Hard to believe, but I’ve spent my fair share of time stalking, I mean driving by our future home. I can’t resist. I love it. I love that we picked the layout, the lot (with help), the design aspects, added our own touches and now we get to watch it go from paper to real life! I love seeing the process, guessing what’s next, trying to figure out what jobs the various building components do. I look at the different nails left behind, strips of metal, globs of dried goo. I touch it, poke it, study it. It excites me to be able to see this house come together bit by bit. While I was in Minnesota, Loran would sent me pictures. Our house website through the builder has pictures updated frequently. And of course, I take lots of pictures. There’s just something to being there. Experiencing it. After hours, of course, I don’t want to get in the way. I also don’t want to experience house building so much I actually build it. Renovating our Connecticut house’s attic/second floor was enough hands-on for me. I’m happy to not have to put work clothes on to experience the construction of my home.
Within the first day of being in Austin, we were at our house. Last I’d seen it, it was a drawing and our lot was just a plot of land. A lot had happened since the foundation was poured mid-November. We had a structure that resembled a house! Walls, windows and floor! Not quite rain-tight, but coming together quite nicely.
The living/dining/kitchen
The girls in their room! Walls, windows, hot tub…ready to move-in!
Every few days, we drive by to see what’s happening. On the weekends, we venture inside when it’s quiet. One weekend, on the suggestion of our sales consultant/friend, Holly we arrived armed with a bag full of Sharpie markers and personalized our house with our names, heights, drawings, quotes and scripture. It was really fun and meaningful and the girls loved it. We did have a talk with them about how they couldn’t draw on any other walls, this was just a special occasion.
We’d just wrapped up several days of rain in which we received 4+ inches. Some of which was in our house. We left with muddy pants after our drawing.
Loran, inspecting the workmanship.
In the girls’ bathroom: 1 Peter 3:3 It is not fancy hair, gold jewelry or fine clothes that should make you beautiful. No, your beauty should come from within you – the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. This beauty will never disappear and it is worth very much to God.
Joshua 24:15 (in Latin) As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
The inscription on our wedding bands.
As someone who has renovated a house and found some artifacts in the walls, some newspaper articles and ads glued to the lathe, it’s really fun to think of someone renovating this house decades down the road to undo all of this crazy early century architecture and finding our little marks. Something that says, we were here.
We had so much fun, we returned the following day to add more. This time, Holly came with us and took photos.
Later that week, we met with our builder Chris for our pre-drywall meeting. We went over all kinds of check lists and walked through the house. I learned the term “bark fart” and because I hang out with preschoolers all day, I found this to be hilarious. As much as a tell the girls that we don’t like potty talk…potty talk is and always will be kind of funny. Anyway, a bark fart is just a rough edge of a board where the bark shows. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t compromise the board at all. This pre-drywall meeting is kind of a big deal, because it meant that the following week, our house would get walls. This was a good thing. We kept reminding the girls to not “walk through the walls” when we were there. They’d want to take the obvious shortcuts from room to room, but there were already wires and pipes running through the walls. Ella proved the important point of not walking through the walls when, while standing in the pantry, she decided she’d walk through the wall into the living room. The problem? She was focused on where she wanted to be, not where she was and she basically clothes-lined herself across the bridge of her nose. She got a nice little bruise. We don’t walk through the walls.
Technically, we can’t walk through walls now. We arrived at our house on Saturday (1/26) to see our house with walls! And having attempted drywall before, I was very impressed to see that in basically three days, our entire house was drywalled, taped, and mudded. We couldn’t have drywalled that house in half a year.
Coming in through the garage and Lily in her room.
Kitchen/living/dining and a jumping Lily
Master bedroom/bathroom
From the front door
I find the house to be a peaceful place. I stare out the windows at the trees and rocks and really enjoy the views. Yesterday, Sunday, I was feeling really down. This move has seemed like a weird vacation in which we are somewhere warm, strangely surrounded by our things and have routine things to do like grocery shop and go to school, but a vacation nonetheless. But yesterday, it lost that vacation-y feel. Not for anything that had happened. It was just sinking in that this was our life. Not bad, just different, just real. I was sad, and cried because vacation life is a way more fun mindset than real life. Real life contains things like doctor’s appointments, trips to the mechanic, bills, and dealing with developmental delays. Loran, being the smart guy he is, took a detour from our original destination of 9:30 church and opted for 11:00. Instead, stopped at Walgreens to purchase a box of tissues for my sad eyes and then drove us to the house. I stood there, staring out the windows, tears streaming down, maybe it was all of the drywall dust I was inhaling, but I felt so much better. Surrounded by the beauty, but protected from the rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, vultures and bobcats that I’m sure are just waiting to get me…and fire ants. Two run-ins now with fire ants. I love our home already. I love that it symbolizes a new start. The friends and family who will stand within its walls, provide shelter to us and others, provide a place for fellowship and laughter and a shelter from the storms, literal and figurative. It’s already my little refuge and a week ago, it was still see-through.
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