Temporary Housing

So in order to do this project, and work on it ourselves as much as possible, we obviously need some temporary housing! We've looked at a used mobile home that is in nice condition, but is $26,000.00. We decided on Saturday to swing by the land and check the burn sites, then go to Ralph's Homes in Waldoboro to check out what they had for used homes. Alan had seen on the website that they had a few available.

Off to Ralph's we go, after breakfast at Moody's Diner. It brought back memories of eating there with my grandparents as a young girl, I think the seat cushions are the originals! Anyway, my mother had bought a double wide from a dealer in that area, I thought we had gone past Moody's to get to where she went, but Alan was sure Ralph's was on the opposite hill. He was right on that, but I was right that we had gone by Moody's to where my mom got her's, because it was at Bogg's not Ralph's! Anyway, we stop in and they have NO used trailers. I told Alan a simple call would've saved us a lot of time! But we decided to look at the homes anyway and got some good ideas for designs and I got a feel for the different dimensions.

When heading to Ralph's we had passed a modular home place with just 3 houses. I told Alan I wanted to stop in there on the way back. We pulled into the drive, and there was our house, a little gingerbread looking house with the porch and scalloped shingles on the top half, and can anyone guess what color it was?! YELLOW! (Upon seeing the house a second time, its not really Yellow but a yellowish brown, though I could've sworn it was light yellow the first time, LOL)

We walked into a little house, 28'x34', with the area over the dining, livingroom open to the ceiling, a little loft and extra room upstairs, an open kitchen, dining, living area like we've wanted and 2 bedrooms and a bath in the back. No master suite. But we loved it. We've been looking at homes off and on since buying the land, and while we've liked some features of each, none has been a "This is the ONE" feeling. We finally found it, and the homes are made by KB Builders right here in Maine. You can have them do as much or as little as you want and they can customize the plans any way you want. We got the floor plans and price list for the little cottage and headed home.

On the way home, we talked about how we could make the house work for us. We think if we do a full basement instead of a slab, the girls can have their two bedrooms down there with plenty of space for a living/rec room for company and privacy. We will have our mastersuite on the main floor, take out the downstairs bathroom and put it in the entry way we add to the side of the kitchen, change the stairs to one with a landing and move them into the space where the bathroom was, opening up the kitchen area more and making the livingroom bigger, and giving us a common wall so we can have a two sided fireplace, one in the livingroom and one in the bedroom (always been a dream of Alan's to have a fireplace in the bedroom!). Then the loft area can be a computer/away space and the little room behind a spare guest room. I also thought about extending the top of the house in the back, making the room upstairs bigger and creating a covered, screened back porch. The house at Hundred Acre Wood is designed like that, and I got the idea when I rode Saturday. We would have the laundry and 1/2 bath in the entry and attach a garage! Ta Da! Now I need to go get some cost estimates, but I'm confident we will have the money when we need it!

Oh yeah, to the point of this post! I called my sister on Sunday and told her about the little house and how things were coming together. She said her husband had worked with a man that does electrical, plumbing and heating, a master electrician that worked on his own on the side. They are going to talk to him for us to see if he'd be able to work on our house. Later she called back and said they knew someone with a 30' 1999 tag along camper for sale for $7,500.00! They had lived in it while building their house, and he was also a contractor. I had them e-mail pictures and it looks new. We're going to look at it Wednesday, that is an awesome price and I think we could manage to stay there. Then use it for company!

Now the funny part, the electrician's name is DUSTIN Oliver, and the camper owner is DARREN York, the names of my middle two sons, there's my sign!