Okay, so the new house is almost finished being built and I haven't blogged much about the process. The kids and I went and took pictures of the house just about EVERYDAY to show the progress. So instead of loading all those pictures on here- I am going to do a separate photo book for the house progress. Many people ask how building has been and if we would ever do it again. Right now- the answer is no I would not do it again. Am I glad I did it- yes. But it is really stressful and hard on the little's that I just don't have a desire to do that again. We are planning on having this be our forever home so hopefully that is our Heavenly Father's plan as well :)

Building a house has a lot of ups and downs. A lot of expectations and for us- a lot of miscommunication. We worked with a builder named Eschelon Homes. We had a lot of positive experiences with them- but had a lot of negative experiences as well....and unfortunately most of those negative experiences were at the end so it wasn't the end we wished for. BJ's brother JC is building a house with them and we are hoping they have an overall better experience than we did. 

One of the biggest stresses to building a house is all of the decisions. HA- I couldn't believe how many things we had to decide on that I had never thought of before. We thought we were pretty prepared going into building, and quickly realized how many little details we hadn't thought of. It was fun picking things but also stressful because we knew if it didn't look good it was our own fault.

In the end I think we were both pretty happy with what we chose. 

Here is a photo of the front of our house. The only thing different that you will see in another photo is the front posts are painted blue in this picture- but they repainted them the color we had originally requested which is white in a later photo. They actually also messed up and painted the front of the house opposite of what we had asked.....BUT, in the end we liked the way it turned out probably better than what we had chose so it worked in our favor.

We really wanted to put a "secret door" in the house, but the cost to have the cabinets painted and installed was going to be more than we wanted. SO- I volunteered to paint it while BJ volunteered to install the cabinet "secret door"

My amazing brother Johnathon came and helped me figure out the paint sprayer we borrowed from BJ's co-worker Gavin. I didn't want to mess up the cabinets nor ruin the paint sprayer, so I enlisted Johnathon's knowledge while BJ watched the kids.

It was SOOO Hot in the basement while we painted. They hadn't installed the air conditioning in the house yet. But we survived. Johnathon stayed for the first coat and I finished a little later on my own. I had posted this picture on facebook about how hot it was and how grateful I was for Johnathon's help. My neighbor Paige saw it and ran over with two water bottles!!! We LOVE that we have such amazing neighbors.

While I was painting the railing guys were there finishing up the back railing.

Yay! Looking good