Our House

As I shared in my welcome blog a big part of our dream was to have our own custom home built on our ten acres. I also shared that my older brother Ric Thiele has been a custom home builder and home remodeler for over 40 years. Knowing he would be building our home and working with us to manage the project gave us the confidence to take this on. I seriously doubt we would have done it without him. I will also point out that he tried to talk us out of building on raw land here in King County. However, once we found our beautiful land with our Mount Rainier views, a good well, a building permit         (for a different house plan) he was on board with our dream.

We began searching the internet for house plans. We knew we wanted a ranch style house all one level. We also wanted to stay within the specification of our currently approved site plan and for the On Site sewer or septic system. This was fine because we wanted a three bedroom home around 2500 to 3000 square feet. We fell in love with a plan from Mascord Homes out of the Portland Vancouver area. The plan is called the Westfall and it has the following elements:  One level, 2915 square feet with a finished attached garage of nearly 1400 square feet, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a den, open great room, kitchen, dinning, plus a mud room. Another major element of this plan we liked was large windows and tall ceilings that would take advantage of our mountain views. We contracted with a Mascord architect to make a few modifications to the plan. We reversed the plan for our land, increased the size of the garage and had the garage angle turned in the opposite direction. 

I was still working at this time so the job of submitting our plan change to the King County Building Department landed with Jill and my brother. About one year to the day after we first saw our land we submitted our plan change request, December of 2019. This was a processes my brother had previously had go through in a matter of two months. This is where the story could become very dark and ugly, but I am choosing to leave a lot of that negativity behind. Suffice it to say that a world wide pandemic and a permitting agency with a notorious reputation nearly broke our will, but finally on July 2, 2021 some 18 months later we got our new building permit. Now comes the fun of building as the world comes out of a pandemic.

In some ways our timing was fortunate because we had already seen and experienced rapidly increasing cost and supply chain disruptions. I say fortunate because we could plan and budget for things with these new higher numbers even if it hurt. My brother began construction of our house and over the next 14 months we watched and worked with him as another stage of the dream began to take shape. While there were frustrating times waiting for subs, inspections or materials overall it was wonderful watching how my brother made it all come together. We were able to discuss improvements he came up with along the way and really could see the craftsmanship he put into the project. He also gave us very good advice on where we should spend money and where we could save it. Jill and I worked together picking every last detail of the house from floor coverings to cabinet pulls. My brother also introduced us to a designer that we ended up contracting with to bring our vision together. Jill and the designer came up with pretty much everything and after ten months we love it all! 

After I retired I got to work on the final completion of the house with my brother. I had done carpentry construction work with him 30 years earlier so it was fun to do it again. I will confess it took a couple weeks for me to get back into construction labor shape, but it was a great experience getting to do meaningful work on our house. We moved into our retirement house in the fall of 2022, some 46 months after buying the land and nearly 32 years to the day that Jill and I moved into our first house as a young couple just starting out.

The first ten months in our new house has been wonderful. Beginning our retirement life in this beautiful and peaceful setting has been exactly what we were looking for. We have enjoyed projects around the house and as we have entertained family and friends you can feel the love growing and our house is becoming our home.