Thursday, March 11, 2010

The adventure begins

Noel, Soxy (tuxedo kitty extraordinaire), and I are embarking on the great adventure of building a home of our own! We (well, I) figured that documenting this process in a blog would be fun since I'm hearing that this whole house-building thing might make Noel and I want to kill each other. (Queue Aretha Franklin...) But we will survive, and we will have a damn good-looking house to show for it!

Thankfully, we have A LOT of experience by our sides, my parents, who amazingly also survived an even more involved process consisting of their own elbow grease. So we will continue to pick their brains and bug them until they want to disown us. Oh, this is going to be fun! But we couldn't possibly put all of our trust in them...enter Building Your Own Home for Dummies. That's right, break it down like we're kindergarteners.

We are not exactly at the very beginning of this process. After much deliberation, we decided to buy land back in my hometown from my grandmother. As of February, we are the proud owners of 12.19 acres on one mamma-jamma hill, plenty of trees, and a spring-fed creek. Buying land is quite an involved process in itself. We had a perker man, electrical engineers, water department dudes, surveyors, and lawyers, oh my! After all of these shenanigans, we can officially call it ours. Whew! And lucky for us, that didn't even involve realtors.

We have since had the land cleared by an Alternative Land Clearing service in Lynchburg. Here's my plug for him (because he did a fantastic job) www.alternativelandclearing.com. We chose this option over a bulldozer because we had LOTS of brush and tiny trees to be cleared. This machine mulches the brush and small trees so it can return to the earth and replenish the soil. We are so green.



Noel and I have since sown 100 lbs of grass seed and cleared some more land with our bare hands. Hear us roar!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats! There's a lot of stress & work that comes along with the process but it will be a great experience. Good luck with everything! Can't wait to see the finished product! :-)

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  2. Hannah, Thanks for the ALC plug! Ryan likes doing jobs at home, and your's was a good one. I think he enjoyed talking to your dad, too! I will be keeping up with the progress of the "Whites' House"! Good luck!! I hope that everything goes just as planned for the both of you, and it is everything that you'd dreamed it would be and more!! Leah

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