Oh boy... Here we go again!!!

Well... Remember in my last post I had mentioned we wanted to be 100% finished this house by mid-May? There's a perfectly good reason for that... We're doing it all over again!

That's right, we're building another house.

Are we crazy?! I think so!

We love this house. We love Lucan. We love our property. But we don't love the distance between the girls' school and home. So we want to move closer. Right now we're about 25 minutes door-to-door. The drive to and from school isn't bad. The issue is when the girls have activities after school, but not until 5:30 or 6:00pm. We don't have time to come home in between and we end up just killing time in the car... for hours! And I don't know how we'd even deal with the distance when one is in high school and the other one is still in elementary school with two different start times. We hadn't really thought all of this through unfortunately. 

So after LOTS of thought and lots of tears, we've decided to sell our pride and joy. 

The first few weeks after our decision didn't feel real, but now that we've posted our house for sale on Facebook and people are coming through it, it has started to sink in. I know we're making the smartest decision for our family, but it's going to be really hard to leave this place. I thought of every square inch of this house in great detail and spent so much time and energy on planning our perfect home. 

I'm sure the next family that moves in here will enjoy everything there is to offer, so that makes it sting a little less. 

When I start feeling sad about selling our house, I try to think ahead of yet another amazing country property. Except this one is way closer to school!

 

 

Here we are... nervous and excited smiles!

I'll fill you in on more, once we know more! We're still working on floor plans and site plans and we're actually excited to do this all over again!

Foundation is done!!

The last time I posted an update about the foundation was when the forms were going up. 

Well... they were finished a week ago Friday:

The forecast for Monday was calling for rain, so we weren't sure if they'd be on schedule to pour the foundation or not. Somehow, it rained all around Lucan, but stayed away from our house!  It did start to rain a bit towards the end of the day, but everything was done. 

Concrete pumper used to fill the forms. 

The following day, forms were coming off. It's really starting to look like a house now!

Garage

Walk-out basement

9' basement ceilings are a must when you're 5' tall. :)

See the wooden framing all along the top portion of this wall? There are some on the front of the house and a small section on the West wall as well.  These were put in the forms before the cement was poured to make what is called a 'brick ledge'. What a brick ledge does is it allows for the brick, or in our case stone, come down further on the exterior of the house. Due to the slope of our lot, this was necessary or else we would have had 6' of exposed concrete foundation towards the back of the house. That just wouldn't have been pretty! 

Here is what it looks like with the forms completely gone. 

Don't mind the poor lighting... I came straight to the house after working nights and the sun wasn't quite up yet!  But the sunrise was pretty!

The foundation needs to sit for a week before it can be back filled so it feels like things have slowed down. 

Waterproofing was done. There is more of where the brick ledge is on the front. 

The foundation was inspected and our underground plumbing rough-ins finished and inspected this week. So it wasn't all just waiting around... But we're really anxious to start framing!

So the plan for this week is to back fill on Monday and Tuesday. Pour the basement and garage floors Wednesday and pour the front porch floor on Thursday or Friday. 

Our hydro line to the house is also going in on Tuesday too while the backhoe is there to dig a trench. Now if we can just coordinate Union Gas to show up at the same time it would be great!

Framing will be starting on Monday, November 3rd once the floors and porch have had time to dry!