Starting From The Beginning...Again

After working on (and still not finishing) the house for 7 years something happened that would change everything for us.  On March 8, while we were out of town, our house caught fire.  That's a statement that you never think you'll utter.  Funny, but not funny, we had just bought a fire safe before it happened. We thought we'd have plenty of time to put important documents in it. Nope. It's been a few months since it happened and I'm at the point where I'm ready to write about our crazy adventures since that day.
 
For starters, we were very lucky that no one was home and no one was injured.  About 95% of what was in the house was just stuff that can be replaced. The remaining 5% is the heart breaker; things I've had since my childhood and things that were my kid's that can't be replaced. The actual fire encompassed the attic but the water damage from putting the fire out was the death sentence.  Everything in the house has to be replaced...the entire roof, floors, walls, windows, everything. So we've got a shell of a home.  The 130 year old brick work is what's left. 

The good news is that we can rebuild the inside to its former glory with a few modifications that will actually make the house function better for us.  The bad news is that it's predicted to take 2 years to complete.  Initially we were living in a hotel for a period of time which was fine for about a minute.  Not having a space of our own for 5 months was kind of miserable, honestly.  We decided early on that we wanted to be back on our property ASAP.  That meant fixing up our garage, or as we lovingly call it, our carriage house.  If anyone out there has visited my blog before you may remember that we lived in our garage for 7 months when we first bought our house while we were doing some renovations.  If someone had told me that I would be living in my garage again I would have said that they were crazy.  And yet, here we are, coming full circle. 

The first time we lived in our garage (I"m having an out of body experience... Like I'm actually writing about living in my garage more than once...WTF!)  it was my husband, myself, my 3 yr old and a cat.  We had a room and a bathroom and that's it.  We're talking about 200 sq ft maybe.  Somehow we managed knowing we'd never have to do it again...Ha!  Now there's 4 of us and no cat.  That space for 2 years meant someone wasn't going to make it out of this situation alive.  In order to preserve our sanity we decided to build onto the other half of our garage to make a bigger, more doable space for the time we'll be living here.  I'll skip the part where we had to get permission because we live in a historic neighborhood.  That process was a real treat..not.  Cut to August where we are now living in our garagemahal as my friend calls it.  Really it's 550 sq feet.  I kind of love it.  My house house is over 6000sq ft. That's a crazy difference.  I think you expand (or contract in this case) to fit where you live though.  Being in 550 sq ft means not a lot of "stuff" is allowed in.  It's actually been easier than I imagined it would be and being back on property has been amazing for us.  It took a few months to fix it up but it's been worth it.  I would say it's 95% done with a few things on the punch list.  I'll be showing before and afters when it's done or at least a bit closer.

Anyway, I haven't blogged in quite some time but I'd like to document the restoration...again.  Crazy.  I'll be posting some pictures from after the fire and the current state of the main house in the next few days just for perspective.  That's all I can muster for today, but here we go again...