Last summer, Tom and I started talking about whether it was time for a new baby. We felt that we were ready emotionally and financially to add another little person to our family.

However we also knew that the space we had currently in our home was not super functional for a family of four, for us anyway. We could make it work, but we wouldn’t like everything about it. So we had some serious conversations of whether we eventually move to a bigger space or whether we embark on a construction journey to add on to our house.

There were some things we had to consider:

• What were our musts for a 4-person home?
• What was the likelihood of finding those?
• Can we adjust our current house to fit those musts?
• What did we love about our current house that would be hard to find elsewhere?
• What would our dream house have that we don’t have?

It honestly came down to two things:  we hate moving, and it would be nearly impossible to find a better location than our current house. (We work in different cities so location is extremely important.)

So last fall, before we found out about baby 2, we started the renovation process. We both really wanted this done before we had another baby, and we thought we had time. Ha oh life.

The first step was meeting with someone to draft up blueprints of the addition. We are adding quite a bit, so this required more than just our dream sketches made at the kitchen table. The upside of adding to our house is we can get exactly what we want so we are not taking any short cuts to make this our dream home. It took several attempts to get the blueprints where we wanted them and have them fit into our budget.

Then came the arduous process of figuring out a construction loan. We had to go to two different banks to settle on a loan agent that was willing to work with us (and that we liked/trusted) because we will be consolidating and refinancing our original home loan once the construction is done.

We finally got the loan squared away after the holidays, and then came the waiting period for the weather and the construction crew’s availability to line up perfectly.

Which happened last week.

They hope to have it under roof by the end of next week.

So many changes around these parts, and I couldn’t be more excited! Tom has been amazing and really spearheading the construction part of this process. I will come in more when we have to pick out the design details on the tail end of the project.

And George is loving all the construction stuff. He was home with Tom most of last week when they were digging, so he had a blast watching it all.