First - to make the new porch truly barrier free, it will cost quite a bit more than the original estimate.

Second - the new porch area will have new soffit and fascia. We've decided to have the contractor put new soffit and fascia around the entire house. The old soffit is wooden and peeling. Do you even call that soffit when it's wooden? Not sure.

Third - our house has never had eaves troughs. We'll have the contractor put eaves troughs around the house. That will help withe the water in the basement problem.

So, yeah. That's a lot of money we'll be spending on the house.

I've probably hinted and mentioned the circumstances about our house a few times, but there are some new readers hear, so I'll go into some detail.

About 5 1/2 years ago, a job opened up for me in my home area. My wife grew up in the same general area of the state. So, I took the job, and moved home. We put our house up for sale right at the beginning of the housing crash. Selling that house became its own adventure that I've detailed extensively in past blogs.

My maternal grandparent's house was empty, so we rented it cheap from my mom until (we were thinking) our old house sold, and we could find something permanent. During that time, my fraternal grandmother died. That house became available to us. It's on the original farmstead that my dad's great grandparents settled and built in 1882.

While the actual real estate transaction was cheap, the house was in very bad need of updating (previous update was 1929). We had absolutely no money, and absolutely no capacity to borrow money to make the necessary renovations. While it's true that we could have moved in, and renovated one room at a time as we saved money, we just weren't up for that option.

My aunt (my dad's sister) really wanted the house to stay in the family. She really wanted us to update the house and move in. She had just inherited a bit of money from her parent's estate, and she has money of her own saved. So, she lent us some money to get started.

We gutted the house ourselves, and hired a builder to renovate it. We were still under the delusion that our other house might sell during this time, freeing us up to borrow more money to finish the renovations. That didn't happen, so we ended up borrowing more money from my in-laws to complete the project.

When the project was complete, we had an almost entirely new house - on the inside. We did nothing on the outside, except clear brush, and cut some trees, and add gravel to the driveway. The house still looked old and beat up from the outside.

Since moving in, we have dome some improvements outside. We put on a new roof two years ago. We replaced the front porch last year. I've blogged on here about each of those projects. They each needed to be done.

So now, we've been gifted this money. And, really we're finishing the project that we started five years ago.

So, there's some pride and sentimentality involved with our decisions. We certainly could have made other decisions that would have been cheaper. We could have stayed in my other grandma's house until our old house sold. We didn't even have to move from our old house. But, we did. And we took the opportunity to move into my family's farm house. And now, we're taking the opportunity to update the outside of the house. And, I'm happy to be doing it.