S-s-s-s-snakes, no thanks

As we started digging in the ground around the new place we kept across snakes two feet underground. Had never seen this before. It was too warm for them to be hibernating so what were they doing in the ground?

Knew they weren't poisonous because of the shape of their heads but we like to know what kind of pets we have.Bob Jennings, the old TV animal guy for Oklahoma, once told me that if you have non-poisonous snakes to talk to them and give them names because if you have them you probably won't have poisonous ones. Not enough food for everyone.

Friends came up with lots of variances on the same name for the snake. Mud Snake, Rough Dirt Snake seem to be the two most popular. Main thing is they like mice to eat ant they won't hurt us.

So meet Sammy Snake!

Just a Little to the Left Please

The property came with an underground storm shelter for 15 people. Of course, that would be 15 people standing up shoulder to shoulder, but if a tornado is bearing down on you who cares. I don't understand the thought process of having a shelter if you have to go outside to get into. And since we are needing a garage that was going to go between the two buildings to connect them we decided to build over the shelter. But it was in the walkway of going from the house to the West Wing so it needed to be moved 6 feet to the west and 2 feet south.                                                                                                                                     .

They dug it up then lifted it to put it where we wanted it. Against the outside wall of the West Wing out of the walkway but leaving enough room for our cars.

This guy had the tough job, he napped while the other guys were shoveling dirt by hand and leveling the area. The Track Hoe operator was having trouble getting around because his right foot was in a medical boot. He and his son were cleaning guns, and he shot himself in the leg, it traveled down the leg and out his foot. So I guess it was best for him to just sit.

As the shelter is being lifted  it starts to twist. The guys are scrambling to keep it straight and I told them let it twist I wanted it turned anyway and Bill had said no; so now I would get what I wanted. Bill had said no because he thought it would be a lot of trouble to turn it to face another way.

Being dropped into place and with one re-lift and tossing a little dirt under one corner it is only out 1/4 inch. They were measuring the top of it, I suggested they measure the level of the interior floor because who knows if the top had ever been level and sure enough the floor was perfect. It was amazing that what looks like such rough dirt work can be so precise. That is why you hire professionals to do certain jobs.

Houston We Have a Problem

Yesterday for the first time since we moved in to the new place we were able to close up the shower wall because the leaks had been fixed.  While Bill worked on the leaks he mentioned off and on that the compression joints were not like any he had seen before and they made him nervous. When I asked him why not change them out, he said you don't mess with plumbing if it works.

Well, last night the grand kids spent the night. They were laying on our bed watching "Happy Feet" and I had gone in to check on them. I sat on the bed to watch the movie for a few minutes. There was a loud pop and the sound of rushing water. I jumped off the bed hollering at Bill we have a broke pipe!. He was asleep in front of the TV and said well turn off the shower. I am still hollering we have a broke pipe and running to the garage area. He wakes up and comes running; after finally understanding what I was saying. One of the things everyone should know is where is their water turn off is in their house. I didn't then but I do now. We actually have two in the same closet. He is pulling the wall off again and water is spraying everywhere. One of those weird connections had come apart.

He quickly put a PEX connection on and that hose will never come apart again. Took him all of 3 minutes to fix.

So glad the grand kids were spending the night, so glad I went in to check on them or we wouldn't have known about the hose until the water had started running into the family room.

Nice Guys Finish Last

 When we bought the property this trailer was sitting on it. The couple had been divorced for seven years, she lived in the trailer and he lived in the apartment we are living in. They shared a driveway, mail box, and water well. They were given 60 days to remove the trailer. We didn't make them move it before closing because we are nice people.

Last weekend they moved the trailer. Left huge gouges in the yard. Cut down a tree we specifically asked not be touched.

Look at the ruts that now run the entire length of our land and they were shocked when Bill said they needed to fill in the ruts with top soil

They are taking the house out by removing sections of fence that weren't put back properly. Only took Bill a few minutes to fix but we shouldn't have had to do anything

They then closed the corner of  Waterloo and Douglas down for over an hour as they jockeyed the trailer around to make the corner. It would have been easier on them; our land and everyone else if they had gone out the way we asked them to go out.

Success! It's off the land!

Their son was suppose to come on Sunday to clean the trash up and start fixing things but we haven't seen hide nor hair of him yet. This is what we get for trying to be nice people. I am sure we will be the ones fixing everything.

Boys and Their Toys

When we "downsized" to our 7.3 acre lawn I told Bill I was finished with lawn mowing and if he wanted this much land he would be the one to mow. We have been married for 38 years and he has mowed maybe six times. The first of those times was the day our oldest daughter, Tiffany, was born; I did half the yard and come in saying I just couldn't do any more and she was born 14 hours later. He was allergic to the world and that's why he didn't mow but now he is allergy free and has no excuses.

Of course, he needed a bigger, better mower than what we have had for the last 10 years. He got on the hunt and found himself a "Bad Boy" mower. If the stars are aligned he can mow the land in less than on hour. full suspension for his old man bones. 60 inch deck, zero turn, all the bells and whistles you could want.

The thing had to be picked up by our flat bed delivery truck!

Since we had to take the mower out to the house and it is better for the truck to be fully loaded we added a fire pit and moss boulders to fill it up.

Here's Mallory trying to figure out why Pa is so excited about this big orange thing in a wood box. We may have to fly an OU flag to cover up the OSU orange.

How Many Things Can Be Wrong In One Room

When you buy an existing home or even a new one you know there will be issues and some of these issues may not be caught on the home inspections no matter how good your inspector, Case The Place, is.

Discovered on the first day that the shower leaks. Didn't show up on the inspection because it didn't leak out from under the wall until the second shower was being taken. So for the last 5 weeks we have been living with an outside wall looking like this. While we tracked down the elusive leak.

Fortunately for us the walls on the outside where the leak was coming under are the metal walls of the building. The former owner wouldn't have known about the leak since there was only one person living there so only one shower. We have searched and searched and siliconed the dickens out of that shower. The leak is down to just a drip from somewhere and never leaves the shower pan except through the drain; so the wall is closed up!









The shower is a little different from what we have used before. In looking at houses we saw this shower in two houses both owned by single older men. Wonder if this is a mid life crisis type of thing?

I love the rain shower head! Will have one in the next master shower. The shower unit itself is just a little too small. Bill can't shave in the shower and I have trouble shaving my legs. But all the different heads are fun and will be just fine as a guest shower.


Another problem in the bathroom that we hadn't noticed during our walk throughs that it was a very dark bathroom. Not enough lights for our liking. So one of the first things we did was add another can over the linen closet area which also gave the shower the light it needed and then added  lights over the mirror.

There wasn't a medicine cabinet. We do't like our toothbrushes to lay in the same drawer as our hair brushes.Just a little weirdness on our parts. Bill installed the cabinet and then I glazed it to match the over the sink mirror. See the beautiful bowl sink? It is a work of art and I hate it. Way too high for someone as short as I am. When I wash my face the water runs down my arms because the water is at shoulder level. We were going to replace the sinks at the lake with bowl sinks and now we know that we would be have been disappointed if we had. We may take these to the lake but cut out the counter and sink them down halfway.

We saw this when we were first looking at the house and knew it was an easy fix. There was no head knocker in the bathroom. That is the cabinet over the toilet (you can knock your head on it, hence the name). Knew that would be one of the items on the to do quickly list since you don't want to be in the bathroom and have to holler for more TP.

There were a whole bunch of overhead cabinets in the building we are calling the West Wing and they look just like the ones in the apartment. Stained it to match as best as possible and we now have TP close at hand.

The bath is now finished. That is until we build the next bedroom and we will be closing off the existing door and moving it to another wall to be accessed by both of the bedrooms. These will be our extra bedrooms and we will be building a master suite.

Our Concept

Bill and I are visionaries. We can see things in the bones of a house or building and know what it can become. After almost 38 years of marriage we know what each other likes and desires.

Everyone else saw this:

We saw this:

I am so glad Bill has an engineering mind and came up with our 3 D model. Now our friends and family can see what we have in mind.

Yes, we are drawing our own plans. No one knows what we want better than we do and once again I have my amazing husband who can create whatever I put on paper.

It is still rough but it will evolve through the building process. This process may take 9 months or it may take 2 years, we are in no rush. We will be living in the house for the next 20-30 years so we want to get it right. We are making decisions for 80 year old people living in the house. We are looking at the restrictions and needs of my parents and planning to accommodate those in our house. Not that we will be living in a place hinting of a nursing home but it will be ADA approved. 

It's Beginning to Sound Like Home

We love the outdoors and nothing is better than the sound of wind chimes in the air. Really got excited last night as I was unpacking more boxes and found our windchimes!

Bill got home and I had him out with the chainsaw to open the air around this one so we could hear the gorgeous sound. Could only find one tree with a limb big enough to carry the weight. I am gong to miss the big trees we had at the last house. All of our big trees now are away from the house.

Even Mama Croc is enjoying the chimes.

Too Many Clothes

We aren't clothes horses at all but between the two of us we certainly have a lot more clothes than the single man who lived in our space before us.There isn't even enough room in the only closet for all my shoes. So what do you do?

Bring in the garment racks and line them up.

The clothes are separated into his and hers, summer and winter. Tubs of sweaters and scarves and gloves.

Yes  that is an Oudad sheep hanging out by the winter coats. Or as Mallory, the 2 year old granddaughter, says. The Doodad. Not enough room where we are storing Bill's trophies for all the full mounts so they show up in the strangest places.

Our Cozy Apartment

Remember I said I wanted a one bedroom apartment with dining for 32. Well, we now have a one bedroom apartment with seating for 300 of our closest friends and family members.

The larger metal building that will be our house has a wonderful apartment built into the back of it. It is a  fun place, the previous owner was a single man with an artistic flair. There are flames across one wall, another has rock on it and then the rest is a discrete highway running to the ceiling. You don't notice the highway at first. Lots of glazed walls, unusual ceilings, and HUGE ceiling fans.

But first we need to wiggle into this space. Only one bedroom so the grand kids sleep on the couches when they spend the night. Luckily, they are young enough they think this is an adventure. Christel remembers pushing the grandparents love seats together and all the cousins piling in from 25 years ago. Guess we have a family tradition we didn't know about/

We are very spoiled with our former homes in the space we have had. One thing I that I would miss was my make up area. So we converted the powder room into my make up room. Not many people have their own room just for hair and make up. Makes me feel very pampered.

The kitchen actually had the same hammered copper that we had in South Bend on our appliances. We were told he spent $1,000 per sheet for what he did we spent maybe $20 and achieved the same look. It is a little garish for our taste having the whole kitchen in it. This will ultimately be the master suiste so we will just live with it for a while.

You park where?

We don't have a garage at the new place yet, that will be the first building project once we get all the minor inconveniences fixed.

With winter coming we don't want to be parking outside until the garage is built so what is our solution? We park in our future home. Luckily the previous owner used this as a barn and there are garage doors on it. There is one with an opener on it that we use.

This is where the third bedroom will actually be. To get there you drive through the kitchen and laundry room. Now that we have all our stuff in  the two buildings Bill park in the laundry room and I angle in and park in the family room. 

The memories we are making in this are priceless.

Our Kind of Downsizing

When we decided to down size we really meant we were gong to move down in the amount of  land we have and house size. But the Smith's never do things like other people do. We found one lot in the middle of Edmond that would have been perfect but the next door neighbor bought it before we could. Who would of thought that in Edmond there were still heavily wooded lots left just off of Second Street in town.. So back into our house hunting mode and off to find the next perfect place.

Ever time we left work, Edmond Rock, we passed a handwritten sign saying 8 plus acres for sale. Didn't pay much attention to it assuming it must be out of Edmond Schools or something was wrong with the land, why not a Realtor sign or nice sign. We wanted Edmond Schools for resale value. But one day I called on it and we drove out to see it. It was truly love at first sight. Do not judge a book by its cover as in the case of the for sale sign.

Isn't that land beautiful? There is a racetrack for small Go Karts or remote control cars or little boys riding their bikes around it at a very fast speed. There is a pond (which needs lots of work), There are metal buildings for storing all our stuff and a one bedroom apartment for us to live in.

So we downsized from 2 1/3 acres to 7.4 acres.
But it is easier to mow, just straight mowing, the last house had no straight lines in the landscaping all curves and in between trees plus Bill bought himself a really big mower. He got a 60 inch deck and it can go really fast and has all kinds of suspension to cradle our old bodies. So maintenance time wise our land went down in size.

We downsized from a 5300 sq ft house to what will ultimately be 7200 sq ft under roof. There are two metal buildings on the land that we will be building out into living space. Our living space is going down to 3300 sq ft which is what we were shooting for. That is one of the metal buildings The other space will have a huge storage room for our rental house paraphernalia. Bill is a big game hunter so there will be a trophy room for his mounts. And then when we downsize our businesses we will move our corporate offices out to that building also. So we have drastically downsized our living space.

We just do things the Smith way.

How It All Began

It all started 5 years ago when I told Bill that I was ready to downsize our house and yard. We had a house that was 5300 square feet and our yard was 2 1/3 acres and there was just the two of us left. That house had 13 sinks in it; way too many for anyone to have to keep clean.. It was a house well loved. We built it 20 years ago by ourselves and raised our two beautiful girls in it.

This is where the name Smithbuilt comes from. We literally built the house with our eight hands with a little help from the professionals. For our first Christmas in the house I gave Bill a architectural rendering of the house I tinted our colors and named  the drawing "The House That Smithbuilt". The deck became "The Deck that Smithbuilt", the pond was "The Pond that Smithbuilt". All but one of our companies start with Smithbuilt followed by a description of the type of company it is. That is our mantra and thought it appropriate that this blog about our new adventure be titled Smithbuilt.

It took me two years of talking to get Bill convinced to sell our home and two and a half years for it to sell. It was a very unusual home and took some special people to love it as much as we did. It sold and we had 5 weeks to find a place to live. Not wanting to rush any decisions in finding a p lace we will live in until it's time for a nursing home we moved into one of our Smithbuilt rent houses. It was a really cute two bedroom one bath with only three sinks in the house. We wiggled into our space and went on the hunt for something more permanent.

 We didn't know if we wanted to build or buy an existing house. I said I wanted a one bedroom apartment with dining room seating for 37. We are so fortunate to have a big family and I love having them over for family dinners.We needed enough space to store all of the stuff we have for our rent houses. When family and friends renovate they give us all of the old stuff to use in our rent houses so it's not unusual for us to have one or two toilets, several sinks, a couple of doors plus all the tools that are needed for property management. Somehow we thought that might be a little difficult to find and might have to be custom built.