Happily Ever After: It has begun...

For those of you that read this post awhile back, you know that toward the end (yes, you had to read alllllll the way to the end to get this part) we talked about our living situation and what's next. These were my exact words "We have decided to build a small, probably close to 1,000 square feet, two bedroom, 1 bath house and live in it for a year or so. We are actually able to pay cash for this with the equity from our home that we sold, so we will be mortgage free during this time. In February of 2018 we will be able to qualify for a loan, so we will start the build of our dream home then. Or not, if we decided we like living mortgage free!!!" In all honesty, when I wrote that, there was definitely a part of me that was totally joking. We have plans already drawn up for our dream home; there was no way Trevor was going to talk me out of building my dream home! Well...it happened. The more we talked about permanently staying in this smaller home and adding on as we need, paying cash for each part as we go, the better and better it started to sound. No, I won't get my dream home, but we have found a way to work in those dream home features that I loved. Plus, it will be a DREAM HOME because we won't have a mortgage! That is a dream home! That will be an extra $1,000+ a month that we either won't have to make or we can put toward vacations, college, making memories, etc!

We have drawn up plans ourselves and plan to do the majority of the work ourselves, which will be so neat to be a part of. This has already been a process in itself. Ha! We had plans drawn up and we kept changing things around and relocating different rooms and we just couldn't finalize them. Well, just the other day we scrapped all those plans and started over. I think we are both really happy with these updated plans and I can't wait to share them once we have them totally finalized.

So, the first step has been accomplished---clearing the land where we plan to build. We picked a place that is completely covered with trees and you actually can't drive a car back there because of how built up it is. You can park and walk to it, but you still get attacked by thorn trees and different pokey sticks. lol. So, we had a lot of work to do before we could actually start the build process. Trevor's grandma is having a ton of dirt being dumped on her property from the muskogee turnpike construction, so there are several workers on her land every day. The project manager agreed to help us clear the property where we want to build, which means we didn't have to pay someone. We were obviously at the mercy of him though and since this was the first step, not much could happen until the land was cleared.

I know this doesn't look like much...but it's the first step to getting started! WAHOO!!

The top picture was taken right after Christmas and the bottom picture is now. So you can see how much the bulldozer guy helped us!

Here are some more pictures of the progress.

Our driveway "before"

Our driveway "after" the trees were cleared. We couldn't even walk where we wanted our driveway to be located, so this was neat to see and get to walk.