Never Give Up On Your Dream...Closet!

I want to share with you something I'm really excited about! I am getting my dream “glam” closet and I want to let you know what I’ve learned from achieving this goal: It's never too late to dream big! This is a big dream for me and it's just about ready to take place, but it didn't happen overnight. Five years ago, my husband and I left a situation that was not pleasant. It was very hard. We had to make some drastic changes that involved us moving. We left our real estate assets behind and moved our construction company. So we ended up moving out to another planet! Most people call it the country, while I called it another planet! I am a city girl. I've not been that far out. Yes, I enjoy the outside, but that was quite a culture shock for me. So today, I want to show you the journey. This last year has been quite a journey and a great example to me to never give up on your dream. We knew we were going to fix up this little house. The one thing that was such a relief when we moved out here, we didn't have the gawking eyes at us. What I mean by that was a big piece of property, and in the situation we left behind us, every time we would go out, we felt we had these gawking eyes at us. When we moved out here, it was a relief. OK, we’re here! So now what’s next? The house leaked. So when it rained, the rain came in the house. There was quite a few things that needed to be changed. We have made many different changes and lots of great ideas about what we want to do to fix up this house. This year we decided to add onto the house instead of just working inside the house. So we're adding a master bedroom wing, and I said, “Let's put in a huge closet!” which has always been a dream of mine. I've had so much fun planning this and I'm going to show you a little bit of the history here. In this photo you can see our trees. We had planted eleven trees two years ago since the trees that on the property were dying. The new ones were not really good, hearty, strong trees and every time the wind came or a storm, I was afraid to walk under them! So I'm measuring the tree here. And I had the tree people come out and we moved it to another location on the property.

The next thing we needed to do was the foundation. This is where the awesome concrete guy came in and he is digging out where the foundation is going to go. This is going to be a pier and beam foundation. The orange circles you can see below are where the piers will be. My husband was teasing me, “So those circles are there to tell the Martians where to land!” I was like, “Okaayyyy.” Ha!

We have a lot of piers that we're going to be pouring here and in this photo you can see where each of them will be. We have to go down deep enough so that the house will be sturdy. In this photo below you can see the great big rig. I came home one afternoon and here he was drilling all of these holes down for the piers. That's what it looks like outside my dining room window.

When he would drill down, he would go down to certain bed where it was rock. That's exactly what they wanted to drill down to. Below you can see what it looks like. Frankly, it

looked like somebody come in here blew up this whole area! But there actually are holes all through this and they had great big square pieces of plywood over each hole.

And right after that, they came in with forms and rebar. This is where they poured concrete into each of these forms. They had to back this huge concrete truck down my driveway. Those things are incredibly heavy so, we reinforced the driveway. This reminded me of reinforcing myself! After you've had your confidence knocked out from underneath you, you kind of need to get your self-confidence back and it’s helpful to think of it as reinforcing yourself just like reinforcing something for a construction project. So we reinforce the front driveway. Then we had two trees, one over here and one over there that this guy had to back down in between. So there was quite a bit of maneuvering going on here with it. And when you pour concrete, when you start something like this, this is huge. You don't stop when it's o'clock or time to go get my kid from school. No, you keep pouring until you're finished. Sometimes it goes smoothly and sometimes it doesn't. It really depends on how they mix the mud. They call it “the mud”. In this photo below, you can see them working on it to ensure that the concrete cured correctly before they left it.

Then they're going to put a beam, a concrete beam all the way around the foundation. These are the piers that are coming in and then they are putting in a concrete beam, like a little thin wall around the entire foundation. They they brought in concrete and they had to hand to bring the wheelbarrows around and put the car for the concrete into each of these beams. Fast forward through this here real quick. There was a lot of work that went into that. Just like there's been a lot of work going into me these last, last few years! This is a process and you don't fast forward through it. We've made a few mistakes with this and had few design changes. As you do that, you've got to make sure that all the trades are in with it, because at this particular point, you have electricians. You definitely have plumbers in there. We had to make sure that all the plumbing was in. We had a French drain put in. We had the gravel. Below you can see my husband doing work around the new foundation. This is what the beams look like once it was poured. These are the piers.

This is what the old house looks like. We literally tore off part of the house to add the new additions. It's kind of like what we do who may go through life. We we kind of have to peel peel different layers away from us as we go through it.

We put in a great big sump pump so that when it rains and the water gets up to a certain level, it actually drains out. Well, I felt like I've drained out quite a few things in my life since we have moved this last five years! When you do a process like this, it is not a quick fix. You can't just speed through it. If you skip a process, once your glam closet is installed then you start to have issues, because it's you didn't do it correctly with each step.

I wanted to take this time to start showing you all the process that goes with a big project like this. I am super excited because I've recently started working with the lighting guy, the electrician and the cabinet guy for my ultimate glam closet! There's a lot of planning that goes into this, just like there's been a lot of planning with me figuring out who I am inside. You know, I'm unique. There's nobody else like that out there. This glam closet is unique. Just like I'm unique. So stay tuned and list and share this journey with me on this glam closet.