The Sold Sign Out Front

We did it.  We sold our house.  A lovely family with 6 children fell in love with our home.

We are so very relieved!  Living (or not living) in a 4000 sq ft house part time while trying to sell it was a chore.    Keeping it ready for showings caused us to develop a daily ritual.  In fact, we have pretty much stopped cooking at the house altogether.  I have been buying a lot of prepared foods and paper plates. Of course we are eating out more, too.  Yuck.  But now it's over.

On the day of the showing to this family, I had re-affirmed my commitment to selling this house.  We staged the house as if we knew the people already.  There were fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, a favorite game staged in the game room.  A Disney movie played in the background.  There were so many things I did that I don't want to post them here, but if you contact me I'll send you a list.


Our realtor, Alexis, is sending me a picture of our closing to upload.  I hope to have it soon.

The Cabin is Delivered

Our home sale is about to close, but we will not be homeless.  Our cabin was delivered on a hot August day with record breaking temperatures.

The dirt pile Joe created when he built the stemwall for the house.

We're not sure about drinking the well water because we haven't had it tested yet, so I drove into Carney to pick up bottled water for everyone.  Jeremy had his sons out helping but no one had packed water.  The temperature was 103 F and the work of setting the cabin on the stemwall required patience.

After an hour, I realized the water bottles were sitting in the sun, so I moved them to the shade of the building.  I didn't realize that Alan had been moving gravel into the area with the tractor.  Within 2 minutes of setting the water in the shade, Alan drove over them.  I heard an explosion of plastic and turned around to see him sheepishly say, "I thought it was trash."

I hate to doubt my husband, but a part of me believes the 10 year old boy inside wanted to see what happened when you drive over water bottles with a tractor.

Regardless, it was my fault for setting them there.  Back to Carney for a case of water.

By 6:30, the building was secure.  Jeremy and Joe (our carpenter) headed home.  We headed back to Tulsa to pack.

A Tiny House?

I've spent some time looking at sites like Mother Earth news for cabin and "do it yourself plans."  We are still plagued by our work schedule.  For the same reason we couldn't remodel the house by ourselves, we won't be able to build a small cabin ourselves.

I really like the Tiny House Blog.  It inspired me to think even smaller than the Field's cabin.  I went back to the Better Built website and started looking through the standard buildings they had.

We stopped by Better Built to talk to them again about just buying a standard building and having someone else do the finishing work.  I had a sketch of a floorplan for the 14x32 (the largest standard building they build).  I knew from my blog research that we needed to think through concepts like window and door locations as well as wiring.

This picture shows the "main" area of the building.  There is a dividing wall between the main area and the garage.  By increasing the pitch of the roof to the max they would allow, we hope to create a small loft for the girls sleeping area above the kitchen and bath.

The garage area is 10 x 14 and will house the UTV (which we PLAN to purchase, but haven't).  They are including a 6x8 door in the garage.  We'll also frame in a small space in the garage for the water heater.

We hope to have this in place by the time school starts.  We still aren't sure about whether the girls will attend a private school in Edmond or Perkins-Tryon.

A Log Cabin, or a Better Built Barn?

Our house is for sale and it's time to talk about building a new house out at "the ranch."  We've decided to quit calling it "the property."  I believe in speaking positively to achieve your goals.  Calling it "the property" means that is all it will ever be.

For two years we've been labeling wine as "ALDEN Ranch."  (I had hoped it would influence our ultimate achievement when we settled on the name back in 2009.)  Here we are, at ALDEN Ranch, without livestock and without a house.

We've toyed with building a log home and have had stacks of Log Home Living magazines lying around the house for years.

I've contacted a few companies featured in the magazine including Satterwhite which is very eco-friendly because they use dead standing timber.  I really like their concept, and some of their homes are beautiful.  I also looked at Coventry and a couple of others featured in the magazine.

I'm nervous about the decision. I'm not sure we can afford to do this right now.  With our home sale pending and an uncertain economy, I hate to commit and create more debt.  Quite frankly, the whole reason we are moving is to change our lives.  I know that we will work hard at the ranch, and I'm not afraid of hard work, but there is something so appealing about owning our land AND home.

I called Ernest at Better Built to see if they have done any custom construction and they have indeed.  The Fields family (of 10) have moved out of their Sapulpa home into a custom cabin  that isn't more than 800 square feet.

Jeremy arranged a visit and we stopped by.  What an amazing family.  They have 2 lofts (where the children sleep), a small kitchen, a bath for the kids, and a master bedroom with bath for Mom and Dad.  This looked like a perfect arrangement.

Unfortunately, the cabin has to be built on site because it is too tall to be transported on the trailer like the garage was.  They told us that they just couldn't build on site for us, and that they didn't have the staff to do the custom work.

We are disheartened and disappointed.

Our House Goes on the Market

We're done.  Our lives have been disrupted and the only activities allowed outside of work are cleaning, boxing, painting.  Living in a home being remodeled is a chore.

I hear that living in a home you are selling is worse.

Tyler Owsley did a fantastic job.  Here's the testimonial I sent him and few pictures of the house.

"Tyler, We are so pleased with our home improvement project.  You are a man of your word.  The project stayed within our budget and the outcome was terrific.  Thank you for the great work that you and your crew did for us.  We will definitely consider working with you in the future." I can tell that Alexis isn't sure about our asking price, but I know the value of the home to a family like ours.  The people that buy our house will be exactly like us, because you wouldn't buy this house if you didn't have a big family.   The yard is beautiful, but I'm feeling a little sad about selling.  Looking at the firepit and hot tub, I wonder how long until we have something like this again.

Water, Shelter, Electricity

The garage is turning out to be a huge blessing.  We wonder what we did before we had it.  Now we are able to get out of the cold wind to work on a few projects, but it's hard to accomplish much here with the cold wind.

The recent bitter cold has shattered the pipes in the pump house so we've got the pump shut off for now.  We're going to have to get someone here to help us.  The wiring in the pump house is shoddy and with all of the trash left in there (old heaters, empty clorox bottles, misc trash) I'm not comfortable with Alan crawling around.

The guy from CREC hooking up the electric was funny, though.  He looked in there and said, "ah it's just 220".  But he also agreed that the wiring needed to be redone.   He thought Alan could do it.

Up at the other pole, which is closer to the new garage, I wanted an outlet so we could start to use other equipment.  It's kind of hard to work on any improvements (or even just camp for the weekend) without a place to plug in.

I called Bob Foster at Foster Electric, Heat, and Air in Chandler, OK.  What a great guy.  He came out and hooked up exactly what we needed and let us do most of the transaction through email.

Bob had some advice about our construction plans when I mentioned building a walk out basement.  He said he's seen too many leaky basements in Lincoln County because of the red clay.   I am a little disappointed to hear that since I'm set on having a walk out basement.

We're Selling the Tulsa House

We need to be here all of the time to make any progress.  That's what Alan thinks, and I agree.  Camping is ok, but we barely have time to do anything else but set up and tear down camp.

Can we sell our Tulsa home and start building out here?

Consistent with our decision making, a thought about selling our 4,000 sq. ft. Tulsa house quickly turned into actually selling our Tulsa house.  I've emailed our realtor, Alexis with Coldwell Banker.  Connie, our realtor friend in Oklahoma City said houses were selling but not houses in the middle.  We needed to either deeply discount our house, or fix it up.

We decided to fix the house up.  Walking through the house itemizing projects created an intimidating list.  The house needed to be painted, inside and out.  The bathrooms needed an update, the flooring needed to be replaced in some areas.

Even though we are quite handy, we realized we couldn't do it all ourselves.  Especially since our company was launching a new product which requires a lot of our weekend time.

I bought some great faucets on faucetsdirect.com.  Alan is going to do that work himself.  I've already re-painted the kitchen cabinets and replaced the hardware with brushed nickel pulls.

I claimed ownership of my house on Zillow and began searching for "comps."  Our house is on a 1/2 acre lot with 40+ trees and backing up to a green built.  I needed to know how much it was worth to establish my budget for the improvement.

I searched the BBB for a contractor who had a website.  I hope that having a website means I can contact him via email.  I just don't have the time for telephone calls and doing some business transactions through email is more efficient.

I found Tyler Owsley with Sound Construction, L.L.C.