31 Days of Building a Home

This October, I am going to do my best to participate in The Nester's 31 Days in October series. Writing for 31 consecutive days is quite daunting, considering I don't think I have posted that much this entire year! 

When coming to a topic, I decided on "31 Days of Building a Home" I don't by any means consider myself a professional house builder... far from it actually. Our home building experience has had a lot of trial and error, but it is a project that we have pretty much done ourselves with the help of my dad and a lot of contractors. I am hoping by documenting our experiences, I won't forget the details.  I also hope that maybe my information will be helpful to someone else who is ready to dive head first into building a home like we did.

The back story

We never had planned on building a house, it always seemed like a dream from the distant future. As of last Christmas, we were happily living in our renovated home that we had worked tirelessly on. At our annual Christmas party, my husband was approached by a friend that randomly offered to buy our house. When he told me about the offer, I looked at him as if he had 3 heads. I said  there was no way we were moving, our house had finally become a home and we were happy there.

After a few weeks of prayer, I was more open to the idea of moving. I knew God would lead our family where we were supposed to be. When our friend's offer fell through, we decided to list the house on the market and "see what happens." If it was God's will, then our house would sell. After our first showing, we had a contract and an offer for exactly the amount we were looking for. We had never expected that to happen, houses didn't sell in one day!

Within a month, we closed on our house, but our home buying options were very limited. Everything we looked at was at the top of our price range, but needed a lot of updating and renovation. The housing market began picking up and people were in bidding wars over houses in our area. We were really discouraged that we had sold a house that we had put so much hard work in to, and had no where to go. 

We began exploring the idea of building a house ourselves. Many people told us we were nuts and this dream was impossible. After the housing market crash, banks were less than thrilled to loan money to people who have never built a house before. After three months, things finally began to fall into place... and that is where I will start off tomorrow.