No More 42 Degree Toilet Seats

It's all starting to come together, and we are tightening up our home for the cold weather! We now have heat with our monitor heater, no more 42 degree toilet seats!


The past week we started stripping down the kitchen. It has taken longer than we expected to paint the cabinets, but we are getting there thanks to Eric's carpentry skills and many hours of hard work.
Our wonderful brother Joel provided us with some bright beautiful green paint to lighten the kitchen up! It's going to look great! We also have a custom built addition to the kitchen, a bar, and we scored two bar stools to use from Goodwill.

Check out our new kitchen sink, a cast iron Kohler we found on Craigslist with nice new hardware. And Eric has started putting beadboard on the backsplash, which we will paint.


The tongue and groove ceilings are in for the most part in our bedroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room. We also have partially installed our solar tubes which will bring in some natural sunlight for free. We ended up sheet rocking our bedroom which feels and looks nice!















There is also beadboard in the bathroom, which we will paint, and we have built the vanity for the sink. We picked out some pretty purple (french) tile to cover the top of the vanity, we'll see if that works with the slate we want to use in the shower.

We have an awesome group of men working on our home, we are so grateful for Carmela, Manuel, Ayer and Contractor Mike! And, since this is Katherine posting, most importantly we have my awesome husband Eric as Project Manager who is making sure everything happens as it should. Pray the remaining work goes quickly, so we can bring our kitten Missy home and enjoy the finished product soon!

Our First Inspection!

Things are coming right along! The past few weeks we have begun tearing down the ceiling, installing new plumbing, and getting the rough in for the electrical. We had an ugly drop in ceiling in the whole house and after looking past some of the tiles I noticed that the roof is actually a somewhat cathedral ceiling! So we have decided to put up a nice tongue and groove pine ceiling similar to the house in Banner Elk. This should open up the house quite a bit and we are putting in sun tubes(similar to skylights) around the house to let the light in.

The kitchen is well under way too! We had to cut corners somewhere and decided to leave the cabinets. We have put crown molding on the top and will change out the hardware on the doors and update the pulls on the drawers. We all ready ripped out the old counter tops and put the plywood down for the tile and it has already mad a huge improvement. There will be recessed lighting in the kitchen and in the living room and will hopefully brighten up these spaces! Can't wait for the new window in the kitchen over the sink. We won't have to bend down anymore to see outside :)

It is getting colder here and the neighborhood folk have been worried about us getting done before the winter. Little do they know I have spent 8 winters in Banner Elk and Beech Mtn. and been down that road! We took down two big trees that were dead in the front yard and I have been busy getting it all cut up for the winter! We are having a wood stove installed in the living room and a wood furnace in the basement so we will be nice and toasty!

Today was a pretty huge day as we passed our first inspection. All new electrical and plumbing has been installed and all the new framing work has been passed! Now we can begin the fun part putting back the house and getting insulation back in the ceiling! It is almost as cold inside as it is outside! Not sure how many 42 degree toilet seats you have sat on but I'm ready for heat in my bathroom!

Tight For Now!

Until we get things working around here we have decided to live at the house while the construction is happening. I did this once before when I remodeled a house on Sugar Mountain. A little different then as I was single and only had to think about my own comfort and needs. Katherine agrees that we should work and live here while construction is going on as we can not afford to rent a house and pay a mortgage at the same time. Let's face it no one wants to rent a house short term especially when the find out we have a 100 LB Marley! So We are making do. We have a "sun room" off our master bedroom that has 3 sliding doors on each wall and the back wall connects to the house. We have a nice futon that is our couch and our sleeping quarters until our bedroom is complete ( sometime in the next 2 weeks). The refrigerator works that was left behind by the last owners, not luxurious but it works. We bought a small buck stove heater to put in the corner that provides our heat and a makeshift kitchen with a camp-stove, coffeemaker, and toaster oven. Nothing really that we can't cook unless we want to make a cake. I spent the day hooking up our water system that connects directly from the water cistern right out of the ground! It is the best water I have ever tasted. This is only temporary as FHA guidelines make us drill a well, which in the winter will be nice as sometimes the spring head freezes up. I will post photos tomorrow of the system as it has been raining all day and I don't want to hike up the mountain in the pouring rain :) The neighbor was nice enough to show me where our water cut on was, wayyyyy up the mountain. I checked and re-checked the main where the water comes in the basement and everything looked fine to me. When we turned on the water she asked, " Your sure you have the main cut off?" "Yup sure do." I replied. Little did I know that there was a hairline cut in the line inside the basement!! So there we were with inches of water left in our basement after a gushing run of water flow created by 100's of feet of pressure up the mountain! Hey you live and learn right! So I fixed the main water source in the basement and we now have running water! Ah yes the little things. Those of you reading this that have hot water and a toilet take a moment to give thanks that you have those things available to you. I won't even go into detail about how I was using the restroom before we had a toilet for 3 days and a service man pulled in the driveway! Lets just say I was outside too! HAHA The things we do....

The yard is really over grown but since we took possession of the property it has been raining every day! Good for our apple tree I guess....The apples are so sweet and I eat one every morning with my breakfast. Marley eats the apple core that's left over and LOVES apples :)

First Entry- September 21, 2011

Our First Home!

We did it! After 4 months of preparation and being drug through the mud by Wells Fargo we actually closed with 2 hours to spare on the contract late Friday night. We tried to close 3 times prior with no luck. I won't go into the details but the work it took to get the loan was not easy! We finally closed after waiting 2 hours at the real estate office and the lawyer never showed up! Finally we got a call saying they would not be able to make it until 9:30! Can you believe it! Well we could after so many failed attempts. So there we were with no where to close except a gas station with a few small tables that were open at the in house Subway Deli. We met a large older balding man with a lazy eye, par for course, and away we went. Nervous and excited the sweet man showed us all the paper work and we were done! We excitedly drove up the mountain to see our sweet cottage up HWY 9 in Black Mountain said a prayer and drove back to our friends house where we have been staying for the past several weeks.

See..... we were supposed to close after coming back from our Belieze and Guatemala vacation and come to find out we were homeless!! I couldn't believe it! Closing was delayed! So standing at our home that night almost brought us to tears as we locked up and drove away. Now the fun begins! Construction starts next week and we can't believe it is actually happening! Stay tuned for more photos of the construction!