The Nauvoo Halfling House

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The Nauvoo Halfling House

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A little piece of magic in Nauvoo IL. Come stay and get cozy!

27/10/2026

Part 4, footers! In keeping with our recent theme, here’s the feet of the house. Also, I realized while building this thing that houses have so many body parts? Footers, headers, hips, it’s delightful!
Anyways, here’s how we dug the trenches that would become the foundation of this house. It was so muddy. Insanely muddy. There is so much clay, and I’m from Virginia where I’m used to pulling rocks out of the ground constantly, so I’ve never experience the absolute tonnage of clay. Giant thanks to my mother and father Sandra ELAINE Pence P.E. Pence and sister Bekah Pence Sorensen for literally getting in the trenches with me. Nasty dirty work that it is. Now onto pouring the concrete!

25/10/2026

Hi, my name is Tori and I would like to say that everybody is welcome here, I simply…did not understand the consequences of my actions. So I’ll just leave this here to try to balance out the audience thank youuuuuuu.

24/10/2026

Happy 24th, for all who celebrate. I unfortunately have to put my full rewatch of the Lord of the Rings off until Thanksgiving, but we will survive.

23/10/2026

The planning!
I’ve done manual labor my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve been privy to the planning part of building a house, and I doooon’t like it.
Thankfully my father had been a builder/designer for a very long time, and we are once again reminded that there not a Shelob’s chance vs Samwise that I could do this without him.
So, I drew what my ideas were for the floorplan and overall look of the house, and dad pulled that into his AutoCAD Clone, because his AutoCAD was in a computer that died and subscriptions are SO EXPENSIVE AND DUMB.
And so we begin to lay out the house!!

Also if you want to see longer more in depth videos, they’re on YouTube- search Tori’s Halfling House!

22/10/2026

Chasing Whimsy | Whimsy for Women Over 40 brought me this insanely perfect mug from Taylor Friese, and I just keep staring at it with a silly grin on my face. It’s the first gift that I’m not gonna leave in the hobbit hole. Because it’s mine. My own. My preciouuuuuuus.
Thank you thank you for this precious and perfect piece of art!!!

21/10/2026

It’s a sleepy kinda Wednesday.
I just finished writing for the kids’ show I work on, and now I’m trying to make myself take a few days of rest before I toss myself into the next thing.
Why is rest so much harder than work??

Also, I started on a comedy show ten years ago, and two years in I learned people had taken pictures of my feet and put them on a feet rating site. Because I was often barefoot they had a lot of fodder. So, it’s a sunk cost to me at this point, and I’ma just keep being a hobbit 🤷🏼‍♀️

19/10/2026

How to Build a Hobbit Hole in Illinois with your dad part 2!

I hope all these instructional videos are as useful to you as you want them to be, but I assume they’re pretty much…not…useful. At all. But hopefully a little entertaining?

Can you tell I built this house between seasons of the comedy show I was working on?

17/10/2026

Today’s bad tutorial provided by my inability to remember to film: benches!

I made these legs for the little hallways back in February, but I didn’t finish them, and I needed benches outside for the Open House. So I popped some 2x12s on top of them and slapped some diagonal bracing on them real quick and was very pleased.

Turns out I like making things, what a shock!

12/10/2026

How to build a round doorway, except it’s a useless tutorial because somewhere along the way I lost all the relevant footage and this is all I have of the process. Which was really fun to figure out, and satisfying to make happen, but also there are 10 round openings in the house and they took me WEEKS to finish.
Pretty happy with them though, not gonna lie.

Address

Nauvoo, IL
62354

Website

http://airbnb.com/h/nauvoohalflinghouse

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