Phase I: The House-Garage-Barn

First, after promising my husband this blog would not become my new facebook--aka I would not be blogging all day every day--I decided that Monday is my blog day. That way it is not taking up time during the weekend or time at night during the week when neither of us work. I don't work on Mondays for now so this is perfect. So Monday = Blog day. :) Anyway on to business...

Right now my husband and I live in the city. Not a big city but a city. We both grew up in the country. My husband, A, hates the city (I'm not a huge fan myself). His parents own a bunch of land near the land their house is on, which also happens to be where he grew up. The land is in different places. It isn't all in adjacent parcels so there are a few options. A certain chunk has always been A's favorite. His parents gave us five acres from that parcel and we are going to build "Phase I" or "The House-Garage-Barn".  The land is many more acres than that and we hope to buy the whole lot eventually.

Phase I:

This is my idea for what we call what we are building. It hasn't stuck even though it is much shorter than the alternative. We are building this structure in the same general area as we will (someday) build our house. However, when we build a house we want it to be "right." We don't want to build and then add on and then remodel. We want to build it and be done. We definitely could not afford that right now. So we build something small that will get us out of town that will still be usable when we have a house. Enter......

The House-Garage-Barn:

The original plan was to build a garage/carriage house type structure with an apartment above it. This way when we build our "real house" we can still use the garage area as a workshop and the apartment as a guest house. When we started looking at plans, the original idea actually looked kind of boxy. So we spent a lot of time looking at plans and finding something that suited our needs without looking weird. 

We found the House-Garage-Barn. It looks like an old-style barn on the outside, has a two-car garage and *perk for A* a workshop area (He does woodworking on the side--his current project is refacing the cabinets in our current house). The upstairs is a 900-ish sq. ft. apartment. 

One great reason that we love this plan is that there is a lot of storage space in the first floor. We have a house that is double the size of the the apartment we are moving to. Although we don't have enough furniture to fill it by a long shot, we have enough junk from the years of living on our own (including 3 copies of the Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl on DVD) to fill up any and all storage space. 

One other thing we are excited about is that we don't have to have a house style picked out before building Phase I. We don't have to worry about the house matching the building.  Most places that have a detached garage build the house and garage together and build them to match. Many properties have a barn and the barn doesn't match the house. So we have a cool looking building that won't match our house and won't look weird because it doesn't match. 

Not sure what next week's topic is yet. We shall see what I come up with over the week. For now I have to get going with the rest of my day. :) As Tigger says, "TTFN-Ta Ta for Now!" :) Have a good week.