First posts are always hard for me. I am the type of person that always likes to think things through, and at times, over think things.

When I originally registered this domain it was to start a blog to document the progress of building our home, however I quickly realized that there was just not enough time in the day to build a house, work a f/t job and blog about it. The house, not the job I mean. So I decided to keep the job and focus on building our home. Besides, there are lots of sites where people document the progress of their home construction. Of course most of them are smart enough to hire someone to build it for them, instead of doing it themselves. So I decided that I would gear the site more towards reviews of the products and tools that I used during the building on my house. Adding into the mix some different concepts and products I researched such as sips or green roofs for good measure. I also want to document some parts of the build that may help others when they are thinking of building. Things that will improve the progress or that may get missed as there were a couple things I wish I had known about before I started to build. Ie sips, increasing wall sizes. Of course the site would not be complete without the advice/caution section.

When we started looking to build a new home so many years ago, we did what many other couples did and toured the show homes in our area. After checking out what seemed like 100’s of show home we decided to go with one custom builder that we liked. While we liked the design of the show home there were a couple things we wanted to change, which is what we thought “custom builder” could do. The only problem was that the “custom builder” was the tag line on his business card, and not what he truly was. Every time we asked for something a little different from the norm we would get comments like “I would not recommend doing that” or “I have talked to builders who have done those in the past and they had nothing but problems”. I guess the custom had more to do with changing window sizes or paint schemes then switching the design to ICF construction or going with geothermal for heating and while he may have been right, I would have liked to have been able to make the choice myself rather then have it made for me. So while we started looking at building a normal two story wood construction home with forced air furnace with a “custom builder”, we ended up building a two story ICF home with radiant heating by ourselves.

Along the way I looked at things like solar panels, green roofs, grey water collection and geothermal heating to mention a few, which is why I thought I would write about it and hopefully inspire someone else to think outside the box when building their next home. Just because it has always been done that way or is easiest to do it the way things are normally done, it is not always the right way.