The beginning.

Tim & I "out back"

This is the beginning of my blog.  I am not sure if anyone will read it, but I'll post lots of pictures!  Someone might need some information I may have, right?  My plan for this blog is just writing my thoughts and sharing my days of being a wife and a mother.

To begin this blog, I would like to dig into the archives of the last 2 years.  My husband Tim & I have been building a home on about 2.5 acres.  We got final occupancy in January of this year. 


Over the past year I've kept a photo journal of our home building project.  It's a lot of fun to go back and remember how far we've come!  At the time, it was pretty stressful and a whole lot of hard work, but now it seems like the right time to put it all togther.


The land had an existing house that was built in 1955.  The house was extremely small and had been added on little by little over the years.   We had to completely demolish the little rambler to make way for our new home. 


There were so many trees that had been neglected over the years, so we worked hard on clearing some out and trimming up others so they would become strong and healthy.  The front property is lined with 100 ft. pine trees and offers a nice background to our house.  It's not very often a property for a new home has big trees in our desert region.

Walnut tree on the East end of the property.



1955 Rambler and Pine Trees



I have been lucky enough to learn a lot by reading blogs and found a million and one wonderful pictures.  Doing a completely custom home was very fun and rewarding, but I will not deny I had moments where I stood there in tears.  There were so many decisions & no one to make them but you, and I wouldn't want it any other way.  With you being the creator, that means that every mistake with the design, yep, that's yours too.  You get to explain it to anyone who actually notices it.  I found that all those hard decisions were mine and Tim's and they seemed so critical and difficult.  No one walking through our house probably would have even noticed.  But we noticed and we thought long and hard about all kinds of things. 

It was hard to draw something up that we had never walked through or seen.  Many of our ideas weren't easily found and it was tough to picture what these sketches would look like from the drawing board to the real deal.  Maybe I have some useful information of what we did that will be useful for someone else.

Here are some of the earlier drawings.  The two I found without actually showing the final product are below.  I literally have hundreds of different drawings.  We used Chief Architect & used Paint when we just wanted to try and draw thoughts out.

Front Elevation Drawing - Final (very close)




Rear Elevation - Finalized (so we thought)

We knew that we wanted the house to be around the 3000 sf range.  Our plans included the master bedroom suite on the main floor, 3 bedrooms, an office, a media room and 2.5
baths.  The plans also were to have a 2-story great room, mud room, gourmet kitchen, Anderson doors, Milgard windows, and no carpets. 


The outside came together quickly and we happy with the drawings.  Filling in the space of that shell, that was a hole other story!  We knew fairly early on of where the rooms were going to be.  We wanted a master suite that was it's own "wing".  We didn't put any of the 2nd story over the master suite.  We wanted the kids to be able to be in the media room and their rooms without having to worry about the noise over ours.  So things started falling in place.


Living on a farm, we know there will be lots of dirty feet and shoes!  We decided to do concrete floors with PEX tube piping that would keep us nice & warm.  We had a hard time deciding what to do with the concrete floors.  Did we want them stamped?  Stained concrete? 


There were so many choices, and there were not a lot of people who did specialty concrete in our area.  One thing we learned REAL quick was that if you are going to have solid concrete slab floors done, it's extremely important to have a crew that can make that finish nice and level.  The first thing they poured was the garage, so we got a real good idea of how their finish work was.  It was absolutely perfect.

Kitchen & Dining area

When they are coming to pour concrete, you have to make sure all of your electrical and plumbing inspections are complete.  Once all your piping is embedded, the only way to inspect or repair is to tear that concrete up.  We documented all conduit & PEX tubing with a lot of pictures, and yes, we did rely on those pictures later on in the building process.


Well, there you have it.  The beginning.  :)  Up Next.....Finished Concrete & Interior Plan.