Progress Being Made

It has been a while since I have given an update on the progress of our farmhouse, so that is just what I am going to do. 

We were at a stand still for a while and it felt like there was no progress being made (even though there was...it just didn't seem like it). There was a problem that we had to take care of before we continued working on anything else. The issue was with the 100 year old stone foundation. And as you can imagine, it was a bigger problem then what we had planned. We knew when we bought the house that the foundation might need a little patch work done to it, but that was about all we planned for. As you might know, more times than not things don't go as planned with construction...there is almost always something that you run into (whether small or big) that you could not see and did not plan for. Unfortunately, this was a bigger problem than we thought and it was going to cost us more than we budgeted for, too. We got a quote from a company that would work on our foundation and it was going to cost us $15,000. We knew it had to be done, but we weren't willing to fork out that much money considering that is more than we paid for the house alone!! My handy husband decided that this was a project that he could do himself and save us at least $12,000. So that is what we have been doing for the past couple of weeks. We knocked out the corner of the stone foundation, and put a beam in its place while we jacked up the corner of the house with two heavy duty hydraulic jacks. That was stressful to say the least...we could hear the house cracking and see it being held up by this beam alone. We knew that we would never have been able to do this on our strength alone, so we leaned on God for His wisdom. We then poured a footing below the frost line and replaced the stone by building a wall with cement blocks, then finally let the house back down once the mortar dried. We can now say that we have successfully lifted up a house and did foundation work (add that to the list). Here are some pictures that speak for themselves. 

But praise The Lord that this is behind us now! Such a weight has been lifted off our shoulders and we we are one step closer to moving in! 

We have been very busy which means we have to find time to squeeze in working on our house. During the day we work on the business and at night we work on our house. So we don't get a ton of time to work there, but we are making every minute count! We have been working hard this past week and can finally say that all of the framing is done! We started with the upstairs, then worked our way downstairs. It is starting to feel like home to us! We can see where we will be doing laundry, where we will be working in our office and where our baby (one day) will sleep! All of this is so exciting to us because we are seeing our dream come to life! There is still a long way to go, but we are enjoying the process and growing closer in our marriage because of this! 

Keep your eyes peeled for more!!!