Tag: #farmhousekitchen

Farmhouse

30+ Tips When Building A House

Sam

I am no expert when it comes to building a house. Kyle and I don’t build houses everyday and we haven’t even lived int hat many houses either. So when we decided to build a house we begged, borrowed and plain stole ideas of what to do. We were so fortunate to have a lot of friends and family who shared plenty of tips with us. As my way of paying it forward I tried to write down all the tips we received so that maybe we could help others like we were helped out. So………. enjoy these 30 + tips when building a house…..

General-

  1. When you dig the hole for your foundation (before the concrete goes in) spray the ground for termites.
  2. If possible, go with 2×6 walls. This helps with energy efficiency and for sound.
  3. If your builder lets you, get 2nd quotes on everything.
  4. I’m sure most of you know this but when you stake out your house it will be small…. like super small. One thing that helped me was measuring the size of my furniture in the staked off area. We also went to a friends house and measured their room dimensions to put our (ok…. actually just my) mind at ease.
  5. When the foundation gets poured put your conduit in, so there is no drilling through concrete walls. Also, remember to cap in the conduit so that the concrete and waterproofing black tar don’t get in it.
  6. Take pictures of everything. You’ll want to know where an outlet is that was accidentally hid by the drywall guy.
  7. Make your doors wheelchair accessible. Actually, look at your house overall and say “how accessible is it?”
  8. Rough-in plumbing in places you eventually will finish out or want a bathroom in (like the basement). Honestly, one person even suggested a bathroom in the garage, and I think it was genius! While I didn’t do that it made me remember that my boys always come in super dirty from outside, so we put our laundry room with a full wash tub right by our garage door and a bathroom access right as you walk in there too. That way they don’t have to go all through the house to get to a bathroom or to throw muddy clothes into the laundry room.
  9. Interior sound insulation, especially if you are doing an open concept.
  10. Where will you store a vacuum or broom? Think about living in the house. Where will you store things? Where will you hang out? Walking through our house and thinking of those things helped us switch a few things.
  11. Do you LOVE shiplap like me??? Pre-paint it (or buy boards already primed/painted) so that when you put it on the wall and over time the house “breaths” you won’t see the grooves that you missed. If you paint it once it is on the walls then the boards will separate over time and it’s really hard to get paint in those cracks!
  12. When choosing tile try to stay away from white grout. White grout will never stay white. Also, if you go with a dark tile in the shower keep in mind that soap scum is white.
  13. Can you add attic storage anywhere? Our builder was able to make us some attic storage that had access from our bonus room.
  14. Ask for any leftover material so that you can touch up things later.
  15. Also, think about where you can use leftover material. Can you use scrap granite in your bathroom on ledges? Can you use the outside board and batten on the fireplace or around a tub?
  16. Lowes Pro account. Kyle signed up for one of these and we get 5% off our purchases all the time. There are a few advantages to it. 1) you can order at the contractor pack levels (i.e. cheaper rates on lights/drywall if you buy so many) and 2) you can have it pulled and waiting for you and pick it up at the one door that says contractor (it makes us feel official). 3) it is kept separate from our checking account so it is easier to submit when we need reimbursed from our loan. I think using a military discount if you qualify would work well too.
  17. One thing that helped us was having some really smart friends (those who were contractors, inspectors, etc.) walk through our house at each stage. More times than I care to admit they pointed out things (like a wall that wasn’t supported right or a friend who looked at one of my building pictures and sent me a Facebook message about plastic wrapping to prevent rotting porches) that we were able to take back to our builder the next day and ask that they address it. I can’t tell you how much this saved us in failed inspection fees, and it gave us peace of mind.
  18. I can’t tell you how many things we have returned. Lights because I didn’t like the size, fans because I didn’t like the color, 4 different styles of door handles, etc. Make sure you don’t get into a habit of buying and returning too much. It costs money and time to return all those items.
  19. Final walk-through for paint/dry wall. Give family and friends each a roll of blue painter’s tape and have them put a piece of tape by anything they find. The worst thing would be to move into your brand-new house and realize you already have to patch a wall because when they brought in the cabinets, they scratched something up.
  20. And keep in mind that some things will not go right. Try to have a good attitude about everything! I’m a Christian and my faith has helped in ways I can’t explain! This house is not my #1 priority, it is just a house.

Kitchen-

  1. My pantry wasn’t as huge as I’d like it, so my builder found some space between the studs to add an extra small closet. Utilize space between studs well- extra closets, built-ins, etc.
  2. Pot filler- ok this is a splurge, but I am so excited about it!
  3. Pot and pan drawer right by or under your stove/cook top.
  4. Silverware drawer next to your dishwasher for easy unloading.
  5. Think about the places everyone goes in the kitchen when they are over. The trash can and sink. Unless you can access the trash by multiple directions, I would suggest not putting it next to the sink (I know strange but trust me!)
  6. If you have an island with a sink in it, make sure the faucet you select isn’t too tall.
  7. I don’t think you need a ton of specialty drawers, but one or two are really nice. My two were the pot/pan drawer and the trash drawer. Maybe yours is a fancy spice rack next to the stove. In the other cabinets think about wire racks inside to maximize space without the extra cost of a pull-out drawer.
  8. Remember that between your island and your cabinets and where your table is you should have at least 42-48 inches so that you can easily maneuver without hitting your hip on something.
  9. Lights. Two big flaws I have made in our house are the fact that our table isn’t centered to the dining room and the island isn’t centered to the middle beam… which means the light over the table isn’t centered to the room and the pendant lights aren’t exactly centered either. You can’t notice unless I point it out….. but I noticed.

Bathrooms-

  1. Pick tile for your shower that is not shiny! You will slip.
  2. Showers that are really large or open air are cold. Think about either making it smaller, adding glass walls, or multiple shower heads.
  3. Where will you store towels for each shower?
  4. We went with taller vanities in the bathrooms. And a taller toilet. I am not 100% sold on this but the taller cabinets look nice and the toilet is easier to get off of when you get older…..

Outlets/Light Switches/Etc.-

  1. Master closet- for a safe
  2. Hallway closet- to charge cordless cleaning appliances
  3. Pantry- for kitchen appliances
  4. Bedrooms- for nightlights
  5. Living room floor- for power couches and lamps on side tables
  6. Don’t forget outlets on the porch. Maybe even put some on the ceiling so that it’s easier to hang Christmas lights. And outlets in the garage for charging power tools or your kids power-wheels.
  7. Where will your bed be in the master bedroom? Think about laying down in it and the lights being on, then having to argue about who’s turning the lights off…… maybe add a switch to the lights by your bed.
  8. Plan where you are going to put your Christmas tree or entry table and then put an outlet there.
  9. Put in dimmer switches in certain areas of your house.
  10. Put in USB outlets in places you might charge your phone.
  11. Don’t want to see cable boxes and such? Run conduit in the walls from where your TV will go to a nearby closet.

Outside/Barn/Garage-

  1. Are you having gas? Run a line to your back porch for your grill.
  2. Driveway….. while building it (and your yard) will be a mess! Try not to do finishing touches (or concrete aprons, black top, etc.) until all the heavy equipment is out.
  3. Gutters tied into pipes buried to move water away from house.
  4. In barns and garages (if your county allows)- add drains.
  5. Make sure windows and doors in detached garages and barns face the house so you can see if someone is breaking in.
  6. Also we had trail cams put up while we were building. And we had people steal things….. so they came in very handy!
  7. Double garage doors vs. 1 bigger door are more heat/cooling efficient.
  8. Put an outside spicket on multiple sides of your house so you aren’t dragging hoses around.
  9. Think about alternative energy/heat/cooling sources. Could your house use an outdoor wood burning stove, a wood burning stove in the basement tied into the fireplace chimney, an attic fan, or if you had a generator where would you put it and pre-wire it to main areas of the house.
  10. We were told not to put the outside air condition unit by our bedroom because it would be loud- but ours is really quiet… so this is “maybe” a good tip?
  11. Our porch is ridiculously deep. So maybe we are a bit excessive. However, make sure it is deep enough for furniture if you have one.

Finding Land-

  1. We just randomly called up someone to ask if they’d sell us land. Since we’ve done this we’ve heard of so many people who’ve also been able to get their land like this!
  2. Make sure the land you like isn’t too wet. Or if it has a lot of trees- just know that it is going to cost money and time to clear that land and probably will mean bringing in dirt.
  3. Think about where you are putting the house and how hard it is to get utilities to it.
  4. Talking about utilities you can call up the water company to see how much a water tap would be (or even if you have water available) and you can see what your county usually lets you install septic wise (we basically only got to install a mound system). Figuring some of this out beforehand might make you decide if the perfect land is really worth it knowing how much prep you’ll have to do.

Farmhouse

Have It Your Way: Choosing House Plans

Sam

I feel most of you reading the “farmhouse” portion of this blog have a Pinterest board full of future house plans. Heck, I am almost finished with my house and I still haven’t came around to deleting off some of the plans I wanted in the beginning. So, I want to devote this post to all the things you might consider when you are choosing plans.

You should know what your builder can and can’t do when it comes to plans.

Many of the builders we asked for prices from gave us “pre-drawn” plans that you could modify. But to take the plans we loved on the internet and make them come to life- was either super expensive to do through them or was actually just something they flat out wouldn’t do. For these types of builders who were building “custom” houses, a better description would be “pre-selected” customization you could do to their plans. One reason we choose the builder we choose was because he truly took our exact plans and made them a reality.

On a side note:  a few questions I have been asked is if

  1. you have to buy the plans before you get quotes?
  2. if you can get quotes on multiple house plans?

The Answer:

1) No, you don’t have to buy the plans before you get a quote- just keep in mind it might be a little more high level with allowances than a detailed quote

and

2) Yes, you can bring two plans to a builder and determine if there would be a big cost difference between them- but unless you are drastically changing the structure or square foot amount they will probably be close to the same price.

What modifications should you choose?

In full disclosure I can’t tell you what would be best for your family and lifestyle. For example: you might decide you need a place to put a dog washing station in your house because your dream is to adopt 13 ½ dogs……. But Kyle and I decided that since we have three boys we basically have our hands full in the “animal” department as it is- so dog care won’t be on our list of modifications.

Instead, I’d like to walk you through our modifications and why we choose them. I am hoping that you can see a trend of the types of things to think about when you start to choose your own modifications.

  • Dining room conversion: we replaced the dining room with a bedroom, then added an attached bathroom with a shower. Our reasoning behind this was because 1) we have 3 kids and 2) we didn’t have the money for a dining room, breakfast area, and 4 bedrooms- so we had to work with the space we had (2,500 sq ft). And that is my point with this modification: just because in the original plans it shows a dining room and half bath- really think how you want to use the space in that room. Maybe it makes more sense to convert the dinning room into an office on one side and a pantry on the other?
  • Made the breakfast area larger: since we converted the dining room into a bedroom, we needed to make sure the breakfast area was large enough to fit our farmhouse table that Kyle built to fit 52 of our closest friends. Although, I am exaggerating a bit, we did need to make this bigger. In general, we found that we really had to pay attention to room sizes and make sure that our furniture was going to fit. This includes outside spaces too! The attached garage in our plan was only 21×21 and wouldn’t fit Kyle’s truck, so we made it larger.
  • Moved the laundry room and connected it to the master closet: a lot of our modifications had to do with future proofing our home as best we could. We selected a home with the master bath and laundry on the first floor so that we wouldn’t have to do stairs as much. We widen the doorways and halls to fit wheel chairs through them…. just in case. We added a full bath vs. a half bath to the converted bedroom in case an elderly parent needed to move in with us down the road. We wanted to build a home that fit our needs now, and hopefully fit our needs in the future too.
  • The original sketch of the outside of the house vs. what we did: Our plans had a huge wrap around porch with a railing, extra windows in the garage, vertical siding, and a half moon shaped window in the peak of the house. Don’t steer clear of plans just because of the exterior. You can change roof pitches, do stone work, add porches and dormers, and drastically change the exterior into more your style. I mean…. Joanna Gains does it all the time on her show- and she’s using pre-existing structures- you get to start from scratch on your new build.
  • Deleting structured posts, adding pocket doors, and planning where to put mechanics: Another great thing about building a house is that you can figure out ways to make it as open as want. So if you want your basement to have only a few posts in it you can put a heavy duty steel beam to support the weight of the upper floor. Or if you want a super open living room you can buy bigger trusses, thus eliminating a support beam. The same thing with pocket doors or where your air condition will be. You can choose to not put plumbing/electric/ducts in a wall so that you can add a pocket door. And you can plan where you want your heating/cooling inside unit at the beginning to make it the most out of the way. That has been one of the nicest parts of building for us. Instead of walking into houses we wanted to buy saying- we’d like to take this wall down and then realizing it would be way too expensive to do that- we get to start from scratch.

You know what plans you want… now what???

There are so many ways you can purchase plans. Like I said before some people might choose a builder who already has existing plans and they modify them for you, some have CAD programs and will draw them up, you can hire an architect to draft them, you can buy them off the internet (this is what we did), and in rare cases (like where my builder’s from) you can submit a rough sketch drawn on the back of a napkin…… I’m only sort of kidding. In most cases though you are going to need blueprints done by a professional that have basement plans (how tall are the walls, where are the windows, outside doors, where do the footers need to be poured, etc.), a first floor and second floor plans (detailed with square footage, built-ins, where center beams are, etc.), a roof plan, all the sides of the house elevation plans, building section plans (r-values, flashing, vents, etc.), and then an electrical plan.

I have a few basic things I want to tell you about this.

  • Some counties will require an engineer stamp on your plans. In full disclosure I don’t know how they determine that- I think it is if your house structure is out of a normal range of support (i.e. you have an open concept without any supporting posts that is so huge that there is questions on whether it is structurally sound). I also think they may require an engineer stamp if you do rafters vs. trusses. Rafters are built on site by your builder and trusses are common roof dimensions that are built off site and are engineer approved when they are built. In our specific county with our specific plan we did not have to have an engineer’s stamp. My brother who also built in our county did………
  • The electrical plan we bought online was not detailed enough for our county. We needed carbon dioxide and fire detectors outside of each room, where the original plans had can lights and fans were not where we planned to put them, etc. So we had our electrician look over everything and add to it where needed.
  • Like I said before, we bought our plans off the internet and we had them modified. We could have had them modified by anyone we choose- but we decided to go through the preferred vendor of where we bought the plan. I think this was a mistake on our end as it took 10 weeks to get the modifications done. If I had to do it over I would have taken the plans we found online and asked someone familiar with our county to draw them up. My only hesitation to do that in the first place was the cost of online plans seemed to be a lot cheaper, but I didn’t actually get quotes- which I regret.

 

Hopefully this was helpful and answers some of your questions about the house plans, modifications, and next steps. If you have any other questions or I didn’t explain something well enough, please comment below or send me a message. In the meantime- keep finding amazing plans that fit your lifestyle!

Farmhouse

You did WHAT yourself?

Sam

So I told you in 5+ Ways to Save $ on Building a house that Kyle and I (heavy emphasis on Kyle) did some of the work ourselves. So I wanted to provide you some honest feedback on what worked for us and what didn’t.

I’ll be real (and maybe a bit braggy) Kyle and I rarely fight. It’s not because I’m an amazing person who solves conflict well or never does anything wrong- it is mostly because Kyle hates conflict and is really easy going. Ah– but that was prior to building a house together. I still think we weathered the house building storm well as a couple but if we did fight about anything on the house…… it’s most likely on this list.

  1. Being our own general contractor. The beginning part of building and being your own contractor is hard. Knowing what steps you have to start with and filling out permits are a bit confusing. Thankfully, we found a lot of helpful people at our township and county, plus some friends who had built/build houses for a living. The biggest part is how time consuming it is. Being there for inspections, filling out the permits, scheduling the temporary and permanent electric, etc. I would suggest only doing this if you have some type of flexibility. Kyle saved up all his vacation time and he scheduled things on his lunch hour. Not to mention the time before work and after.
  2. Some land clearing. We bought 8 acres of trees. Tall trees, small trees, dead trees, beautiful trees, just lots and lots of trees. Kyle started cutting up trees for where our driveway and house would be in February 2018. A year later and he is still cutting up trees. Two of our builders’ quotes included tree clearing at about $10K. This is a high price because DISCLAIMER cutting down trees is dangerous. I still lean on the side that this was probably worth doing it ourselves  Kyle doing it (the boys need their mom so I wasn’t cutting up any trees!). We could work at our own pace and the only thing it bothers is that the outside of the house is a little messier than I’d prefer. But for $10K I can handle it looking like a tornado went through. (We also spent money to have a landscaping company clear the undergrowth and cut ATV trails in our woods. This was about $1,500 and well worth it!)
  3. Electric and Plumbing. Well. Here goes. It was nice being married while it lasted. My answer is this is absolutely not worth it. We saved about $2K from our original quote and Kyle spent about 90 hours in total to save that amount. Now here’s the thing, Kyle needed to have a part in our house build. I am not sure if your spouse (or maybe you do too) find worth in having your hands in the actual building of the house, but my husband finds worth in this. He doesn’t care about the paint color or kitchen cabinets, he was about as useless as they came when picking out flooring or tile. But he wanted to run the electric and plumbing and there is value in that. Plus he now knows intimately all the workings of our house. So although my answer still leans towards the not worth it column on this in general, if I wanted to be a great supportive wife I’d tell you that by doing it ourselves we saved some money and the quality can’t be beat.
  4. Fireplace Installation. Kyle did all the framing and installation of the fireplace. This took about 5 hours and saved us $900. One thing I want to make sure I mention here is that for $50 the same place who was going to charge us $900 to install the fireplace came out to inspect my husband’s handiwork. This ensured our warranty was able to be enforced (just in case) and honestly gave us peace of mind. Totally worth it.
  5. Fireplace mantel, hearth, and surround. We are still working on this so I’ll update this post once we are finished with a full report.
  6. Kitchen Cabinet Installation. Between the Builder helping (for free!) and my husband we saved about $2K on installing our kitchen cabinets. I can’t recommend enough to just check with your Builder to see what they would charge to install the cabinets vs. what the company where you buy your cabinets will charge. Like I’ve said before get multiple quotes for everything!
  7. Island knee wall and stove vent hood. This is another thing we are still working on, so TBD. But I’ll let you know that custom shiplap vent hoods are super pricey! Like over a thousand dollars pricey. So I think it’s probably safe to assume this is in the win column for saving money but I’ll update once it is 100% done.
  8. Running Water/Electric to house. So first, a big shout out to our brother-in-law Joe who helped Kyle with this! Along with hiring a friend who owns a mini excavator, Kyle was able to run electric and water from the road to our house for about $1.5K. This took one 8 hour day and was worth it. We’d estimate we saved a few thousand dollars by doing this.
  9. Interior Insulation. We spent $760 on the actual material to reduce the sound in our walls since we have an open concept living area. It took Kyle, his dad, and myself 3 hours to do this one night. We probably saved at least a few hundred $’s and honestly it was some of the most uninterrupted conversation time Kyle and I have had….since….well….. since having the first kid. Well worth it!

There are still some areas of the house we are working on but for the most part this is what we tried to tackle ourselves. If you are going to build (and want to do some of the work yourself) I would sit down beforehand and make sure you have a good estimate on how much time it would take you to do something and if the potential savings is worth it.

Looking back on it we were really happy with the projects we decided to do…… and we are still happily married.

Farmhouse

Who Built Just Another Farmhouse?

Sam

Blah. I am sure you are going to hate seeing this as the opening line to every single one of my posts….. but here it is again…….. this is just who we used to help build our house. You can take this list or leave it. Although, I think they do quality work and I would recommend all of our vendors (which I think is unique for someone whose built a house because boy oh boy have I heard horror stories!) you might not have the same experience as me- or know even better vendors. Also, if you aren’t in the Cincinnati area this is probably a pretty useless post for you to read.

  1. House Plans: Architectural Designs- House Plans
  2. House Plan Modifications (used by AD- House Plans): UO unlimited options, inc.
  3. General Contractor: Tritek, LLC  (even though we didn’t use a General Contractor Joe Speeg was more than helpful at the beginning and answered a ton of questions)
  4. Builder: Ernie Miller (937-515-0894)
  5. Foundation (used by our builder): Mark Edenfield
  6. Electric and Plumbing: Kyle and Kena Willingham (OK so here’s the deal he also goes by Pineapple so if you are from our area and are thinking “who is Kena?” it’s Pineapple’s real name) (513-238-0611)
  7. HVAC: Carney Heating and Cooling
  8. Painting: Adam West (he gave us an amazing quote and we’ve seen his work- unfortunately our Builder had us use his sub-contractor.)
  9. Flooring: RJC Flooring and Construction (513-233-5581, he also gave a great quote and does quality work but we had to use our Builder’s sub-contractor.)
  10. Fireplace: Vonderhaar Fireplace, Stoves and Masonry 
  11. Land Clearing: Libbee’s Landscaping 
  12. Driveway: Foebar Excavating (513-616-9595) & Borcher’s Excavating (513-623-8387)
  13. Kitchen: Kelley Hensley with The V Collective
  14. Septic: Jest Enterprises LLC
  15. Percolation Test (soil test): Clear Creek Environmental
  16. Site Plan: Robert Shannon
  17. Water Tap/Electric Tap: dependent on your area

OK, I think that is the list of the vendors we used. What is not included in this list is the sub-contractors our Builder used for drywall, tile, and flooring. They did great work, we just don’t know their contact information since our Builder sub-contracted it out for us.

Also not included is what all we (aka Kyle) did to help build our house and cut down on cost. Check this out for that list!

Farmhouse

5+ Things Worth the $ When Building

Sam

Since I was working with a limited budget I was mostly concerned with saving money, not spending it while building our house. (if you’re interested in where we saved the most money check this out) However, there are some things (for us at least) that are just worth the money.

I think these fall into a few categories:

  1. Things you can’t do down the road.
  2. Things that you can do down the road,  but let’s be serious you probably won’t.
  3. Things that might add to the bottom line but are worth it.

Things you can’t do later down the road.

There are certain things you can upgrade or do later down the road when building and then there are things that you can’t- or rather if you do it will cost you more than it is worth.

We built an open concept living room, kitchen, and dining room type of house. You know, just like any other modern farmhouse. I don’t regret this at all. There is a con to this type of floor plan though- it is loud. I’m not sure who you live with- but I live with three boys who would be excellent salesmen for earplugs. So for $760 we invested in sound insulation for our interior walls. When you build, you usually only insulate the exterior walls. I am so thankful we went ahead and did this (and when I say we I mean my husband and I used a date night to shove batts of insulation in the walls). However, could you imagine if we got into our house and decided a few years into it that we wanted to do this? We would of had to take off one side of the drywall, put the insulation in, put the drywall back up, and then repaint. Yeah, no thanks. $760 well spent in my opinion. Here are some other structural type changes I’m glad we did:

  1. Interior insulation.
  2. Running gas to our back porch for a grill.
  3. Rough-in plumbing in our basement even though it is unfinished.
  4. Two extra conduit pipes from our attic to basement for future wires (i.e. future security systems or TV setup).
  5. Electric and conduit from where we would mount a TV in the living room to the closet to hide wires.
  6. Bigger garage. My husband’s truck is a crew-cab, long-bed- enough said.
  7. 1st floor master and wheelchair accessible doors and hallways. Just in case- after what we’ve spent we don’t ever plan to move.

Bonus: Our bonus room above our garage was also something we added that increased the price but for us will be needed space eventually. Adding it on now was much cheaper than adding it on in the future.

Things you can do later on, but let’s be serious you won’t.

I’m not sure about you but my house usually has an entire list of things that need to be done that never get done. I keep telling myself we will do it, but let’s be real, when I get home from work the last thing on my mind is home improvements. In fact in our old house we finally painted the hallways…. just to make it look better to sell.

One thing we went ahead and upgraded on that falls in this category is cabinets and counter tops. We could replace them down the road, but it wouldn’t be anytime soon and it would be a lot of work to replace them. If you’re building a house I suggest putting some money into the kitchen. You do not want to upgrade that thing right off the bat.

  1. Kitchen upgrades.
  2. Trim. Trust me- no one replaces trim. If you want wide trim just get it.
  3. Flooring. I know I said you can save money here but make sure you are buying something you won’t just want to replace in a few years. That’s a lot of work.

Bonus: This might be a preference but smooth ceilings is sometimes an upgrade with builders that I personally think it is easier to do now than later.

Things that might add to the bottom line but are worth it.

I really don’t think of this category as “upgrades”. I think of it more as good ideas to remember when building because you’ll probably find them useful……..

  1. Dimmer switches or some USB electric outlets in strategic places.
  2. Extra lights. In front of closets, extra kitchen or bathroom lights, etc.
  3. Extra outlets. In and under cabinets, one where you plan to put your Christmas tree, in the pantry, in the entry way , in closets, floor outlets, outlets in the garage, outlets on the porch, etc. – make sure you have enough outlets.
  4. Tank-less water heater or our preference: an electric heat pump- water heater (in our old house it dropped our electric bill $30 a month!)

Bonus: Alternative heating and air. We installed an outdoor wood burning stove. This helps reduce energy costs in the winter and heats our water too. We also installed an attic fan- this let’s us keep our air conditioner off for at least two weeks extra in the summer.

 

I’ll be honest. I can find a whole list of things that I think were worth my money when it came to building. For example: a pot filler. My boys (husband included) think that pasta is a side dish to every meal, so it was worth it to me. However, I wanted to keep this list as a high-level concept list vs. a “do it exactly how I did it” list. The wonderful thing about building is that YOU get to choose what is too important to compromise. Hopefully this list gave you a framework to think about those things.

 

Faith, Family, Farmhouse

First things first.

Sam

So you’ve decided to check out just another farmhouse blog? I know you. You are either a family member (hi mom!) or friend who’ve I shamelessly begged to follow me, or like me obsessed with all things farmhouse. You’ve checked out the other 503+ blogs out there about how to build your dream farmhouse and now you’ve stumbled on mine- which to be honest probably isn’t too different than all the others. So why should you keep checking in here? I mean what is different? I’m going to be real. I am not a professional Christian, wife, mother, crafter, photographer, construction guru, or interior designer.

Needless to say my photo editing skills include begging one of my best friends to take pictures for me, or using Instagram filters. So if you want beautiful farmhouse photos this is not the place for that. I think my pictures are OK and they are real– like I might forget to move a highchair out of the way of a photo I post. My decorating skills are on par with my budget- basically really sound in a structural type of way but not excessive.

My abilities as a mom, or crafter, or chef are limited. I work really, really, really hard to keep my kids alive, dressed (which is harder than you think- or maybe you too have toddlers who love to be naked), fed, semi-clean, and well-rounded. But I pretty much fail daily on this. Except the keeping the kids alive. I do that, but barely. So if you are here to learn how to cook from scratch, raise perfect kids who go to Church and don’t try to light it on fire, or sew homemade costumes- well let me introduce you to other blogs for that or my personal favorite amazon.com.

As far as a wife goes….. Kyle (my husband) hasn’t complained. Well, let me rephrase he hasn’t complained to me. Honestly though, in Kyle’s words “we get along so well because I am easy going”. He’s the calm to my storm, the practical to my wild, and all in all really is easy going. I try. I really do. Like in all areas of my life sometimes I’m a really amazing supportive wife and other times I’m just a supportive wife- and then when times get a little overwhelming I’m just a wife.

So what can I promise you here? Well, I think I can promise you some honesty and some realistic budgets for building your dream house. I feel like sometimes what is lacking on sites is the authentic budgets. Like I see the ones that are 4,000 square feet and a million dollars to build or ones where you build it yourself and spend $50K on a $500K house. This place will be as middle of the road as possible. AND because it is my place to post- I will also share a few things on faith and family– because honestly the farmhouse part doesn’t do much for me without the other two.

Thanks for stopping in and I hope you enjoy!

– Sam

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