Building

Keith and I were married this past February, and growing with him has been the most amazing adventure of my life. Nothing makes me happier than knowing we get to spend the rest of our lives together.

 Keith and I on our wedding day.

We decided last year to make Saskatchewan our permanent home, rather than moving back and forth like  many football players do, and in September we're scheduled to be getting our house. I am just so excited to do my best to make a home full of creative touches and reflections of who we are. Both Keith and I come fresh off the farm, and we were lucky enough to find 18 acres not far from town and went to work designing our dream home. I've always said I didn't need a huge house (who wants to clean that much?), and we were overjoyed when we found Zak's  out of Hague, SK to build our home. I grew up in a big log house that my parents built, and always dreamed of open ceilings, no hallways, lots of windows, and a loft. So when we found a company willing and able to give us all these things (and still hopefully able to afford to feed ourselves after!) we were very excited.

The house process has been underway since March, and now that we're inching closer and closer I find myself getting more and more impatient. I longingly look at my lovely paint samples and the small pine cutoff from our ceiling boards. I sometimes just tuck the pine board into my purse so I can just pull it out whenever I want and hold it to me. I've also taken to longingly looking at furniture. Building a house is a daunting and expensive process, so we've come to terms that for the first few years we will work with the furniture we have. Which is mainly all leftovers from our college days: our current kitchen table used to be my desk in university, our couch Keith bought for $125 when we moved to Saskatchewan last year, our TV stand and coffee table are the smallest cheapest things we could get at Walmart, and we don't even have a bedframe or night stands. We walked through Sears the other day and I pretty much drooled over an amazing green corduroy couch and oak dining table. These are all things we can live without though. Things we can't live without is plumbing and heating. And a refrigerator. 

Now, a lot goes in to moving far from your parents and attempting to start up your own life. You don't realize things that you miss when you live around your parents home. And building not just a house but an entire acreage provides even more difficulty. Driveway, well, septic, fencing, basement, plumbing, electric, natural gas, hookups, shed, lean-to, (future!) garage, permits, water, phonecalls phonecalls phonecalls... This list goes on! Of course we decided to contract it all ourselves - how hard can that be right? Not to mention we can take the money we save on a general contractor to feed ourselves for the next how many years.

As daunting as the entire process is, I hope I remember every bit of this magical time in our life.