Hey, there! I’m Dawn and this is my hubby Mike. We love home construction, remodeling, decorating, and all things DIY. And we like doing everything on a budget. Ok, well let’s be serious, one of us is more budget conscious than the other one. I’m sure it won’t take you long to figure out who’s the more conservative, level-headed one versus the creative, over-the-top, not quite so budget conscious one.
One very unique thing about us is that we really do the work ourselves – yep, just the two of us. We don’t have a crew of individuals working for us and at the end of the day, we go to sleep with the satisfaction of knowing that we accomplished it together. Depending on the project, there are a few exceptions (like electric and heat and air) where we do have to hire experts, but we will always make it clear in our posts when we had to hire out.
A few years ago, we took on an enormous project of building our own home from the ground up in a quaint little Texas town north of Dallas called Van Alstyne. We found the perfect piece of land on 2.25 acres in a housing development that was already built out except for this one lot on the end of a cul-de-sac. Perfection!! We fell in love with the area at first sight!
When we told our neighbors “we’re building our own house”, I don’t think they really understood that the “we” was truly Mike and me. Mike is a skilled carpenter and home builder who has worked in the residential construction industry for over 30 years and has done everything from framing, roofing, tiling, painting, cornice, trim, flooring, concrete, landscaping, home design – o.k. I’ll stop there ‘cause you get the picture. The guy has A LOT of experience but was always creating beautiful homes for other people. So, you know what that means? No time for our house (sad face).
Since we never seemed to have enough time for our own home, we made a decision that Mike would ONLY work on our home and he stopped doing work for others. I continued to work my full-time day job in corporate America but helped Mike in the evenings and every weekend. It was truly a labor of love and we enjoyed every minute of it (well, almost every minute – there were a few things that I didn’t particularly enjoy but I’ll get to that later).
After 2 years, we moved into this beauty – although it didn’t look quite this complete at the time. We had originally planned for this home to be smaller, but things change and we kept “adding a little here” and “a little there”. Before you know it, we ended up with almost 5,200 square feet of indoor living space which is ridiculous when you think about it. I mean, who really wants to clean THAT much space? I guess we were influenced by our surroundings and got sucked into the mantra that “everything’s bigger in Texas”.
In the end, we were over the moon happy with our finished house and we were able to put in lots of extras and upgrades because we did the work ourselves. Wait a minute, did I just actually say “finished” house? Now that truly did make me laugh out loud. I don’t think our Texas home was ever really finished. Even the day that we put it on the market, we continued to work on it. Oops! I jumped ahead a few years because why would we put our dream home, our labor of love, the house where we literally shed blood, sweat, and tears on the market so soon? OK – back to my original story.
After moving in our dream home, over the next 3 years we continued to “fine tune” (I’m refusing to use the word finish) our home. One by one, our little baby birds (otherwise known as children) flew the coop. We found ourselves as “empty-nesters” and staring retirement in the face within the next 5 years. Although we loved our Texas home, we knew this would not be our retirement home. For retirement, we had visions of being on a peaceful lake with a smaller house and a boat dock in our backyard.
Two years into the “fine tuning” of our Texas home, I innocently suggested “why don’t we start looking at lake homes just to see what’s out there?” I specifically said “not to purchase but just to look”. I mean, we definitely did not need to take on another project because we still had PLENTY of projects in our Texas home. However, I am such a planner and felt the need to start thinking about finding the perfect retirement home. I thought, “What if it takes a REALLY long time to find something we like?” Of course, you can probably guess what happened next. We looked AND we purchased.
But how could we pass this up? It was a lake front property on beautiful Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma with its very own private boat dock. Plus, it was a small house in much need of updating. The house was built in the late 90’s and was originally less than 1,000 sq. feet. At one time, the garage had been converted (although not very well) into living quarters making the house about 1,200 square feet. We were giddy with excitement just thinking about the possibilities of renovating and adding on to a lake house.
My planning skills came in handy and we decided that we would continue to fine tune the Texas home while starting to work on our retirement home. Now that we were empty nesters, we had loads of extra time. I calculated that it would take several years to complete the lake house, but surely, we could get it done in 5 years. It was perfect!! By the time the lake house was complete, we would be ready for retirement. So, that was the plan. Mike and I had it all laid out.
Have you heard the saying “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”? Well, 2020 hit and that’s exactly what happened to our plans. Yep, all those plans went out the window. After working in Corporate America for over 30 years, I was presented with an early retirement opportunity, and at the same time, the world was going crazy – you know, the pandemic. I said to myself “Wait a minute, you mean I could never go into an office again, stay in my jammies all day if I want to, work with my husband, be my own boss, make my own schedule, do all of my home projects, etc…?”
And that is the story of how we came to where we are today!! After my retirement, we decided to accelerate our plans which included selling our TX home and renovating our Oklahoma lake house full time. I’ve always wanted to blog, but other things were in the way. Now I have the perfect opportunity to blog to keep our friends and family up to date on our progress as well as share information with others on how we accomplished our house updates. So, join us on our new journey as empty nesters while we transform and “fix-up” our Oklahoma lake home “Okie Style”.