The Porch Has Become a Deck

The boys are so excited to start demolition! They can't wait to start swinging sledge hammers and making things fall down. But first, we used small hammers and pry bars to remove paneling.

Then there was the problem of that love seat (in the photo, Jeff is standing next to it). We tried to move it out so the garbage truck could take it away but we couldn't fit it through the doorway. How did we get it in the house anyway? Jeff and his friend, David, begged to be able to dismantle it. What the heck? It gives them something to smash and saves me $30 that the garbage service wants to haul it away.

That love seat filled 5 large garbage bags! We knew we were going to generate a lot of garbage with this project so I started calling around for prices for a rolloff dumpster. Did you know you can only keep those for 15 days? So we decided to get a 3 cubic yard dumpster that is emptied once a week for $60 a month. That's more like what we need, at least until we are ready to knock down the whole house.

Anyway, back to the demolition of the porch. Here's a few pics of my helpers:

My grandson, Henry, using a real drill to remove screws from the skirting.

Peek-a-boo!

Two of my favorite helpers!

But this one is not:

Ewwww! Creepy! It slithered away under the house. I'm NOT looking forward to seeing that again!

The missionaries from our church have been asking when we were starting the demolition project so they can come help. Our ward currently has 5 missionaries (not sure why) so I invited them over.

They took out the windows, walls and removed two layers of shingles from the roof.

Then they removed the sheet rock ceiling and most of the paneling that was the roof. They really did a lot of demo that day! They left us with a shell:

Then the boys got their chance with the sledge hammers!

The porch is gone and all that is left is a deck...sort of. 

It really changes the look of the house. We are hoping to finish taking the rest of it down this week. 

Well, that was exciting....for a minute.

The house next door to us (to the north) has been a rental since we moved here. In fact, the lady who used to rent our house, moved into that house when we moved here. She was recently evicted and the original owners of the house are remodeling it so they can live in it.

We met them last week and told them our plans to tear down our house and build new. They expressed interest in buying our front porch and moving it to their house. We invited them to come over and see it and talk further in a few days.

Well, they came over yesterday to take a look. They liked what they saw and made an offer, which we accepted. 

Then they took off some of the skirting to see how the porch was built and how they could move it. This is what was behind the skirting:

Termite damage.

Oh, no. Hold the phone. How is this thing even standing?

At least it looks like old termite damage and we don't see any of the termites themselves. 

But, needless to say, the deal is off. No one wants that mess, including us. haha. 

The good news is we were tearing it down anyway. It was exciting for a minute that our new neighbor was going to help in that process and give us a bit of cash too, but now we are just back to our original plan. Nothing lost and it confirmed to us that we are absolutely doing the right thing by tearing this house down. 

Soil and Poop

After Glenn and I decided to build our own house, we went to our local building department to find out what we have to do to get a building permit and to show them our floor plans. They liked our plans and told us we had to have the foundation plans engineered, but the floor plan was good. (More about that in a minute.)

Then we went to the health department to see if they had any requirements for keeping or updating our septic system. They said as long as it's functioning correctly, we can continue to use it. However, since we had been living here for 3 years and my mom had owned it as a rental for several years before that, we should have it pumped.

So I called American Septic and made an appointment for them to come out. And, boy, are we glad we didn't put it off!

Our septic tank was FULL! He said we were probably 8-10 rolls of toilet paper away from a back up. Eeeewwwww!
He emptied the tank and sprayed it down with water and pronounced it clean and ready to serve another 30 years! That was good news!

With the septic given a stamp of approval, our next step was to find an engineer to draw up our foundation plans. I looked up engineers on Google, found a couple and called them. I was told before foundation plans can be drawn (engineered), a soil test has to be done to determine what kind of soil we have which will determine what kind of foundation we have to have.

I played phone tag with 3-4 geotechnical engineers for about a week before I was finally able to hire one to come do our test.

They have to dig 2 holes about 3 inches in diameter and about 20 feet deep and take soil samples from this hole.  They dug one hole in the front: 

And one hole in the back: 

In the front at 20 feet down, they were still hitting really soft soil so he wanted to dig a little deeper. At 24 feet, he hit solid rock.

In the back, he hit rock at 20 feet. 

He said this was very good news. 

Now we wait for the soil report to be done, and then we wait for the plans to be drawn up. And they are running behind so they said it'll be about 3 weeks to get the soil report and about 2-3 weeks after that to get the plans. 

While we wait, we will be working on getting moved into the motor home (that we borrowed from some very good friends) and getting our old house torn down. I think we'll be doing very well to have that done by the time our plans are ready. It's a goal to shoot for!

How Did We Get Here?

House building is not something we ever thought we'd find ourselves doing. I've always admired people who build their own houses because it takes commitment and fortitude and determination. It's a long project that takes hard work for a long time. It's a daunting process. So how did we get to a place in our lives where we are committing to this daunting process?

Well,  3 years ago we inherited an acre of land with an old doublewide mobile home and a two car garage on it. The house was built in 1975 and had some improvements made to it over the years like a new roof, vinyl siding, and a mudroom and porch were added. But recently it has really started to show its age. The cinder blocks it sits on are shifting and the wood shims are compressing so the house is starting to separate down the middle. The sliding glass door won't open anymore. The windows are drafty making it difficult to keep warm in the winter.

So we knew that eventually the house would need to be replaced. We thought we would just replace it with another manufactured home.

Manufactured homes today are well built, well insulated, sturdy, and in our price range, cheaply finished. You can pay more for one with sheetrock, bullnosed corners, upgraded cabinetry, fixtures, flooring, etc., but the price really starts to climb.

So we looked into used ones. We didn't find anything that was better than we already have. Most were worse. And they would have to be moved which is expensive.

We looked into kit homes. Log, steel, and wood. And modular homes. We found introductory prices that were appealing but by the time all the upgrades we needed for snow load and wind loads,  floor plans, etc. were added, were right back up in price.

I was talking to my mom on the phone about all of this and telling her the prices and issues we were finding and she said, "Gee, you can build your own house for half of that price." What? Really? My parents built their own house in the mid 1980s so she has knowledge in this area.

So I sat down and started doing some figuring and pricing (and praying). For roughly the same price as the kit we were looking at, we can build our entire house completely finished (a kit only gets the outside shell of the house done) .

And it would be paid for when we are done. That's huge! No mortgage, AND getting the house we want, the way we want it.  Score!

So my husband and I prayed about it and made the decision to jump in with both feet and build our own house with our own two hands. Well, 4 hands....8 hands if you include help from our 2 teenaged sons.

There are a few more details than this, but basically that's how we came to decide to build our own house.

Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming because there are so many details and so many decisions to make but we just remind ourselves that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Then the next step. And the next. When we think of it like that, just a series of steps, it seems much more doable.