Hello, everyone! I apologize for being a little MIA on my blog the last couple months. I had planned to send out one or two final posts before announcing that I would be taking a blog hiatus for a couple months. However, Baby arrived unexpectedly two weeks early, so my blog was left to sit and gather dust. 🙂

That is our biggest life update: we had a baby! “Baby J” was born on Christmas Eve and everyone is doing well. I will have a post sometime next month with his birth story. My husband was able to take three weeks off work, so we got a good start bonding and adjusting as a family. Our families and friends took great care of us in so many ways, so if you were a part of that, thank you! We are now into a routine of the new normal. Our sweet little boy is getting bigger and cuter every day, and we are loving this new season as parents.

Meanwhile, work on the house and land has been progressing. My husband has been hard at work on plans and paperwork. Due to some zoning rules about size, we had to redesign much of the house and make it a little bigger than we had planned. So instead of starting small and adding on, it will be medium-small and most likely stay that way.

Because of the change in size and design as well as a few other things, the whole house will take a little longer than planned. We had originally planned to have the house finished by fall of 2023. Now we are looking at fall of 2024 instead. This takes off a lot of extra stress and gives us the ability to do more of the work ourselves. Doing it mostly ourselves was part of the fun anyway, and it brings the costs down.

My husband has been doing a lot of house work on evenings and weekends, but he will also be able to take some time off over the summer to get bigger things done. We will be hiring a couple of our siblings to work part time for us too. It will be a fun family project!

Over the last couple months, he has been finalizing the design, filling out permits, and prepping for our next steps. We also staked out the house site! The loggers cut all the trees a couple months ago and we had a few “stonemason” days with our families to get a feel for how to do stonework, as the design includes a stone chimney and a partial-stone foundation.

We are currently waiting to get one of our permits back so we can move to the next one and waiting for the loggers to move their logs so we can put a driveway in. Once we get a driveway, we can purchase our sawmill, mill our logs, and get the foundation, well, and septic in.

Now that we are mostly adjusted to our new normal, I plan to get back to posting as regularly as Baby J allows; but hopefully back to 2-4 posts and one email update per month. I look forward to it!