// May 5th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Today we finally closed on our construction loan to build our new house. We’re now waiting on only the building permit and we can begin construction. Assuming we break ground by June 1st, we should be moved in by the end of November hopefully. It’s so good to finally have that behind us and we can’t wait to see some earth moving on our lot.
// April 4th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Just a quick update on the homebuilding front.
Last Monday all the construction bids were in and we came to terms on a sale price for the construction of our new home and got our contract signed and turned into the bank.
The bank has ordered the appraisal. After they appraise it we can schedule the closing.
Meanwhile our builder has ordered the engineering plan. After that they can get the building permits and be ready to break ground as soon as we close.
Hopefully within 3 or so weeks we’ll be moving earth finally and get this thing underway.
// February 25th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Despite dire warnings from our banker that the builder approval process could take weeks and that we were risking a lot waiting this long to get them approved, our builders’ subcontractors all answered their phones on the first try and gave our builder the thumbs up, so our bank approved our builder within 3 hours of submitting their packet to the bank. We sure put a lot of sweat into worrying about that and we’re glad it’s behind us.
We’re having our architect make some minor changes to cut costs – mostly reducing the excessive lighting we added. We should have our contract done within a week or two and be able to close and start building within 30 days!
// January 15th, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Say what? If we flip flop any more, people might start to think we’re …. Democrats…. eeew!
The new year has brought a turn of events. The past two weeks we’ve had a change of heart (again). Our hometown has become just that, our home. We had begun to make plans that stretched into the coming years revolving around our being here and we didn’t want to give that up.
All said, redesigning a smaller house is still a better deal for us than buying an existing home at market value. Plus we still get a house that we designed from top to bottom.
The last major hurdle is getting our builder approved by our bank. Then we’ll have our architect trim the house down and update some design elements that will help us save money. Then we’ll probably start construction in the April or May timeframe.
Stay tuned! Things move fast around here.
// January 1st, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Last summer we had decided we’d sell our house in the next year and either buy a home near a lake we like across town or have our builder friends build us a house, and that if the latter fell through, we’d do the former. We’ll that’s exactly what has happened.
The early budgets were sufficiently low enough to merit proceeding so we went ahead and bought a lot and began developing our plans. As the process unfolded, the house ended up being much bigger than we had intended (the architect didn’t follow our guidelines regarding maximum size). After showing the larger house to our builder he said while it’d be close, they might be able to get it built and fall under our absolute drop-dead top-end limit. As the bids came back, it became clear that we couldn’t build the house, as designed, on budget and would have to have the architect redesign it to be a smaller house.
We spent the last part of the holidays reflecting on where we started and where we’ve come in the process. We realized we’d made a lot of incremental concessions in our lifestyle and future plans to be able to afford this house, such as putting our youngest in preschool a year earlier and regaining a second income, among other things. It also occurred to us that our construction budget had grown by almost $40,000 from the figure that precipitated our purchasing the lot. We were on course to be house-poor.
So, we’ve decided that it’s no longer in our best interest to build the house after all, and that we’ll proceed with our original plans to find a house within walking distance to the lake.
This gives us some peace in that we’ll avoid the headaches of building and the sizeable mortgage payment we’d have. As we’ve already sold our house it’s easy for us to move on to the next thing. The main point of concern is finding a house that meets our rather narrow criteria. We don’t want to live in a standard-lot-size neighborhood. We want an irregular lot and lots of trees, near the lake. Those kinds of places, which are also in our price range, don’t stay on the market long so we’ll have to really be on top of the search process. But I’m confident we’ll find something we like in the next six months.
Wish us luck!
