little nervous about for practicality, since we have very small kids, a dog, and this room is directly off the pool. But it was much cheaper than tile and because of the location of the kitchen if we went with another option there would be 3 or 4 different flooring materials coming together in this area. We decided to go with wood because we like the look, it’s cheaper than title, and it kept the flow going through the house. It should also be a little easier on my back than tile would be. (I have serious back issues.)

Eddie is planning to fill in the space on the top of the cabinets with plywood and molding to make it appear that they go all the way to the ceiling. I’m hoping that little wine shelf can be converted into cookbook storage instead because we don’t have that much wine to display and the wine we do have can go in the wet bar area. 

I think my favorite part about going with an Ikea kitchen was that they offer a very affordable double bowl farmhouse sink with a 25 year warranty, so I did get my farmhouse sink after all. (If you follow me on Facebook, you might remember that we had previously agreed that the more expensive options we looked at weren’t going to be worth it, since our sink doesn’t face the living area and very few people would see it.)