Another step closer. Insulation will stop the furnace from running constantly!

This was a tough choice. A decision of this magnitude can't be summed up simply with factual findings. Our choice was made on several factors, one which included the intangible idea that our candidate is a graduate student with everything to gain. He has excellent qualifications, but also, his enthusiasm to learn and develop his craft as a professional architect was most appealing to us. We look forward to moving forward!

We had been thinking about budget and timeline for quite a while. We had several drafts and decided that it was time to create a spread sheet and live with something more concrete (no pun intended). 

Below are our current budget and timeline. These will probably flex and change.

After much discussion, we decided on many specific elements for our house. We also identified our challenges and made a decision to try posting a job opportunity on the Lawerence Institute of Technology job posting board. LTU is a world class architectural college in Southfield Michigan. We received 4 inquiries and began the process of interviewing. All were graduate students with some degree of experience. All our candidates were young professionals, well presented and already on their way to becoming working professionals in the field. We also contact 2 professional architectural firms and discussed our project with them. This was an interesting process and we confirmed many of our beliefs and learned along the way.

With the barn complete, we will now turn our full attention to the house. Several years ago, we agreed that it would be great to live where we hunt. So, with casual intentions we began a search for property in southern michigan. We looked in Jackson, Washtenaw, Livingston, Tuscola, Lapeer counties. After much searching and physically walking many properties, we happened to drive by a listing that we kept passing because we thought it wasn't right for us. Well, turns out that this was our dream property, we felt the connection immediately. The property was held by a bank and the price had just been reduced, so we moved quickly and bought it. Thats where this story starts.