Our New Home
And How We Got There



Two years later my wife and I are in our new home Is it finished? I have a few things on the out side to do and a few small jobs on the inside,but we are certainly comfortable and enjoying our new home.



Our new home

This spring we have been busy making and planting flower gardens,planting some shrubs, putting lime and fertilizer on the lawn.. things are starting to take shape.

We have also planted blueberry bushes and raspberry canes and around sixty strawberry plants.Just waiting patiently for the first blossom.

Shrubs and nickie in the fore ground

Some shrubs and of course Nickie getting in on the action.

When I look back over the last two years I wonder how we ever made it to this point. There were times when I wondered... maybe I should have had a doctor check me for insanity.

There is one thing I have learned... things do not always go as planned.

When we had decided to go ahead with the new home idea, the first thing we had to do was to get the home we were living in ready for sale, and then list it.

After a few weeks we listed the house and in a short time we had excepted a conditional offer, they would have to sell there house before they could buy ours.

This we thought would be a good thing,this would give us time to get things moving on our new home.

Since we already had our building lot and had it cleared and ready for the excavation stage, we decided to build a small building on the lot that we could store some of our belonging in, and later on this building could be used for a garden shed or work shop.

A storage building

Up but not quite finished. The siding will be put on to match the house at a later date.

So now that the building is up and we have a place to store things, it was time to bring in the heavy equipment.

This process of excavating went so smooth and fast I hardly had time to take pictures.

This brings up a very interesting thing about the pictures.

My wife and I documented the whole proses of building our new home from start to finish and as the memory card in the camera filled up we would up load the pictures to the computer ....You guessed it the computer crashed and we lost all our pictures of our new home.

What is it they say about spilled milk?

Ok back to the house building.

At this point there were no new developments on the sale of the house and until the house sold we would be limited to how far we could proceed on our new home.

Taking a look at our situation we agreed to put in the septic system and pour the footings.

With the footings and septic in and the clock ticking on the conditional offer we decided to push on.

We would put in the foundation wall and back fill,haul in fill for under the slab, compact it and make the necessary preparation for laying the heating pipes and also do the required rough plumbing. Then we would wait until the house sold.

If the house did not sell by late summer then we would re-list it in the early spring and start over again .

Just as we were going to take the house off the market the house SOLD and the buyers wanted to move in within weeks.

We were happy that the house had sold but it was not quite the time frame we were hoping for.

Our Camper

This would be our home for three months.


I moved our camper onto the lot,had the well drilled so we would have water and hooked the camper to the septic system. At least we would have a roof over our heads.

With the help of my wife and my son in law,when ever he wasn't working at his regular job, we started building our new home.

On the day we were to move out of the house and into the camper, we were also putting up the truss rafters, and did I mention that it was pouring.. and it poured for the next two days. And to make matters worse, the movers who were to move our furniture to my daughters basement for storage, didn't show. As the saying goes “it never rains but what it pours”.

That evening after putting up the truss rafters,and with the use of a covered trailer, we moved furniture. It was a long day or should I say a long night. This was one of those times when I felt I should let a doctor have a look at my head.

The progress of the house moved on but not as fast as I had hoped, and before we knew it the leaves were changing fall was here.

We were quite comfortable in the camper but the nights were starting to get cooler,.and then it happened,we woke up one morning to a blanket of snow.

Snow can be a good thing if the temperature does not fall to far below freezing.The snow insulated the water line,a garden hose laying on top of the ground,keeping it from freezing.

But with the snow came colder weather and I am here to tell you our camper although great in the summer time is not so great in the winter.

And so in the middle of November we moved into our unfinished home,this was not part of our plans. If you have ever moved into a unfinished home you know what I am talking about. This is another time I thought about that insanity thing.

Our new home although unfinished was warm and the water didn't freeze. The wood fire place was doing a fantastic job of heating the house, and as it turned out we used the fire place the rest of the winter for heat.

Do to a back log in manufacturing my geothermal heat pump would not be delivered in time to be installed for this heating season,but the fire place was all we needed.

Our fireplace When I was younger this would have been just another adventure but as a more mature person, moving out of the security of your home at times was a little concerning


Would I do it again? in a heart beat.Would I do things different? you bet. If I planned to do most of the work myself then I would start building earlier in the spring,giving myself more time to finish the house before cold weather set in. And having a better plan for living arrangements..in case we found our selves out on the street.

My wife has often said to me “ I can't believe we were able to do it”. It is amazing what a person can do if you put you mind to it and if you are focused on what you are doing. You just do it.

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