Wow that's a long heading! But seriously, what DO you do when something that was seeming more and more improbable suddenly becomes something that actually CAN happen? It's been a long time coming to get to this point and I honestly don't even know how to process this new information.
We moved into our house after our wedding and figured we would stay for a short amount of time before finding another home. Then over time we got to the point where we couldn't fathom leaving because this was HOME. Then we started talking about the possiblity of adding on a 2nd floor. We were really invested in this idea for a few years. We felt like we needed a little bit more space if we wanted to have kids in this house. We got in touch with a few log cabin companies to see if it was even possible. Can you even build an addition to a pre-exisiting log home? We found a few companies that weren't so hot on the idea. We also found 2 companies that said, "YES! It can be done." We had both draw up plans for a 2nd floor. One company was hard to get in touch with and didn't send plans that had any "heart" in them. The other company got us in touch with a builder near us who drove out to our house on a Sunday to meet with us and sent us beautiful plans fairly soon after. Then there was talk about cost, figuring out the logisitics, the recession getting worse, and a upcoming Lillie arrival. As much as we wanted to make this happen we decided it was time to put house stuff on the back burner because taking care of our family came first. In the mean time we saved and saved so that whenever things were ready to fall into place we would be ready to go.
Lillie was born and during the first year of her life we just focused on us, the 3 of us, becoming a family. Then we started thinking about adding on again. Now we REALLY loved our house and it became even more increasingly important to stay here but we also want to expand our family some day and we will need an additional bedroom for that (and preferably kid's rooms without exterior doors). We started talking about possibilities and thought about building out instead of up. We got in touch with the builder again and found that going out would actually be cheaper than going up. He drew up some new plans. They have been sitting in a roaming folder that floats around the house but they are here. We figured out the finacial plan of action and things started falling into place but there were still questions. As things became more real we needed to get the ok to build and for months we've been waiting on the surveyor to say yes before we could go any further. Yesterday we finally got the news. We are officially a duplex, not an in-law apartment like we feared. We CAN build an addition. We can expand the house. We can give Lil a room without an exterior door. We can have stairs to the basement INside the house. We can have a washer and dryer IN our own house. We CAN! The one drawback is that we will need to install our own seperate septic system and will need to get a perk test first (always 1 more hurdle to go) and of course it will add on to the cost.
It was such a shock to the system to get an ok. I'm still in disbelief. We've had so many roller coaster waves of "can we" or "can't we" over the past 6 years and now we're within sight of the finish line. It looks like it's almost time to get in touch with the builder again and see where things go from here.
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