Josh and Erin in the Twin Cities

Holy frickin hell is it cold! B & B are up here for the weekend and the weather has totally not cooperated. I guess it is nice for the winter carnival, the ice sculpting and all that, but it is not so nice for just being out and about. Or as they say around here, oot and aboot.

We went over and checked out the progress on the loft, which was a really good thing. Some of the structural changes that we had agreed upon were totally not done. They even went so far as to have pipes coming from the floor to the ceiling in the wall that is not supposed to be there. The people in the demo told us it was no big deal and they can fix anything, but I can't imagine how they are going to re-route the pipes. It was amazing seeing it framed out for the first time, some of the rooms seemed MUCH smaller than my minds eye had made them, and some were just about right. The picture on the website is completely not to scale, they have an image that looks like a king size bed, and there is a lot of room around it, in reality there is not going to be much room around our bed.

Other than those things, it was great to see the place and how it is coming along. It was really cool to be able to finally see it and say, "this is where the sink will go, this is where the tub will go." Overall, if they can fix those issues with the walls, I can't wait to get into the place.

E and I have already determined where we want to live after we get tired of the city. We have talked about it a few times, and we want to get a Wee House and a bunch of land outside the city and live completely "off the grid". No wires, gas lines, water, sewage, etc hooked up to city resources. We want to have the ability to use solar power, well water and if we absolutely have to use gas, we will have to get some sort of propane tank or something. We looked at some of the property around here, and if we go about 45 minutes away, we can get something on a lake or river with around 20 acres for $150K, which is really not bad if you think about it. $7500 per acre. Both of us have talked about how cool it would be to have horses and various other animals running around, but horses are the absolute highest on our list, because we both love them.

Anyway, enough about what we want to do, we know we are going to move into the loft, provided we can come to some resolution with the walls and such. I will say that when we walked in and saw the walls where they shouldn't be, E went through the roof. She was ready to call the whole thing off, but the people in the demo were able to calm us down enough to be ok for a few days.