Country Livin’ Blog

Three years ago my husband and I were living in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. We had been talking for a while about moving out of the city and having more room to exercise our seven dogs. Yes, you read that right, seven dogs. Don’t think we stopped there! We currently have nine! So, there we were thinking and talking about moving out of the city. Shortly after Christmas our daughter-in-law told us her cousin had a house for sale north of Wetumpka, Alabama. Why not take a ride out to see where the house is located? So we loaded up into our Suburban and drove the twenty miles north to Wetumpka and kept going. The house we were going to see was further out than where we finally settled, but it got us out of the “thinking” and “talking” stages and into the “looking” stage.

We were both on the internet one Sunday afternoon looking at land for sale in the Wetumpka area. My husband said to me, “Take a look at these lots. They are reasonably priced and they are 3 to 3.5 acres.” I looked and said we should take a look at them. We contacted the real estate agent who was selling the lots and put in a bid which was accepted by the seller. Our lot is 3.25 acres and relatively flat or at least we thought so until we started building! But, I’m getting ahead of myself. We then entered into the process of looking at home plans and interviewing home builders. What we discovered is be careful if you want to buy your plans from the internet. Some builders won’t use plans from the net. Our builder said they sometimes run into problems and need to talk to the person who drew the plans. If they came from the internet it can be difficult to impossible to speak to the person who drew the plans. We used a local architect who was able to modify our plans to suit our need for space for our seven dogs. Square footage was taken from a storage area of the house and used to put in a “mudroom” that we use to house dog crates. That was one of the smart things we did!

There are some things we learned in the building process that we would have done differently if we were going to build the house today. For starters we would not have opted to have a vegetable sink in the island of our kitchen. Out here in the sticks we have a septic system and garbage disposals and septic systems don’t mix! The only time I use the vegetable sink is to fill my watering can when I water my plants. I would much rather have had the surface space.

I know that currently the “hot” look for kitchens is granite countertops. We didn’t want granite countertops. They are more delicate than you would expect. We decided to put in ceramic tile countertops and that was a good idea. I love them. I can set down a pot or pan directly from the cook top onto the counter without worry. They clean up easily and I can use bleach and other strong detergents when I’m cleaning. If you own nine dogs, you want to be able to really clean those countertops! I highly recommend ceramic tile on the counters.

I know this blog is about living in the country and I will get to that in later posts. I hope you will find this blog fun to visit and will come back often to see what we are up to. Thanks for stopping by, y’all come back!

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