The last time I updated here, it was near the end of a long summer. Our plans were still coming along despite some setbacks that we’d had here in the house and some of the challenges we were experiencing. And our plans are still moving forward, it’s just that as things tend to do around here, the actual plans are evolving still.
The last time I posted was August 5. Two and a half weeks later our lives changed in a pretty significant way.
On August 22, it was a Monday, I had a plumbing inspection scheduled. We’d started the apartment area, and I was trying to get the rough in inspections wrapped up because I had drywall scheduled for the following week. The only problem was, this plumbing inspector was different than who came out last year, and in that time they decided I could no longer use galvanized pipe in the showers. I’d been running all the plumbing with PEX, which is way better and easier to work with, but I assembled the shower with galvanized. That way I could put the valve, shower head, and the drop for the tub all together and just mount the whole assembly.
I didn’t pass that inspection on account of the galvanized pipe between the shower valve and the tub spout and shower head. He asked me to replace the pipe and call him back to come see it. These were the instructions that I promptly forgot as soon as I came upstairs.
The reason I forgot is because on August 22 Katie wasn’t feeling very well. In fact, she’d been not feeling well for a few days at that point. While I was in the basement with the inspector, unknown to me, she decided to take a pregnancy test so that she could get the negative result and set her mind at ease.
Well that obviously didn’t turn out like she expected.
At this point in the game, what’s one more, right? This year we sent our youngest to Kindergarten, our oldest biological child started college, and now biological baby #4 is on his way, and I’ll be honest that was definitely not the plan. I will also fully admit that maybe I set myself up for this when one of the very first things I said when we started this blog, one of the first things i said in the very first post was, “We are not pregnant.” Because that would have been absurd, right? Starting over at our age and with everything else we have going on?
Well. It’s happening pretty soon now. And we are honestly so excited and ready for this new adventure.
In terms of all of our other adventures, we are settling into something a little more stable in the house. We are not taking all the placements that we did last year, as some of those teens have moved out we have not moved new ones in. We are finishing up some of the projects in the basement while we are looking forward to our new baby arriving soon.
That’s not to say that we are giving up on our plans, far from it. It means that we are pressing ahead with the building plans for the small houses and making those happen as soon as possible. When we first began this journey we dreamed about providing space for youth who age out of foster care to land. A place where they could work on their life skills, employment, education. All of it in a safe space that they could call their own. We are still close to making those spaces a reality.
We’ve used the last couple of months to really nail down the site plan and what we want to do with the small houses, and we got a little help with that plan from the city. When we started making these plans, I researched the zoning requirements to find out what the restrictions were. For dwelling units in the city, a one bedroom house or apartment had to be a minimum of 850 sq ft. 850 is a fair bit bigger than what our needs are, so we decided to build 2 bedroom houses in order to maximize our space. An extra bedroom only adds 100 sq ft to the minimum size requirement, so we could accommodate 2 youth with 950 sq ft.
In October, the city made a change to the zoning ordinance in an attempt to make it easier and cheaper to provide housing in places where it is much needed. Now the minimum size of a one bedroom unit is only 550 sq ft. This means that instead of building a 2 bedroom house at close to 1000 sq ft, we can now build a duplex at almost the same size, with separate 1 bedroom dwelling units on each side.
I’ve been a little bit nervous about how the roommate situation was going to go out in those houses. Matching youth up, dealing with roommate issues and how each person would keep their own space clean, who puts the utilities in their name, all those were issues I’ve been thinking about. If youth have their own space to themselves, many of those questions have simpler answers.
The focus now is on clearing the hoops that the city has asked us to jump through so that we can begin building as soon as this spring. We are also drafting what that program is going to look like, because let me tell you we have learned a LOT over the course of this last yet.
But that’s a story for another post.