Just About Finished...

It seems like it has taken forever ... and it certainly has taken longer than we were hoping (thank you rain), but the shell of our house is just about done. The only things left to be done by our contractor are a door knob and some trim on the outside. It is a relief to have this building up on so many levels. First of all we have been accumulating a lot of materials and haven't had a good place to put them. Secondly, it would be helpful to have some shade out there for the kids to hang out in when we are working. And finally, it is very important to have the building done because we just sold my house (check out this link for more details).

As you can tell from the picture above it is really starting to look like a barn ... err ... house. Actually, we really love the look and are excited to get out there and look out those big windows every morning. The barn look is something that may come in handy in the future. There is a possibility that we will build a stick-built house in the future with a walkout basement. If that happens then we will turn this pole building into storage and an on-farm store.

I know I have kicked this around a little bit on the blog from time to time, but since we are getting close to beginning work on the inside I thought I would throw out some of our reasons for choosing the pole building style.

1. We just plain like the look. There are many pole building homes in the area and they all look okay, but we feel like it is a style that just begs for red and white colors. I like the fact that it is simple house with a little bit of character.
2. In theory it is a little less expensive to build. We will have to see how this plays out, but so far it looks to be holding true. It doesn't take any plywood sheeting for the building and the posts help form the foundation. And even though it took a long time to build ours if you just look the work days it went up pretty quick. That is a bit of savings.
3. That steel roof may come in handy when burning wood. With our wood burning stove inside it might be a nice thing to have a fire resistant roof. But, a well controlled fire will also help.
4. Since it is a pole building it is easy to finish inside. Because of they way pole buildings are put together we don't have to worry about any load bearing walls inside and can put them wherever we want. That helps with our design because we have gone through many changes.
5. It will work great as storage and will convert easily. Remember, this is basically the same thing that you see as machine sheds on farms and acreages. Because of that we can easily convert it into a variety of things.

Yep, we are pretty encouraged about the progress and even more excited because we have to be living in it in about six weeks (or the camper if all else fails). Also, if you have been wondering about some of the nuts and bolts of how we have gotten into farming and are making things work I encourage you to check out this weeks posts. I am going to kind of run a series looking back at how this all is coming about and hopefully encourage some people like so many readers and commenters have encouraged me!