I’ve had a few people checking in for updates on where we are at lately, and I realize I’ve been neglectful of updates here on the blog. My apologies for going so long in between updates, but I think you’ll see why when I fill you in on what we’ve been up to since we got our occupancy permit. I’m going to try to briefly hit the highlights.
First of all, I would rather build 5 more houses than ever move again. In fact, we still aren’t fully moved out of the old house, though we are fully moved in to the new one. The old house itself is almost completely empty, though there is still some junk in the garage and in the yard that need to be dealt with. I really didn’t feel like trying to move the trampolines and play stuff from the yard, or the rock wall in the living room, so I left it in hopes that a family would want it all when they came through to look at the house. Of course we could remove it if they didn’t want it, but we could always hope, right?
The house needed a fair bit of work, but we really don’t have the time to dedicate to it, and we felt like it needed to go on the market as soon as possible. We gave it exactly one weekend and did as much as we could with it, patching some holes and doing some painting, and completely redoing one of the bathrooms with paint, flooring, and a new bathtub. We did the best we could in one weekend and then listed it – and a huge THANK YOU goes out to a few amazing volunteers who came and helped with all the patching and painting that weekend while I redid the bathroom!
This week we accepted an offer on the house! There are still a few hurdles to clear including inspection and appraisal, but I’m feeling hopeful that we can cross those things off the list as we get to them. The main goal is to sell that house so that we can roll our construction loan over into a regular mortgage. It’s going to be a lot easier to get that new mortgage if I don’t own 2 houses, so the sale of the old house would be huge!
We celebrated our first Christmas in the new house, and the space was so amazing! It’s been a struggle these last few years to have a big holiday like that, because there’s just not really enough space for it. Kids were in too close quarters, opening gifts was difficult, and keeping track of them was almost impossible. It was so amazing this year to just have the space to spread out and it made the day so much less stressful.
Of course if you’ve read the earlier posts on this blog, you know that a big part of the house is to make room for teens, so for Christmas we had 3 teens come and stay with us for a few days over Christmas. They were each kids we’ve had some connection with but all of whom were living in foster care residential programs around the state. Coming for Christmas meant a few days with a family and some normalcy, and the more the merrier, right?
The plan with the new house was to finish the main level and get moved in, and then start working on some bedrooms in the basement right away. So before our first building permit was even finished, we opened a permit for part of the basement. The 9 bedrooms on the main floor are 2 more than we had before, but still just not enough. This is especially true when we have extra kids in the house. We are still moving kids around, doubling and tripling up in bedrooms in order to make things work. Last weekend, for example, we had 3 extras for respite for a night or two, and then we’ve had one for respite who needed his own bedroom for this whole last week. So we find ourselves still moving kids around bedrooms quite a bit, because there just aren’t enough still for what we’re trying to do.
So with this new building permit we’re finishing 6 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in the basement. I know, I know, that’s basically another whole house. It sounds really absurd when I say it, but the house will be a modest 15 bed, 6 bath ranch when this permit is finished. Emphasis on modest! It’s a very simple house, no-frills and nothing fancy. Just very, very functional. And quite large. Will 15 bedrooms be enough? Almost, because that doesn’t account for the apartment yet. Those will come with permit #3.
The basement framing beginning:
For the basement project, we are through all the rough in inspections, which means we have gotten through plumbing and electrical already. The plan is now to fully finish one room at a time. We learned a lot in building the house, so the inspection processes were painless this time around. In fact, I did almost none of the electrical work. My 17 year old did pretty much the entire thing, all the wiring, outlets, switches, and breakers. Since he did the work, we let him stay home from school on inspection day and handle the inspection on his own too! Here he is with his well earned inspection approval:
As for the rest of the basement, what will be the apartment area is pretty much storage right now. It’s kind of the catch-all for anything we don’t know what to do with. Well, that and the garage. There’s a lot of stuff without a home right now.
The other main part of the basement is going to stay unfinished, but we are making it really fun and usable for the kids!
Another pretty major update — we’ve had our first independent living teen move in with us!
Remember those three who came for Christmas? We knew that one of them was eventually going to need a place to stay through the independent living program. We were originally thinking she would come somewhere around March or April, that would give us time to finish some bedrooms and move some kids downstairs and get everyone in bedrooms where they are supposed to be long term.
Well, as often happens, plans had to change and we needed to make some space sooner. So we shifted kids around and freed up a bedroom for her. It puts a little bit more pressure on the basement bedroom situation, because it makes it a little bit tight upstairs for some of the kids until we can get some of that basement space usable, but it works. We’ve had much less space before and we’ve made things work, so we figure we can do just about anything temporarily.
Our oldest biological child also turned 18 last month, so now we have two 18 year olds in our house. How did we get so old? It doesn’t feel like we are that old. Maybe it doesn’t feel that way because we also still have a 4 year old.
We are excited to be able to offer a little bit more respite to foster kids and foster families. The local child welfare and mental health agencies are starting hear about all the space that we have, and it seems like somebody always needs some kind of respite. Depending on how all the bedrooms shake out when the apartment is done, we might find we need to have a bedroom or two set aside just to do respite for some of these other kids and families who really need it.
So to sum up, this is what we’ve been up to in the month and a half since I posted last:
– We moved in to the new house, finishing off a few small projects to get our final occupancy
– We have had several kids for respite days/nights/weekends
– We did Christmas and 6 birthdays
– We fixed up the old house (somewhat) and hopefully have sold it
– Did all the framing, plumbing, and electrical for the basement bedrooms and bathrooms, and we’ve started drywall
– Rearranged bedrooms (already) because a new independent living teen has moved in with us
– And we switched all the kids over to new schools
Next up – finishing the basement and getting the mortgage all situated. Once that is done, we can start pushing ahead toward the next big thing! I’ll have lots more details about the teen housing stuff in the weeks to come.
For now, I just have to tell you how amazed and grateful I am. We LOVE the house, and we LOVE where we live. The kids have space to run, they play hide and seek and nerf and laser tag and all kinds of things in the house. They have space to spread out, to play games, and it really takes the stress level of the house down a bit when kids can play in smaller groups in separate spaces. That’s just not something we could really do before. It also makes it a lot easier on everyone when there are extra kids in the house for respite.
Sometimes in the morning I’ll drink a cup of coffee while it’s still dark outside, and I look out in the yard at the snow and the trees and I just can’t believe we live here now. Or when I’ll watch my kids play a game or chase the dog through the house. Last weekend the house was full of kids. I mean, obviously it’s always full with just my kids, but we had some extras with us too, and they all hung out, they played games, they watched movies. The house was full of life and conversation and I was just so grateful for it all.