One Week Away...

Well, yesterday our realtor called in order to set up a specific time for our closing! For the past three weeks it seems like we have just been waiting in limbo for this day to come, and now we are only seven days away. So, now after months and months of planning and preparing the rubber is about to hit the road. Once we take possession of the land there is still plenty of paperwork to do. Because of the type of building we are doing and because of the small amount of money we are planning on spending we are going to have to work with two lenders. In the next couple of weeks we need to get everything together so we can release land to the building lender and then put together a materials list for them. It makes my head spin just thinking about it!

As I have mentioned before we are planning on building a pole frame building to live in. This type of building will be less expensive to build and go a up a little more quickly. The ability to put the building up quickly is very important to us, because we want the church to be able to sell the parsonage we live in as soon as possible during the good selling season in the spring. So, once the plumbing is roughed in, the building is up, and the slab is down our first order of business will be the bathroom and a kitchen sink! Once we have those we can think about moving in and just camping out in the "house". It won't be ideal to live in it while we build it, but it is what we have to do. Of course if the parsonage takes a little longer to sell then we will have more time to build.

Initially we are planning on only building one permanent building on the farm followed by the possibility of a permanent three sided shed once the house is somewhat moving along. We want to see how the farm and the land work before we go planting buildings all over the place, but we do need a place to live and a place to store some hay. As long as it is possible to get water and electric to the building site we have now decided to build on top of the hill. As many people mentioned in other comments it is nice because it gives a view of the entire land and the surrounding area, along with giving a good flat spot to build the buildings and plant the garden.

The building we are planning on having built will be 36 x 45 x 10 (possibly longer depending on how the builder spaces the posts). Also it will most likely have a 6 foot porch running the length of the building. At this point we plan on finishing a portion 36 x 35 which will give us 1260 square feet and a small area for small equipment storage and "garage" type stuff. In the long run if we decide to continue living in this building then we will have an extra 360 square feet to "add on" with out much work.

But, the other plan behind this building (and the reason for the 10 foot ceilings) is to turn this "barn" type building into a on farm store in the future when we build a stick building. At that point we will not need 1260 square feet for the store so we can reclaim part of the building for barn and still have a high enough ceiling for storage. It would give us a neat sales building and a possible location for a certified kitchen if we wanted to go that value added direction.

I told my wife last night that I wish we could just be at the point of building now. I'd rather be deep in debt and working rather than trying to figure out how to get into debt! Oh well, in time ... in time ...