Friday, July 6, 2007

Answering Some Questions

Hershey and Lorenza want to know if this will be an everyday house or a vacation house. This will be the everyday house but Mom and Aunt Bec think living out there will be like a vacation every evening when they get home from work. Mom is going to sell her house and Aunt Bec is going to sell her house and they are going to move to the new house and get new jobs and every night they are going to come home and sit on the porch and have a vacation.

This will be boring for most of you but we will give a history of the land again.

Four brothers came over from Ireland. They came in through the port in Savannah, GA. They migrated to Alabama and settled but decided to move on. In 1834, they came to a place in Texas that they finally settled. They had to clear the land and build homes and fight Indians. They were lucky in some ways because they didn't need a cemetery until 1838. Three of the brothers had families and they had families and on down through the years. Mom and Aunt Bec are descendants of the youngest brother.

Each brother was given his own 180 acres to clear and farm. Amazingly, all 180 acres that the youngest brother received still belong to the family after 173 years! (We don't know about the other brothers' land; we will ask Grandpa.) Grandpa has three cousins who own 100 acres. Grandpa owns 39 acres. Uncle John owns 19 1/2 acres. Mom and Aunt Bec own 19 1/2 acres. The other two acres are the family cemetery. (Yes, that grave site from 1838 is still there.)

Grandpa and his two sisters inherited 40 acres from their father. Grandpa's sisters sold him their part of the land. Grandpa's aunt gave her 40 acres to Grandpa's cousin. In March of this year, she asked Grandpa if he wanted to buy the land because she has other family land. That's when Uncle John, Aunt Bec and Mom bought the land. Somewhere along the line those two acres were set aside for the cemetery.

So, now we are to 2007 and Mom and Aunt Bec own their 19 1/2 acres of land. They picked a place to build a house. Since it is for both of them, they want two master suites. They couldn't find any floorplans that came close to what they wanted so they hired an architect that Aunt Bec used to work with. They took the architect out to see the land and the location where they want to build and he is designing a house for them.

Right now, they are waiting for him to draw up some plans for them to look over. That is why we said not much will happen on this blog for a while. Until they get some plans, they can't hire a builder. And once they get a builder, they will need to go out there every weekend to see what he is doing. THAT'S when you will get to see things because they will take lots of pictures from the foundation up to the roof and all the things inside.

We are just so excited about it, that we wanted to set up the blog. We had picked a name for our blog and, since it was available, we grabbed it up. For a while, we will write about what is happening until we have pictures of the house being built.

3 comments:

Katherine and Pippa said...

What great history. And it is so good that you still have the 180 acres in the family.

We've got a question too. Will it be easy enough for your Mom and Aunt Bec to get work? (Always the downer in any plans....)

We're really looking forward to reading about it.

Kate and Pippa

BEAGLEDOM said...

How exciting, you all will get to bark at cow dogs all the time. Can wait to follow the process.

Good Luck

Frankie and her dads

Bella said...

Hey thanks for sharing that amasing story with us those I got a bit confused about which acres went where!!!
Looking forward to seeing pictures & perhaps diagram of where the DogHouse will be.
What an adventure
Wuffs
Bella