For those of you who have been following our story of “That crazy thing we are doing,” it’s been a while since an update. Honestly, this has been a hard build season. Our third year of working all week and spending weekends working on the house.
It’s a great goal to build debt free but doing most all the work ourselves has been exhausting, often discouraging, expensive, time consuming, and frustrating this last year in particular. The county and state and been pretty patient with our long process. They usually expect a home to be built in six months to a year. We’ve just ended our third year. The race to meet permit deadlines definitely put extra pressure on us emotionally, physically, and financially this year.
The good news is we have our official occupancy certificate! The bad news is that the house isn’t done, livable but not done. We have our camping trailer up for sale but no takers yet. It’s probably just not the right time of year to sell. At least we are able stay in the house while we work on things.
I’ve been staining the hand railing and beams, then applying two clear coats of lacquer. If you look at it from afar it looks great but when you're up an personal with it like I've been, I see all my mistakes. Urgh!
Jer’s been working on our backup generator for the solar panel batteries. He’s made a good six trips, mostly on weekends but also a couple weekday trips. We still don’t have it wired in and working. Jer is getting closer but it’s scary, there’s a lot of power going through that system. We need to know that everything is in place to have peace to step away for a while. We hope this next weekend to have it done. Jer is learning a lot in the process.
Still on the list to of to-does: shower walls, interior doors, window and floor trims, flooring, kitchen cabinet doors and counter top, and the outside decking…and of course, this all takes time and money. Still, last year at this point we were just beginning to sheetrock. I’m grateful for the progress we have made.
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