April 7th, 2022 The Last Nail

Our first homesite plan.
It mostly failed.

There's a saying I like to use. Happiness comes of pride, pride comes of achievement.  Today I feel like we achieved something great and, filled with pride, I am a very happy man. 

Our newly built home.

We put the last nail into the structure of our Farmhouse today, completing its intended shape and function.  The details I will write about today are the broad strokes of out home's design and construction, what we were trying to build when we had nothing but empty dirt. 

This building project started in 2015 when I  Photoshop-ped a Google map image while playing around with possible farm layout. (The picture is at the top.)  The site planning went through ten, or so, reconsiderations before we ran into reality and had to site the house in a different place. 

This is the actual home
site plan we used.

In the early site plans, our intention was to make the Farmhouse look as small as we could. We wanted to hide the house by siting it in a back corner. In the end we were not allowed to build where we desired, so the home site was move to where it would be agreeable. This brought a complete change in how we saw the house project because once we had a home site we hired a nice architect named Eric to give us signed drawings.  Eric was worth most of the money we paid. He put fresh eyes on our  design ideas and made our plans work better within the space we had. Some of my early ideas were used, but the idea to re-orient the house along it's long axis presented the house as large and the central object central of the Farm.  

We loved the design Eric came up with and secured an engineer to provide structural details. Neither of these sets of drawings gave any guidance as to building the house, so we made some minor changes to the plans as we built it. Most of  our changes, or interpretations, were about being efficient with money. We used many used parts in furnishing the house. The bath tub, bath sink, cabinets, and doors  were all re-used from other houses. Where we couldn't re-use parts, we made decisions on a cost/benefit basis. All of our plumbing and electrical installations were done to minimize energy and water use and  also be well lit and heated.  Shopping for things we would find useful became a habit. 

This is my original design.
Eric made it work.

The house plan was fairly simple. Since our intention was to open our Farm up to the public, later on, we designed the house to look like a farmhouse might. The main design element in making this appearance was a wrap-around porch where we placed the last nail today. The porch we finished added 750 square feet to the footprint of the house, but also cuts cooling costs and decreases road noise. As we made the many thousands of decisions we added a seven foot ceiling and solid floor in the attic space adding a full 425 of highly usable storage space.  The entire useable floor space of our 1000 square foot house, is 1925 feet. 

This is what we built.
We adjusted it a bit.

Having never built an entire house, but having a great deal of experience in the building trades, we spent a time avoiding, and making up for, mistakes. The County's building inspectors chipped in quite a bit and gave us enough guidance to piece the whole thing together successfully. We had to come up with some idea of how the structure would go together, designed and built an entire water and waste system, then learned how to make a safe and effective electrical system.  Buying materials, learning how to pour a concrete foundation, and piecing a million things together only brought us to a point where we could decide how to finish the house inside and out. A million decisions, all well considered, mostly correct, brought us to today. 

Though we still have a long list of things we need to do before the County signs off on our permit, the broad strokes are done.  

Our last nail is figurative and not literal. But the shape of our home, and the pride of place feeling it gives us seems complete.