Sam & Sean
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Exterior
It’s our first Friday Five and we’re super stoked to get these babies started! Things are always moving at the farm and February is no exception. Today we’re talking about some of the biggest steps we’re taking to start turning the house into a home this month.
It’s no secret that we haven’t had heat since we’ve bought the farm back in 2018 (the property had been vacant for 10 years before us). One of the things we unfortunately did not factor into our architectural plans was how our HVAC would be laid out.
Working with half of the home being 160 years old and the other half being new construction makes this process a little trickier than expected. Right now we have two options. Option One: Keep only one furnace and run ducts that will mess up our glorious layout. Option two: Use two furnaces (one on each floor), pay double the cost up front, and lose one of our upstairs closets. Decisions decisions.
You guessed it, we haven’t had power at the farm since we’ve owned it either. That means we basically have stock in generators and have worked by flashlight day in and day out. Never being able to hit a switch and light up a room is absolutely something I realized we take for granted on a daily basis. Guys – I very likely will be brought to tears the day we get to turn real lights on in the house!
Another item we’ve never had at the house is running water. We’ve been carrying buckets of water by hand from the creek for all of our gardening and cleaning. Needless to say, it will be a beautiful day when we finally have running water.
Our exterior doors. This section deserves its own blog post (and it very well will have one). We hunted high and low looking for the right front door and french doors that will do justice to our home, and bring some of that 1860’s character back in. With the help of Sierra Pacific, we found our perfect match. You’ll have to wait to see these babies – I can hardly wait myself!
When we started designing the outside of the house we knew vinyl just wouldn’t make sense on an 160 year old farmhouse. Then Sean found LP SmartSide from LP Building Products and we fell in love. This composite wood siding is finishing being installed over the next few days. It’s primed with a beige color, and will be painted in the spring once all of the seams are caulked. There was an option to go with a pre-painted siding, but with needing to caulk all of the joints anyways, we figured finishing it off with a clean coat of paint will give us a more polished look.
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Thanks so much!