It’s been a year since we moved into our home!
We broke ground on 9/9/2019 and received final approval to move in on March 5, 2022. It was a lonnnnnng labor of love, literally blood, sweat and tears and lots of couples therapy.
If you’ve followed me on Instagram for a while you know it’s been a long journey to get to this point. Sam and I bought our piece of property in 2011 a year after we got married. We built our first home “the granny flat” in 2014, 2 years after we added our first child, Waylon, to our family. We lived in our 1187 square foot home for 8 years while adding 2 more children to our tribe, Zeke and Ruby.
It was perfect for us as we were starting our life but I’d be lying if I told you that is was all sunshine and rainbows. We needed more space and the big dirt backyard where our “forever home” was supposed to be seemed to mock me daily. I was pushy and Sam was overworked. Hell we both were overworked. I was blogging and making money from home while growing and raising babies and Sam was working on other people’s homes while drawing up plans for our home. I’d follow all these home accounts on Instagram and the jealousy would brew. It seemed so easy for everyone else… and I had a contractor for a husband! It felt like the situation where the cobbler’s son has no shoes. In hindsight I can look back now and realize the work I needed to do. We both had work to do. We found a couples therapist that specialized in Emotion Focused Couples Therapy and started to uncover the layers of stress and pain we were putting on ourselves and each other. We highly recommend this particular type of couples therapy as it gets to the core wounds of each person and each couples unique negative cycle. Sam and I are both in agreement that there are people that came along side us at this time in our life that got us through to the other side.
When I say that “The Powers Place” was the house that built us, I’m not just ripping off a Miranda Lambert song. It’s the only way to describe the inner work we did as we built our home. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 Sam was solely working on our house. We got by on what I made and were hoping to be done with the house in about 8 months. A global pandemic was the last thing on our minds that would cause a setback. This is going to sound cliché but what happened next was the best thing that could happen to us a couple. The house was put on hold while we quarantined and our newly framed home looked like a construction ghost town. This was Sam’s worst nightmare and mine as I watched him recede into his deepest depressive episode. He needed help and it couldn’t come from me. I remembered a friend of ours had gone to a healing place called Onsite in Tennessee and that it had profoundly changed his life. I called the admissions office praying they were still running their programs and that it would work for us.
Sam got in immediately and within a week was on a plane to attend the Living Centered Program at Onsite. It changed his life, my life and our family. If you don’t believe me just watch our healing talks on Instagram @chrissyjpowers. He came home with a fresh perspective, hope and had shed a truckload of shame he had carried for years. His shift was so profound I attended an experiential therapeutic training with them a year later and then attended my own LCP program with onsite last year.
What does this have to do with home building you might be wondering? Everything because without this healing and shedding of our old negative stories we wouldn’t have finished our home. The pandemic was still roaring with waves of new variants but we found our footing and we got scrappy. I went back to work in Private Practice as a therapist and utilized every ounce of influence I had to create relationships with brands we loved and were already using in our home.
This is where Kohler comes in. We used all Kohler fixtures in our first home and loved the quality and seamless beauty of their designs. We reached out to them to see if they were working with bloggers but not holding our breath as I wasn’t and still am not an established home blogger. When they wrote us back wanting to partner with us it felt like a miracle. We didn’t know where all the products or finances were going to come from to finish our house so this partnerships with Kohler was a Godsend. We went from a place of extreme stress and pain to planning our bathrooms and kitchen fixtures with the expert team from Kohler. For links and information on our bathrooms designed exclusively by Kohler click HERE.
Conscious Carpenter Sam Powers weighs in:
From my perspective I’ve been around Kohler products for most of my career. I’ve always recommended them to clients for their longevity, durability, quality of design and ease of use. After living in our home with 3 small kids for a year I’m continually impressed that our fixtures still look and function like I just installed them. That’s not something I can say about a lot of products. Some of the products that continue to impress me are the Kohler “Pure Wash” Bidet Seats, our boys bathroom sink, our primary bathroom sinks that bring beauty into our everyday use and I love the color ways and sheens of our shower hardware and I love the durability of basic things like our toilet-paper holders, towel bars and mirrors. My favorite piece would have to be our monster “Prolific” kitchen sink. Chrissy wanted a farmhouse sink but since I do most of the cooking she honored my request of installing a stainless steel sink and we’re both very happy about that decision. Using all Kohler products created a continuity in our home that allowed form and function to flow seamlessly together.
