A Short Story That Went Long...

Almost 5 years ago, we moved from Nampa to Idaho Falls (with a brief stint in Blackfoot between) and bought a teeny-tiny little house for a really great price. The house was super small, less than 600 sq ft, with only 2 bedrooms. But, since we only had Kylee at the time, that wasn't a big deal. Plus, we were planning to enclose the carport and turn it into a master bedroom/bathroom plus a dining area and laundry area. A quick and easy project, since the foundation was already there, as well as the roof. Then, after a quick 2 years of living in the house, we would turn around and sell it to harvest the equity of our hard labor.

After we bought the house, we called the building department to look into getting a building permit for the project. This is when the floor fell out from under our grand plans: we were informed that the only way we could convert the carport was if we created a driveway from the front of the house around to the back and poured a concrete pad for parking cars in the back, since the requirement was to have at least 1 parking spot that must be 10 ft from all sides of the property. The driveway in front of the house was too close to the street, and the area to the side of the carport was too close to the side of the property. Ick.

Not only was our quick and easy addition no longer possible, but we also found out about this time that we were going to be adding Mr. Aedan to the family (quite unexpected) and our cute little house was soon to be way too small. So an addition it must be.

We went back to the drawing board and finally came up with plans for our house. Unfortunately, the cost was such that we would have to either find lending or work on it very slowly over time. We chose the latter, hoping to avoid debt and do the work as cheap as possible.

Wow. We were smart. :0) We had some crazy experiences. Some we have vowed to never repeat, and some that taught us well enough that we think we can do it again. We had TONS of help from both our families and some of our greatest friends here in the ward, such as when Dad and Jake spent a day helping Brett pour the footings, the day we roped Bishop Eborn and Dan into helping us pour the foundation walls, or the day the whole McDermott clan came to help frame the place. Wow. Don't think they knew what they were getting themselves into...and I'm pretty sure they'll never get into that again!

It was a long, hard haul, but we finally finished our addition...more or less. We moved into the bedrooms early in 2009, and have slowly been finishing odds and ends ever since, including a deck (made out of the redwood from the deck that's been on my parents' house for years...they chose to tear it down for their own addition just in time!), and siding the old part of the house to match the new (with some help from Chance and Colton).

 

The new siding was so nice, it covered up this nasty old white stucco that was crumbling all over.

We also replaced the chain link fence on the side of the addition with wood and a gate, added a large storage shed in the backyard that Brett scored at work for free, and added several raised garden beds.

Then in January of 2010 we managed to pull together the money to redo the kitchen...the atrocious, tiny kitchen. It turned out SO nice! The pic below doesn't show it very well, but the worst part of the old kitchen was the cabinet that came out into the already narrow entry to the kitchen. And it wasn't just the lower cabinet, but the top, so it really blocked a lot of the view between rooms.

 

So many blessings came when we were finishing the house, like when Brandon came to visit and saw our dismal attempts at Sheetrock and mud, then asked a friend/ward member to help us out. They saved us!

  

 

 Kylee was super excited when the carpet finally went in.

My photography has been slow, but there are some times when it really seems to help us out. This spring we were blessed to have enough extra "unclaimed" income come in to be able to FINALLY buy couches. We had a nice black couch that we bought when we were first married. But when we moved back from Nampa and into Mom & Dad's basement for a few weeks, it wouldn't fit into the basement and we were out of room in storage. So we had to give it away, and Mom and Dad gave us their old couches from the basement. That is what we've been using ever since, and they were SO bad!

 See? Ick.

 Goodbye to the green and peach monsters!

 Aaahhh...much better.

Finally, almost 5 years (instead of 2) we have come to the point where we can put the house on the market. We chose to wait until I finished school, because our house was literally bombed the entire last year of my schooling, and there is NO WAY we could have kept the place clean for showing at that point.

So, our Memorial Day weekend was filled with laundry, cleaning, scrubbing, mowing, weeding, planting, and more cleaning. Oh, and paperwork. But we did it! Too bad it's going to be FOREVER before it sells, but at least this is a step in the right direction!

**I have to say, I KNOW I took more photos of the whole process, but I'll be darned if I can find them! Anyone who knows me knows I took a zillion photos, so the computer must have eaten them. :-)