Our journey to building our dream home.
We’re simple people, we like living a simple lifestyle, we don’t go on many vacations, we love being at home and homeschooling and homesteading. We had lived in the same house all our married life, which is currently 18 years, it was a great little house and wonderful as we raised small kids but once they started getting older and bigger and we had more stuff the desire for more room and more land kept growing.
We could rarely eat at the kitchen table because it was always taken up by schoolbooks, crafts, seeds starts or other projects someone in the family was working on and had no place else to put. It was extremely hard to work in the kitchen, because we would always be in each other’s way, our bathrooms were tiny and there were books all over the house. We considered several options over a few years, researched adding on, we looked at properties, we were planning to switch houses with my mother-in-law at one point. None of these options worked out for one reason or another and I felt that the Lord had something better in mind.
At the beginning of 2021 I was watching some Youtube videos and stumbled on a family that had built a barndominium mostly by themselves and were able to keep the cost to a miniumum. Shane had been showing me pictures of a beautiful but extravagant barndominium that he had seen on Facebook. I loved the idea but didn’t think we would be able to pull it off until we started watching videos of people building their own. I showed Shane the video and we started tossing the idea around. His mom had some property that would be the perfect spot for our new house.
That began our year long journey of researching options in our area and trying to find a building and a builder that would help us. We thought we had found someone but after multiple meetings, him way underpricing what he thought it would cost, taking forever to get back to us with the final estimate, we decided that he wasn’t the guy we wanted to help us on this journey. It was extremely frustrating to have to start all over again, but it made us realize that our original design was going to be to big and cost to much. So we reevaluated and came up with a better design that would really work for our family in the long run.
We had originally planned on doing a 2 story 40×60 with a built-in garage. When we got the estimate, we decided to bring it down to a 1 story and kick out the garage to potentially be built later on. Revamping the house plan felt so much more right for our family and our needs, but we still had to find someone to purchase the materials from and we had to find a builder. We were into 2022 at this point, when we got in touch with Reeds Metals and found that we would be able to purchase the building from them and that they had a builder they recommended that was close to our area. We were excited to work with Reeds because their prices were reasonable and they were very helpful.
More on our journey coming up in Part 2.
