home construction – Farm and Finery

On Tuesday we went up to the home site after work and found some of the exterior walls have been put up!!

What a difference a day makes! We can finally get a sense of the size of the rooms and how tall 10’ ceilings really are…

Door to nowhere? Actually, it’s from the smallest bathroom out to the pool porch.

Here’s the wall just off our entryway going up!

They really made great progress this week and it was fun to visit the site every day after work or on a lunch break to see the walls going up! As a thank you, I made some lemon poppy seed muffins for the crew.

Lemon poppyseed muffins to say thank you to the framing crew

When I asked Russel if I could take his photo he responded, “it’s up in every post office around here, but sure!”

Now John and I can walk around and really get a sense of the home we have designed! A few notes for those who are curious about our forever home – it is a single story so we don’t have to worry about cooling an upstairs (which can be very expensive in the Texas heat), and it has 10 foot ceilings to make the home more energy efficient during the summer months. Add in the planned ceiling fans in almost every room and the deep covered porches, and you can see how we have thought about the 40+ days of 💯 degree heat we will experience each summer.

Here I am in my future office on November 6th. Yes, I am wearing shorts in November because it was 84 Fahrenheit that day!

Guest bedroom and pantry wall going up.

Great room fireplace and built ins
Looking into the great room
South wall of the great room – opposite the fireplace
Small bathroom off the great room
Storage behind the great room
John in the storage room

Dining room looking into the living room

I finally asked one of the framers why they don’t have the bottoms of the windows framed out. He said they will get all the walls up, make sure they are perfectly square, and then add the lower threshold for the windows. Who knew?

The exterior walls and walls around bathrooms are 2X6 construction while the other interior walls are 2X4.

We’ve had a couple days of rainy, cold weather (well, cold for here), so I’m excited to get back to the site and see what progress has been made. Next comes the roof framing!

As always, thanks for stopping by! Hugs, Libby

Building on family land that hasn’t been “improved” has many challenges – including the basic and early step of actually getting to it!

What still needs to be cleared. The whole road bed looked like this.

It’s a complicated situation – how John’s grandfather’s land was divided in the 1990’s – but the portion that my late mother-in-law inherited has a 40 foot wide deeded strip of land that connects the rest of the 177 acres to the state highway. Without this 1.1 acres of land, this property would be landlocked. And it has never been cleared in the 24 years I’ve been with John. Until now.

As we prepare for backhoes, bulldozers, concrete trucks and trucks heavy with timber and other materials, we needed our own road to get the materials to our home site (we were previously using a neighbor’s road that is adjacent to our property, but they didn’t want those heavy trucks beating up their road).

Hence the clearing has begun so groundbreaking can begin soon.

I was really happy when I saw the work! First – I cannot believe how fast the crew is at clearing – all of this was done in just one day! And I love how many trees they left – I was really concerned it would look like “scorched earth” with everything decimated.

Our new “road” headed to the state highway. On the right is the neighbor’s road, which is OK for cars, but not for big cement trucks.

Now the final 1/3 needs to be cleared out to the road. I think there may be some heavy rock laid down so the trucks don’t get stuck in mud, but I’m not positive. Thankfully John has been in charge of this part of the process!

This has definitely been part of what is different building out in the country, versus building on a lot you purchased in a neighborhood. We have to do all of the infrastructure ourselves, but in the end we know it will be worth it!

Have you ever built a house or needed to bring in infrastructure? Would love to hear your thoughts and thanks for stopping by!

Hugs, Libby

Tag: home construction

Walls going up!

The Road Not Yet Traveled