Re-Addition: The History

Colleen and I are planning on adding an addition on to our house. I thought it would be fun to keep everyone up to date on how it goes, as well as journal our progress so we can look back at where we started. Let’s begin with a little bit of background.

19-something or other – A small farmhouse is built with no plumbing aside from the well pump on the porch and no heat but from the wood stove in the main room.

1978 – Colleen's parents, with their nearly one year old daughter, buy a “fix-er-upper” on a nice four acre farm. Over the course of the next year, they completely redesign the interior of the house adding luxuries like lights and flushing toilets (house pictured cerca 1979).

1990 – Colleen's parents decide to build a two story addition of about 900 sq feet. This addition is self sufficient with it’s own bathrooms, kitchens, etc and will be a home for Colleen's grandparents to live out their golden years (pictured in 1993).

1999 – Colleen, newly graduated from Vanderbilt, gets a job near home and moves into the addition.

2004 – Bruce, a little squished in a one bedroom apartment with Mike and Lissie, moves in with Colleen.

2008 – Bruce and Colleen decide that two bedrooms and a 50 square foot bathroom don’t leave much room to grow and begin planning an additional addition: the readdition.

In the more recent past, we hired a restorations company who had an architect that used to work with Colleen’s parents. We went through a number of versions of floorplans before finally deciding on one that met our criteria and didn’t infringe on anyone’s right of ways (that’s a long story, perhaps for a later blog). We then hired the architect to do detailed building plans which his company could build for us, or we could bid out to other contractors. So, currently we are awaiting our first round of those plans. In the meantime, I’ve been furiously detailing out possible kitchen and bathroom set ups, picking out bathtubs and kitchen fixtures and generally obsessing about the whole thing. This blog is the result of that obsessing.

-Bruce