All The Homes We've Built... So Far

Our homebuilding experience spans over 20 years, and two states.

The states that we have lived in the longest (both, individually and together) are Florida and Tennessee.

Those are also the states that we've built houses in.

A Traditional Florida Home

Jim has survived the home building process three times now.

The first time, was this home that he had built in Florida (circa 1985). Basically, he just picked the colors and styles and everything magically came together at the hands of the builder, D.W. Hudson.

Next came these...

A Traditional Tennessee Home

In December 2001, Jim and I built a home together in Franklin, Tennessee.

It was your basic brick home with vinyl siding. It only took 62 days to build (...thanks to Ryan Homes). We had several things going in our favor that helped to speed up the building process:

• It was the wintertime in Tennessee. Since most people build their homes in the Spring and Summer, there were a lot of contractors & sub-contractors who were available and eager to work at this time.
• This was your typical "mega land developer buys mega chunk of property and sells it to mega home builder to mass-produce homes on quarter-acre lots". And you know... the quicker they get it done, the quicker they can move onto the next mega land deal.
• Almost everything was "predetermined" for us. We got to pick the basic things like types of flooring, cabinets, and siding. But, for the most part, there were very few "unknowns" and everything just fell into place. (Fortunately, we were very happy with how things turned out.)
• We also had a very motivated GC/site supervisor. Our street was one of the final phases in this particular subdivision, so everyone was eager to wrap things up & move on to the next project.

See all the homebuilding pictures we took during the construction phase ...from breaking ground to move-in day!

A Log Home In Tennessee

Now, here we are in the process of designing and building our first (and hopefully last) log home together.

With this house, we are choosing every last detail of what goes into it. But we're letting a General Contractor (who has years of experience at building log homes) oversee how all of the work itself gets done.