The End of an Era

Hi Everyone!

First of all - Happy Easter!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with their family and friends! We sure did:)

Where do I start with this post.  The reason I haven't posted in a week is because it was an extremely hectic week. It was our final week in our townhouse and we had to be all moved out and close on the house by the end of the week. However, as of Wednesday afternoon we get a call from the realtor asking us to move the closing up to Thursday night rather than Friday morning!  Obviously my first instinct is -there is NO way!  That would mean losing a whole night that we were planning to have to do a final sweep through, cleaning, etc. Instead, we'd have to finish everything that night. As you can imagine, I was freaking out and very stressed - and as a hormonal pregnant lady, I worked myself almost to tears on my drive home knowing that was going to be our very last night, thinking about how much work had to do that night and that I lost a whole night of calling that our house.  However, we made it work, busted our you-know-what's and got it all done with the help of Kevin's mom who we were grateful to have come over to help us with the final cleaning of the place.  Here's a look at our week:

For a week and a half we were basically "camping out" in our own house - holding on as long as we could!

We finally got the place packed up and out.

Our whole lives are now in a box, and will sit and wait for the day until we come retrieve them!

I had an interesting last morning at our house.  I fell and slid on a hill that I've fallen on once before (also while pregnant...not good, but since it was more of a slide I was totally fine) taking the dog out. It was thanks to the cold rainy/snowy weather.  The reason I bring this up is because here I was all sad about leaving, and after I fell all I could think was "thank god this is the last time I have to walk Tiki down this stupid hill!"  Sometimes it takes something like to make it easier to move on and take my mind off of being sad and sentimental!  Needless to say, I had to change my pants before work.

 

And so it was time to officially hand over the keys and end our era on Clearbrook Court :(

That house was Kevin and my first official place together that we got after we got engaged and right before we started our lives as husband and wife. We will always hold a special place in our hearts for that townhome.  It was our home for six wonderful years and is packed full of memories along with countless days/nights hanging out with our awesome neighbors!  We may have had to say goodbye to our house, but we are happy that we made some great friends that we aren't saying goodbye to :)

It is now time to "turn the page" as a wise man once said :)  It's official that we no longer own our townhome and we are now currently residing about 10 minutes down the road with Kevin's sister and her wonderful family until the new house is ready.  They have been incredibly generous for opening their doors to us (and a LOT of our stuff!) and we look forward to having a lot of fun while living with them!  They couldn't make us feel more welcome and comfortable in their home and for that we are soooo very grateful!

As for the house, it is coming along.  As of Friday we now have a second level!  The roof frames were all built and stacked up in front of the house, so we are hopeful that we will be under roof by as early as tomorrow.  I can't wait to see it this week!  Kevin is also meeting with Guardian (who does the electronics, wiring, etc) tomorrow for a final walk-through before they install all of our wiring.

Here is how it's looking:

 

Note the framed roofing I was referring to sitting out front

Here's the back view of the house where our sliding glass door will be.

If there's one thing I will always remember about this past week it is this - moving sucks, BUT moving sucks even worse when doing it while 7 months pregnant!!!  I definitely don't recommend it.  Kevin has been carrying the team and has been so great at making sure I don't lift heavy things and telling me to go sit down while he does things.  But at the same time, I would still do things on my own and lift and move things because it simply needed to get done.  Boy was I exhausted!!

Lots of changes have been happening but this past week was probably the most drastic so far.  But it is one step closer to the new house and even closer to the baby.  Today marks my 30th week of pregnancy!!

Can't wait for the start of April tomorrow!

The wait is over

Happy Monday!

It certainly was a rough day for most of us waking up on a Monday morning (which is always rough to begin with) and dealing with all of the gross wet snow on the ground.  When will this winter end??  Last night, Kevin and I drove by the house to still see no walls up.  We did at least see some progress with the floors in on the first floor, so we knew the framing couldn't be far off.  It was at least encouraging to see the neighbor's house already under roof, when they had just started the framing early last week. However, I was still really hoping to see some walls up last week, so I can't help but say I was slightly disappointed that this was all we saw.

Take a look at what we saw yesterday (Sunday) with the floor now in:

Here's the neighbor's house as of yesterday (Sunday):

As you can imagine, I was pretty worried when I woke up to the snow this morning wondering if this was going to delay the framing process.  I am happy to report that when I drove by after work today, this is what I saw! The wait is finally over!! We have walls!!

OUR KITCHEN!!! :)

And in just one day this is the progress on our neighbor's house:

The neighbor's house has it's little roofing over the garage and front door and all of their windows are now installed.  They sure do work fast - and I love it!  I was also happy to see that the side windows of this house actually line up with where our garage will be.  So our beautiful big kitchen windows will not look right into any windows next door, which will be nice.

Things are happening and in just a matter of days we will finally have what looks like an actual house.  I do have to say it was very exciting to walk up close to the house today and look into the bones of our new living room, dining room, family room and kitchen and know that that is OUR home!  Very fun! I was already picturing where our furniture was going, etc :)

In other news, we have now come to our very final days in our townhome.  Tear :(  Tomorrow night will be our last night sleeping here before the official move in with my inlaws. Then this weekend we head to Cleveland for Easter.  I'm excited to see my family...we haven't been in Cleveland since the first weekend in January, which is a long time for us!  I was also thinking how the last time we were there was BEFORE we even considered building this house! It's amazing how much can change in just a few months.

I'm sure we'll be driving by the house on Friday before we head out to C-town, so I am excited to see what it will look like by then. I'm sure I won't be able to stay away though and will go by almost every night this week so stay tuned for the framing updates!

lumber- what a beautiful sight!

Yes, you've guessed it...we have LUMBER!!!  What a beautiful sight this was to see after work today.  Can you believe that this is the entire frame of our house sitting right there all packaged nicely together?? This is it...this is our house!

As I had mentioned before, I like the fact that our neighbors are just a bit ahead of us.  I was also right when I said it seems like they've been moving awfully quick on our house, because the neighbor's lot got started a good 1.5-2 weeks before us and now I keep saying that it seems we are almost even to where they are in the process!  I'm not sure if our lumber came today or yesterday since I didnt stop by then, but either way it's only a few days apart.  So the reason I like the fact that our neighbors are just a bit ahead of us is so we can see what the next steps are on OUR house.  Their lumber was just delivered last Friday and we stopped by again on Saturday to see nothing has changed.  Well as of today (tuesday) this is how their house looks!

I am just busting out of my skin to see what ours is going to look like by Friday.  I really think we may have something that looks similar to this if not even more if they get started by tomorrow!! WOOHOO!

They also went ahead and got our beams placed.  However, I noticed we don't have concrete floors poured in yet in the basement or for the garage.  I would think they'd do that before framing?  If that's the case, I'm afraid they might not start framing until a day or 2 after that.  Here's to hoping!

In the meantime, I've become absolutely obsessed with decorating ideas for this house.  Now would be a great time to dig up a magic lamp in this pile of dirt to ask a genie for unlimited money to decorate!  My mind is on overflow with ideas.  I think I'm starting to narrow them down, but just when I do then I find more inspiration and change my mind. Oh the possibilities!! Once I get those narrowed down, I might post a few ideas on here to share. 

The next post you will likely see is the very start of what will finally look like an actual house :)

"bumping" along

Greetings!

I've been obsessed and have driven by the house every day except one day this week!  They've got all of the plumbing in place and a wrap around the foundation (I'm sure kevin will yell at me for using the wrong word, but i dont know what you call the "wrap"!).  Today when I drove by, I saw a ton of lumber sitting across the street and for a second thought it was ours!! However, it's the neighbors (their lot number is labeled on the side).  I'm hoping ours will come by next week since our place looks pretty close to the status of the neighbors.

Here's a pic of the "wrap" I'm referring to. (by the way I just figured out how to make the pictures larger!)

In other news, I'm starting to feel like we are officially coming to the homestretch!  Obviously there is still a long way to go on the actual building of the house house and it's not even halfway done, but just the homestretch of everything going on.  This Saturday we are moving about everything out into storage and this Sunday I start my third trimester!  Since the moment we knew we were pregnant, we had talked about wanting to get a new house before the baby and back then if felt like we had so long to get to this point.  Then since the start of this year with signing on for this house, selling our house and finding out the gender of the baby, things really started happening.  Now everything is REALLY happening and everything is about ready for us to just sit back and wait over the next 2.5 months!  I just can't believe this is all happening!  So much change in such a short amount of time. 

So to take a little pause from house talk...let's do a little baby talk!  Baby boy Lawler has been kicking up a storm.  I think he must be filling into his tall genes because he's been kicking really high up by my ribs (and sometimes what feels like into my ribs!).  Kevin has been enjoying feeling the kicks too.  As a matter of fact, he's giving me a few nudges right now! Soon we'll also have our childbirth classes and baby showers.  I'm getting so excited for the baby to come!  I have decided to keep my "bump" pictures off of facebook for the most part, but I guess I'll share some on here to share my progression.

Here is where I was at 21 weeks when I really started to see more of a bump "definition" starting.

Here's how we're growing now at 27.5 weeks - just a few weeks later than the pic before.  Crazy how a few weeks makes such a difference at this point!

 Hopefully by next post, we might have our lumber delivered to start framing!!!

Foundation - check!

Greetings!

It was a fabulous end to the week.  Since stopping by on Monday (and also Tuesday) only to see the first layer of foundation built, we came by yesterday (Friday 3/8/13) to see the entire poured foundation completed! Woo hoo! My good friend Nora was right- when I told her how I was freaking out that the weather could affect how fast they do the foundation, she (who is a professional interior designer) kept assuring me that these builders prepare for those kinds of things and it will be fine.  I thank her, because she was of course 100% right! That "snow storm" we had this week didn't seem to have any impact on the foundation!

This is what we saw:

As I mentioned before, I was worried about the spacing between the houses.  This is how it's looking. MUCH better than I was thinking:

So I think we are in great shape!  I also wanted to share with you a better view of the backyard woods that we love and are looking forward to enjoying!  The woods look like they go on forever meaning that we'll have that great privacy and also hopefully some nice wildlife.  Plus, I think Tiki is going to love it too! I just hope there aren't any vicious animals like coyotes. Eeek!

While I'm feeling better about the yard, I will say I'm still extremely interested in how they are going to finish our yard.  Right now the dirt/yard around our foundation is still uneven, but all of the neighbors yards are evened out.  If ours gets nice and evened out, it will hopefully look like all of these, which I think would be perfect!  One of our first priorities when we move in is building a nice patio.

As we sit back and watch the process of the house being built, we actually can't "sit back" at all right now.  We are moving next weekend about 90% of our stuff into storage and in about 2.5 weeks Kevin, Tiki and I will be moving in with my very generous, selfless and brave sister-in-law and her whole family until the house is complete :)  So I am about to go right now to get moving on packing.  After being here for six years, I'm starting to get that sad, emotional, bittersweet feeling about the move.  We've had some really great times in this house and with our neighbors who became our good friends.  Obviously it's not like we won't see them again, but I'm going to miss sitting outside with them in the summertime grilling, having some drinks, having a firepit, etc.  Well it will be a sad day when we leave for good, but we'll have to keep our eye on the prize with this new house and get ready to start a new exciting chapter of our lives with our new little boy.  Ok, these boxes aren't going to pack themselves! I gotta get moving!

Until next time...talk to you later!

There's a hole in the ground

Hello all,

I wanted to post a few progression pictures between last week and when I stopped over today.  It's coming along and looking great so far!

Before I get into that, I do want to share some stresses I’ve been going through since the groundbreaking.  Making such a huge commitment like this, it's only natural to second guess a couple things, right? While I couldn't be more excited about this house,  recently after they started digging I've been stressing out a little over the size and landscape of the yard and how close the houses are together.

First off, I don’t think it helps that the neighboring house is being built at the same time as us.  This is because the holes they dig for the houses are larger than the actual main frame of the house.  So seeing the two holes next to each other I felt like they were so close.  Kevin felt the same way but after last week he assured me it looked much better now that foundation is starting.  So when I went today I totally agreed that they look much more spaced apart that we were envisioning before!

 As for the yard, we are right on a turn/hill where there is a slope that leads up to the woods that starts right behind us (which we love that we'll have the woods by the way!).  Our neighbor whose house is already built on one side has a yard that runs right into the steep part of the slope, therefore cutting off their yard, while the other neighbor's yard goes level.  It’s still hard to tell how our yard is going to pan out after they clear the area and flatten it out, but we are right in the middle of where the slope evens out. So that makes me nervous until I see it cleared.

I have to say that after seeing the lot today and walking all around the hole, I’m feeling MUCH better about the yard.   They now have the main base frame built so I can see the exact edges of the house, so its getting easier to envision.   The yard still isn't going to be huge (which we knew from the get go), but the way it's looking  I’m feeling better that our yard is going to be spacious enough and isn't going to be cut off by the slope too much.  I'm hoping in about 2 weeks we'll have a better idea of how the yard is looking.  Fingers crossed!

So let’s take a look:

These first photos kevin took last Wednesday.  As you can see there was still a lot of digging to be done and this was already a week after they started. It was so rocky! (I saved a piece of the rock as a memento!)

These next ones are from just two days later on Friday when they were adding the wood to get ready to start the foundation. In the second photo, my mind is already easing a bit that the slope to the woods isn't too bad.

When I came today, the first part of the foundation was now built with hay over it.  That means they are about ready to start building up the foundation!

Now this is what has been easing my mind a bit about the yard.  Here is a photo of our neighbor's house who is about 2 weeks ahead of us.  Once they get the foundation done, they do clear out and flatten your yard so you can see how it's going to look.  The second picture is a view of how ours looks now and the other neighbors yard that DOES cut into that slope.  The last photo is how our yard is looking from the other end. 

This view is from the backyard looking to the front.  This will be our new neighborhood!  Obviously you can see what I mean when I said our lot was super rocky! I'll be happy when all that rock is cleared out and it's all yard!

 I hope you enjoyed the updates, and thanks for bearing with me on my thoughts on the yard so far.  No matter what, I know it's going to be great and the house is exactly what we've always wanted and I couldn't be more excited!!  I think it's just hard to tell what things are going to look like when they start.  Either way, as mentioned earlier...I'm already feeling much better about this.

I'm so excited to see how fast things go from here.  Stay tuned for the next post!!  Let's also hope the weather starts getting nicer too. I'm already loving that it was still light out by the time I got there (close to 6:30pm).

:)