House Update

On Tuesdays I'll write updates on the house we're building. I should call it "Into the abyss" because the number of decisions we need to make continues to multiply exponentially. For those new to the blog, welcome! We are building our own house (with the help of some skilled help), along with my wife Paige's sister and her family who are building next door.

Our pad will be poured tomorrow. They poured Steve and Terri's yesterday, and dropped off their trusses. Framing begins on theirs tomorrow. Ours won't get framed until the end of the month (unless the framers get ahead of schedule on other projects). It's getting really exciting to see the houses begin to rise out of what once was an alfalfa field.

Our building consultant is a great man of God who prays for our homes as much as we do. It's so great to work with people that look at things like a house as a tool that God can use to reach people.

Here's a funny. We drove out to the land last night at sunset with our oldest son Josh. He hadn't been out in a while, and it was great to spend some time with him. The sunset was amazingly beautiful (Go God!). Paige commented that the new house will be closer to the sunset! We all had a good laugh. The house is a quite a bit farther west from where we are now. Some of our friends a joking that it's no longer West Phoenix, it's East LA. We aren't moving that far out!

Selfishly, I began the idea of the new house wanting more space for my workshop for my woodworking and car hobbies (The new house has two four car garages, one of which is an air conditioned workshop). As I began to really pray about the house, and gave it to God, he began showing me ways it can be used for Him that I never imagined. I can't wait to have father-son workshops so that they can learn while spending valuable time together. The back yard will be a large enough grass field to do about anything we want. We are setting up the irrigation and lawn so that it will cover both back yards as one yard. We will have a football field sized lawn! We are really looking forward to entertaining. We are already praying for our future neighbors and actually hope that not all of them are believers.

Anyway, some of the decisions this week have been selecting faucets for the showers (not as easy as it sounds) so the valves can be installed during framing. We ordered the Jacuzzi tub for the master bathroom. Friday we'll pick out the latillas (lodge pole columns) and review framing issues like door heights. We were going to go with 8' doors (10' ceilings), but some of the narrower doors look goofy to us at that height, so we're going to go with the standard 78" doors except for the sliders and front door which will remain 8'. We are also looking at fireplaces for the master bedroom (Jacuzzi tub, fireplace, I'm really working on bonus points since I bought a huge TV for the family room). The plan is to have a plasma tv built in above the fireplace. I'll talk to the framers to see if I need to get that now too (I hope not).

Stay tuned!