Some of you who know Gaelic (or can Google the words “bonnie braes”) may be wondering why I’m writing about building pleasant hills. Surely I can’t spend an entire blog discussing the process of mounding up dirt, no matter how pleasing the end results.
Alas, this blog is not about hills (though perhaps a hill or two will feature into later posts). Bonnie Braes is the name that the original owners gave to the house where my husband, daughters, dog, and I currently live. It is an apt name, for our house sits on 17 acres of rolling, wooded hills. Overall, it’s a nice enough house though there are many changes we wish to make to it. And that is where the building part comes in.
One of the biggest changes is a major renovation that we’ve been working on in fits and spurts for over three years now. It was actually something I had first brought up when we were looking at houses. Our house was built in the seventies, and it shows. The kitchen color palate includes burnt orange countertops and a green floor. Our upstairs bathroom takes this one step further with a blue bathtub for added variety. It may have been in style fifty years ago, but I prefer things a bit less. . . colorful.
After much discussion, we decided that we would buy the house despite its flaws. It met all of our biggest criteria—it had acres of mature woods, the price was good, mortgage rates were low, and we figured that anything about the interior of the house was changeable. In fact, we actually thought we would be better off getting a house with a dated kitchen and bathroom. After all, everyone says that you should upgrade your kitchen and bathrooms in order to get the best deal when selling your house, so we assumed that the best deal when buying a house would be when the owners did not do this.
If all we had decided to do was change out the linoleum and countertops and perhaps resurface our bathtubs in a less garish color, we would probably have been done with the renovation and moved on to other projects by now. But we did not stop there. Oh no. Once we started discussing some of the more minor changes, we started thinking about other things we wanted out of the house. A masonry heater so we would not be reliant on electric baseboard heat (we live in the upper Midwest, so this was a big deal). But that would take up considerable space in the family room and kitchen and require us to basically remove a bedroom. So an addition was added to the plans. And if we were going to do that, we might as well make a bigger kitchen in that addition and use the existing kitchen as a large pantry to further our goal of making all our own food.
You can see how this could spiral out of control. But we were young and had no children at the time, so we figured that it was the best time to make all of those changes. Or at least, I decided that and convinced my ever-patient husband of that fact as well. We set out to find a contractor to do the basic work for the addition—pouring the foundation, building the walls, adding the roof. In our infinite wisdom—or, perhaps more accurately, my infinite optimism—we figured we could do the rest of the work ourselves. Since we had the complete shell, we could work at whatever pace we wanted. We knew it was a big project, but we had pulled a building permit for two years which I thought would be plenty of time.
Some of you who have undertaken such projects before are probably laughing at our ambition. The rest of you are probably remembering that I mentioned earlier we’ve been working on this for over three years and wondering how that math works (turns out, at least in our town, you can just pay the permit fee again to renew it for another two years, so we’re still legal). Despite the time we have spent on this, the house is nowhere near complete. We’ve basically been living in a construction zone for three years. At one point, there was a hole in the upstairs floor (we have since filled it with concrete to form the base of upstairs masonry heater). And this was not a small hole either—it’s a four foot by six foot monstrosity that confused our dog to no end.
Of course, this renovation isn’t the only project we want to complete. After all, Bonnie Braes is not just a house—it’s a home as well. Therefore, some of the “building” will be more figurative—such as the building of our family which recently doubled in size when we welcomed twin girls. This, of course, means there will be plenty of posts about raising twins as well (I certainly do not claim to be an expert, but hopefully you can still learn something from my experience). And then there is the building necessary to reach one of our major goals in life—to bring ourselves as close to self-sufficiency as possible. There are countless topics in that sphere, from raising chickens to our exciting attempt to build a root cellar. My husband and I are both big believers in trying things for yourself instead of just paying someone to do them for you. This method has brought a number of rousing successes, but sometimes, it also leaves a ton of rapidly drying cement in the middle of your root cellar at 9PM on a Wednesday night. However, we have learned more from many of those failures than we have ever learned from our successes. Hopefully you can as well—and perhaps without needing a jackhammer.
On a final note, I consider self-sufficiency to encompass the financial sphere as well. Though I do not hate my job (most days), a lot of my long-term goals are not conducive to an eight to five job. I want to be free to pursue whatever I happen to be passionate about at a given time. I also want the time to try different things and build up new skills. The unfortunate thing about most careers these days is that they are extremely specialized. If you want to advance, you build your skill set in a particular area and then continue to refine that same skill set day in and day out. While this specialization works well for the productivity of a company/nation, it is just not exciting for me. And so while this blog is not strictly about early retirement/financial independence, that is one of my major life goals and will thus come up from time to time.
With that, I invite you to join me on this journey. There should be a lot of laughter, possibly some tears, and probably gratuitous dog/baby pictures. While I will be building my house in the literal sense, I will also be building my family, my skill set, and my self-sufficiency. And while I may have started thinking about this blog to describe the house building, in the end, I expect the figurative building to be the worthier journey.
