It’s good for the soul to visit your alma mater and cheer on your favorite football team (even if their season has been less than stellar). So that’s what we did! We packed up the car and headed East to cheer on our beloved Spartans and take a mental break from house plans, light fixture shopping and all things new house.
I received a text from Hubs letting me know that our builder communicated that he is “bringing in the sewer today”. Now, I don’t know what this means but my best guess is that he is having a large sewer pipe dropped off at the property. Since I don’t speak builder, this is of course just a guess and subject to gross error. Not thinking much of the news, I went about my busy day and didn’t even make a stop to check out the lake house happs. Well, turns out that was a missed opportunity! As I’m knitting away at soccer practice that evening, Hubs sends me a picture of our new crawl space that has been dug into the ground! Holy shit, sewer = crawl space?! As is the trend for me, I was surprised and excited about this development yet scratching my head over how digging our crawl space has anything to do with the sewer. I know my construction ignorance is showing here, but help a girl out!
It’s always comical to me how defining some events seem in my head versus reality. I pictured the ground breaking a major event, one that should be attended by the homeowner with excitement. The truth, for us, about building our house is that we usually find out that something has occurred after the fact, or we misunderstand what exactly is taking place, like today. LOL! It’s exciting regardless of how it comes about and thankfully I’m finding the humor in it as well.
So if finally happened, we broke ground on our new house!! Life is so good right now!
Xoxo,
Jenna
On a Tuesday morning in mid September I received a text from my lake neighbor.
Neighbor: your house is coming down soon
Neighbor: the tractor is on the lawn
Me: really? OK!
Me: I hope they notify me becuase I’d like to be there when they take it down
Neighbor: front door and front edge coming down
At this point I called my neighbor to confirm that my house was in fact being demolished at that very moment. After a quick call to Hubs to share the news I headed over to check it out. Sure enough, when I arrived an excavator was carefully prying the outside wall from the structure.
I kept picturing demo day as an explosive affair or one where a bulldozer levels my cottage in minutes, which I realize is completely unrealistic but that was all my brain could conjure up. In reality the demo process on our narrow lake lot was slow and carefully achieved.
It took two full days to dismantle the house, pull up the concrete slab, and haul all the debris away. Miraculously, not a single blade of grass on our neighbor’s lawn was disturbed during the process.
On the morning of the third day I stopped by to see if they had finished the demo and was shocked to see an empty lot. Which seems ridiculous since I knew what the outcome would be but it was so strange to see nothing but dirt where my cute cozy cottage once stood. I hadn’t felt much besides excitement until this point and I suddenly found myself feeling sad and sentimental about the loss of our favorite summer hangout.
I’m thankful now for the thousands of pictures I took of the boys and the fun we had as a family during the six summers we spent in our cottage. It’s probably time to make a photo album or something…
Cheers to progress!
Xoxo,
Jenna
Raising Home 