Field of Dreams (Mound of dirt)

When we decided to buy the adjoining 4 acres we knew from the start we wanted to make it a baseball field.  We started the first dig last year and realized we needed to do even more but no one was available so in March we were able to get a dozer back to the property to do more...here is where we are so far.

We are finished with the dozing so now Mike is pulverizing the soil to break it up more, we will start putting on the lime, fertilizer and grass seed in the near future.  Baseball season has started so we are limited on free time but as we have some this is a priority, we'd like to have it ready for fall ball.

Time to build a house

Well now that we have our dream land it's time for our dream house.





We had a plan from years ago we thought was "The One" but a girl can change her mind and that of her husband's :) After buying the land and seeing all the sights I realized it was important for me to have a porch, the original plan only had a stoop so the hunt was on.


We considered KHovnanian and Schumacher but there were limitations that we felt we didn't want to compromise with. We've gone through hundreds of plans trying to make sure every room, every detail would be perfect until they all started looking alike.

While looking we kept trying to find a contractor...wow that's not easy! I thought times were tough, obviously not for construction. We finally found a contractor that would meet us when he said he would and called back when he said he would so we told him we were sure he would be the one building our house this year.


We meet with Joe Hall in January and gave him what we thought was the final house we loved, it was called "The Satchwell". He was to turn in the estimates the following Monday. Out of habit we kept looking at websites with houses and the afternoon after meeting Joe the perfect dream house was the featured house on a new website called coolhouseplans.com. We looked it over for a day to make sure it was perfect and called Joe to tell him change of plans. Joe suggested we work with an architect to get it just right because some changes needed made to make it a bit more affordable.

So we did...


We've been working with an architect of Blackwell and Huggins to get our house plans modified and ready for the builder so he can get us a good estimate. We now have those complete and in the hands of Joe of J&J Contracting. I'm excited to be at the next phase of this house building process.

Here is the house we have chosen:

Here is the main floor layout:

We are now waiting on the estimate and starting the shopping part of this adventure. We're first trying to decide what the outside is going to be vinyl, hardee plank or cedar. Please pray that Mike and I can make it through this long adventure without a scrape.

We're starting a blog...

Well we are full of adventures so we've decided to start a blog to share it more easily with family. It will mostly be about our latest big life adventure but a long the way I'll share personal aspects with you too.

This is us: Here's our latest story: For several years we have been looking for land and occasionally houses. We never found the right thing, it was either too far out, too hilly, out of our price range, house wasn't as good as the one we have now or there was a cell phone tower too close to it. We were slowly losing hope for that dream place.

Then it happened, one day after a trip to our local realtor, Venture Real Estate, we found out that the best way to be searching for land was straight throught their company website. Things were on there a lot quicker than the Homes and Land books we had been looking at during every dinner/lunch out. So I followed Nick's suggestion and went to my computer and checked out their website, there it was a section of land that looked perfect. We went on the hunt to find it, after great directions we made our way right to it. As we came around the last turn to it we looked at each other and knew this was perfect. We instantly made a call to get the motions started on it, we felt it may go quickly so didn't want to wait too long. Unfortunately this happened to be the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, 2011. Great! Everyone is away on vacation and we are not patient people.

After what felt like an eternity our Closing date came for the land to be ours... June 29th was here! We walked out super excited to finally be landowners of property our son can run and play on forever. We now own 17 acres.

With the Branson's that's never enough :-) There was an adjoining 12 acres that another family member owned that we wanted part of. We made a call to start the ball to purchase an additional 4 acres that would make the lay of the land complete. This deal was a lot easier so by July 26th we were closing on this extra 4 acres which will become a baseball field sometime this coming summer.

Here is our land, at least what we could get in one picture, there are several acres of wooded land behind and to the right the picture taker.

We spent many weekends out there last fall, just playing ball, flying airplanes, cleaning up the weeds, getting cattails out of the pond. It has been great memories already!