Lets do a quick recap here.

As of August 15, 2017 we had been living with my in-laws for 5 months. The builder had framed almost the entire house in 5 days, and things seemed to be moving along at a great pace. It was so exciting to walk through the house and visualize where every thing would be. We were still visiting the house every day after work to see if anything had been done. Weeks went by and NOTHING WAS HAPPENING. It was so discouraging to pull up and see that not a soul had been there today. Our builder had taken on a commercial renovation and we had been tossed to the bottom of his list.

After several intenseconversations with the builder things started moving again. In came windows, doors, and shingles on the roof. It was such a beautiful site. Below you will see our 82 days in progress picture.

I was so motivated to get into our new home if I thought for a second I could finish drywall I would have been in there hanging it. If you read my previous post (here)I listed the items we wanted to do ourselves. One of those things was the stone on the outside of the house. I put my DIY boots on and got to work. We decided to use Air Stone from Lowes as it is DIY friendly and you don’t need any special tools to cut it. I could not wait to get even a few pieces of stone up. I think I’ve mentioned this before… but I tend to be a little impatient. So with the help of the truck headlights and my daddy who has a hard time telling me no, we set some stone.

I will never forget driving down the road the first time after some siding and stone were on the house. It seemed like we had been waiting centuries for this day. Tears streamed down my face as I admired my beautiful little blue farmhouse from the road. It wasn’t even close to being complete, but we were 98 days in, and it was actually starting to look like a house.

Things continued to progress at a snails pace. I had scheduled time off of work to move into our house the first week of November as we were promised before we started. (That’s nine months with my in-laws) I reminded our builder frequently that we would be moving in that day. The above picture was taken October 8, 2017… the house was FAR from move in ready. I was a mess. It seemed like this whole process consisted of HURRY UP – then wait. My anxiety, OCD, impatient, control freak personality was not cut out for this. We were working at the house until 1:00 am most nights painting, laying flooring, and cleaning up after the crew, then driving home to sleep and getting up to go to work the next morning running on fumes to do it all again. As fate would have it I fell at my nieces birthday party and sprained my ankle, on top of that I was extremely ill and exhausted. After 3 visits to the Doctor in one week I was officially banned from working at the house. I was devastated. How would we ever meet our deadline if I wasn’t there to push things along? As hard as it was, I knew if I didn’t take a break to recuperate things would only get worse. I slept for three. straight. days.

We were SO close I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. There was only one BIG problem. We still did not have water. However, just as I said this entire process, on 11/4/2017, we moved in.