Our new house

Before I let this go too long, I wanted to include a picture of our new house. Actually, I'll include a pictures of the old house we left, a picture of my mother-in-law's house before we added on to it and finally a picture of our new house added onto my mother-in-law's house.

Here's the old house we left. This is a picture from a couple of years ago when we had an hard snow. We rarely get this much. This house was originally built in 1928. The dormers weren't on it when I bought it and there was only a front porch. There was practically no insulation and there had been a limited fire (that I didn't know about until I started ripping out all the walls to insulate the house). As with any old house, there was always a lot of work to do. No matter how much I fixed, there was always more to do. It had two acres of land with it that was nice. I planted a lot of different kinds of trees around. But cutting the grass on about one acre of that land was starting to be a burden. Also, when I got married, my wife wanted air conditioning and we were unable to get whole house air conditioning in this old house. So, we started to think about selling this house and buying a new one. Unfortunately, we couldn't sell this house for enough to buy a new one with comparable room. So, we were stuck.

Then, we got the bright idea of building a new house on my mother-in-law's property. She had an acre of land so we would only have to buy the house. Also, my wife found a modular home company that could build a nice, new house for what we expected to get for our old house. Everything seemed perfect until the town told us we couldn't have two separate houses on one lot. I could spend an entire post of the back and forth of that. But we finally decided to just add onto my mother-in-law's house. Here is what her house looked like before we added on. This isn't the best picture of her house but it makes more sense when you see our new house attached to it. It took years of planning, working with a lawyer to talk with the town, getting the plans right, selling our old house (in a very slow market) and preparing to move. Finally, on August 28, 2006, the builders started to dig the foundation. By November 4, we were moving into the new house! That is the wonder of getting a modular house. I'll show some pictures of them putting our house together in another post. It was delivered in four pieces and by the end of the first day, it was water proof. Here is our new house the day we moved in. Notice that we had my mother-in-law's house resided using the same siding and shutters as we were using on our part of the house. Also notice that we loved the Farmer's Porch on the old house so much that we got one on our new house. Also notice that we have no grass yet. The builders will be coming back in the spring to plant grass and do a little landscaping. I hope that will be the final touch that makes our new house perfect. We have a little less area in our new house but it is laid out so much better than our old house that we hardly notice the loss of room. Everything is in the right place. We got to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in our new house. We couldn't be happier.