Our House

Two months later we officially own 3/4 of an acre in Farr West City. We signed the paper work over two weeks ago and they are supposed to stake it out today and start digging Tuesday. We are already two weeks behind our initial August 18th dig day, so we will see. I am not holding my breath.

We are getting used to it out here. It is a different dynamic here in what I call the quasi-country. Don't get me wrong, we are in a sub-division there is no getting around it, but we are surrounded by farms and I am not ten steps from the Brandons :(. On the other hand it will be so nice having space to live and run and play.

Let's get to it. We are going from 1,800 square feet of living space to 2,835. We feel this was a perfect upgrade to fit our growing family. Not too much and not to little. We always wanted a two-story. Or a story and a half. I have dreamed of owning my own bungalow since I was a little girl. My grandpa still lives in theirs in Colorado. I respect the use of space bungalows have and the overall flow. Theirs has a circular flow to it. You literally could go from one room to the next and around the whole house without turning around (except if you went in the bathroom), every room had two doors.

But building a bungalow was not in the money cards for us, so we took a builders plan and adjusted it to what our likes are and what our family needs. We maximized every nook and cranny in this place. We pushed walls, added an additional room that would have just been rafters, added a larger patio covering.

I am going to address a few issues, things, reasonings, whatever you want to call it, for why we did things a certain way in our house.

1. Why in the heck didn't we do a basement? Well, if we would've done a rambler style home we would have. In doing a two-story home we simply did not want that large of a house. Many think it will decrease our resale value (if we ever sale) and they may be right, but our needs over rule any needs of a potential buyer who is a what if. And secondly, the water table here. We also didn't want this monstrosity of a house sticking out of the ground. Every house has to be around four feet out of the ground out here if there is a basement and we just didn't want to go that route. 
2. We pushed the family room out by two feet and added a large patio cover. This cost a little, not gonna lie. We didn't want an extravagant master (yet again, may be our downfall in resale), super large bedrooms, or anything too fancy. The main purpose of this home was to make more space for family. More room outside to hang with the kids and enjoy, more space in our living areas to have friends and family over. So it may not be some peoples choice to have a smaller master bedroom and bath, but we will take the hit. This house is for our family now, not someone else's in the future.
3. Why did we go with a "big builder"? Well, this is a hard one to answer, because you never know until your house is actually built, how you feel about them and their service. We feel we did our homework and spoke with a few builders before we chose to build. We interviewed and sat on it for a few weeks and then decided to go with this builder. We still aren't sure if it was the best idea, and quite frankly, never thought in a million kazillion years that we would go this way. But it felt right at the time, it was within our budget and timeline (ha! we will see about that timeline), and they were a preferred builder with our bank as well as our bank being a preferred lender with them. This granted us a semi-substantial payback on both ends that we wouldn't have received if we went with another builder. 

So here it is. Hopefully you can get a feel for it. I'm not going to go into detail about it now, but over the next few weeks I will give you a sneak peak into each room and our plans to make it as comfy cozy as our old, beloved 267.