Something New Is Coming

As you know, we have spent the last 3 years slowly making our house into the home of our dreams. When we bought it 3 years ago, the 7,000 sq ft of property and 1,050 sq ft of house were a blank slate for us. The landscaping was all dirt, the trees were all half dead, and the inside of the house was old and bland. After landscaping the back yard and most of the front, laying new floors, painting every wall, and redoing the kitchen, we're ready for more.We have been praying and dreaming about our home and the needs of our family for the past year or so. When we took into account the square footage of our home, size of our family, and the fact that we will be home schooling starting this fall, we knew we needed to make some changes.  So, we began looking at other homes for sale in our area, thinking that buying something larger would be our only option. But a part of us was sad at the thought of leaving our first home. After lots of research we realized that if we were to sell our current home and buy something large enough to accommodate our needs our mortgage would nearly double... and that did not make us very happy. So we started brainstorming our next best option, and we quickly decided that adding on to our existing floor plan was the way to go.Thankfully we have an awesome contractor (Shout out to my Pops!) who helped us come up with an excellent floor plan. We are finalizing the layout and design details this week and will be submitting the plans to the building department soon! Prayerfully we don't hit any major snags along the way and if everything goes according to plan, we will be enjoying our newly renovated home this summer. We will be sharing all our plans and costs here as the project unfolds and as soon as we are finished with the plans we will post those as well.Have any favorite before and after pictures? Renovation stories? Ideas? We'd love to hear them!