Choosing the colors for siding, flooring, cabinets, etc!

Decisions, Decisions!

So, this past week has been interesting! We are still in the process of getting our loan closed. The loan officer called to ask for verification of closing funds and that came as a surprise! We really thought we had until our closing on Dec. 18th to gather the funds needed but it turns out that the underwriters needed verification 2 weeks before! We scraped together the cash to deposit into our savings account only to learn that you cannot use cash for closing funds! There has to be a paper trail...

I thought I was being smart and asked if I could give the cash to my parents to write a check and we were told that you may also not accept gifts for closing funds!

I HAVE ALL THIS CASH....PLEASE TAKE IT!

So, do your homework while saving your down payment, don't expect to roll into the office with a bag of cash on closing day :)

We jumped that hurdle and our closing is still scheduled for the 18th (God willing)! During this time, we also had to ensure we had the proper insurance before we could move forward.

I do realize that most people have sold a house and actually walked away with money (unlike us) so this isn't a major problem for most. We started 7 months ago with literally NOTHING!

So.....tonight we met with Jeff, our sales rep and picked out all of our options! I was super excited for this meeting and luckily, Kyle and I are on the same page design-wise so this was a piece of cake! Here are some poor photos of some of the items we picked out. It is important to note that we started our plan with the Valu line that TK offers and we added options to that in order to keep the cost manageable. We did choose to upgrade our cabinets and carpet.

 We chose to go with Flint for the vinyl siding along with black panel shutters. You have the option to choose the panel or the louvered. The louvered are shown here, we decided those may be a pain to clean and we all know we don't want to be cleaning shutters all day! Flint is more of a gray, it was one of the darkest options in our price point.

This dark cabinet is what we chose to go in each bathroom. To the left of the dark cabinet, you can see the corner of the kitchen cabinets (Cabinet Upgrades (Schrock Brand) Princeton Maple Glaze Style-Arch Color-Amaretto Creme) I originally wanted all the cabinets in the house to match but the standard bathroom counter options are cream or white so the white cabinets would look awful! This is the same style as the kitchen cabinets with a different glaze. No biggie! I also have no idea where my kitchen counter top/cabinet picture went! We went with a black-ish laminate counter.

The brick was the absolute hardest option to choose! There were a lot of choices but this is what we went with. I think it's Tudor Grey, I may be wrong. We also chose the darkest stain to go on the mantel and beam on the vaulted ceiling in the living room.

We upgraded the carpet and padding so we went with this carpet, it will be throughout the house except in the bathrooms, kitchen and laundry room. It is more brown than the photo shows and it has black scattered throughout. Our dog has black hair so...

Again, my vinyl floor choice is missing but there were a lot to choose from!

I'm not really a vinyl/carpet fan but we figured money was better spent upgrading the cabinets now and we can do the carpet/vinyl later.

These are the coach lights that will go outside at the garage, porch, back door and garage service door. We went with black because we chose black shutters. We could have chosen, bronze or nickel as well.

We decided to go with bronze fixtures throughout the house. The bronze dome light shown here is what will be in each bedroom. The two light fixtures above the dome is similar to what will be in each bathroom except ours will have 3 lights and it will be bronze. They place these over each sink bowl.

This is the entry way light

This is the dining room light but it will be bronze. The kitchen will also have 4 or 5 recessed lights.

This is the fan that will be in the living room.


The only thing that was slightly annoying was that all the door knobs come in nickel. In order to have the door knobs match the light fixtures, we had to upgrade which cost an extra $300.

We did ask to make one minor change. Kyle suggested shrinking the laundry room so we could stretch our master bathroom just a bit. His eye for design is so helpful!

The options have been chosen and it was pretty painless!

Our next step is to wait patiently for closing while our sales rep gets our permits. We scheduled our pre-construction meeting for Dec. 23rd, two weeks from today! If everything goes as planned, we think they'll start digging around the first of the year!

Let the paperwork begin!

Let me tell you! This process is not the most fun thing we've ever done!

In a previous post I told you that we had to practically give our home away when we "sold" it. Because we didn't walk away with a dime from the sale of our house, we had to start at $0 saving for a down payment for our new house. Luckily, we are living with my parents and they are generous enough to not charge us a dime to invade their space.

When we started shopping for mortgage/construction loans, most banks wanted 20% down. I understand how this may be possible for folks who actually made some money on a home but not us. It was pretty defeating. If we were going to save that much money it was going to take us a really long time! We definitely didn't want to wear out our welcome with my parents so we kept searching.

We came across Park National Bank and found that their down payment requirement was only 5%! We started getting our paperwork submitted and the rest is history!

Here are the items that were required for our loan application:

1. Last two pay stubs
2. Last 2 months of bank statements
3. Last two years of tax returns

 

Once all that was submitted, the process was pretty simple.

We elected to clear the property on our own, it was pretty heavily wooded and doing that would save us $5000. We had about 30 days to get the property cleared. They told us to clear the dimensions of the house plus 30 feet on every side.

 

Here is what our property looked like before we began clearing. We purchased 11.71 acres and we were ready to mark our trees to be cut down.

 

We (but mostly Kyle) spend about 4 weekends working on the property. It was not an easy job! Near the end, the trees were just too big. Once he got the bigger trees down, we didn't have any way to move them. Luckily, we have great friends with the right equipment! Here is a photo of our friend taking care of business!

 

 

 

 

Once the bank let the builder know we were underway, the bank went out to appraise the property and the builder is scheduled to stake the house this week! Our loan is scheduled to close on Dec. 18 and then they will begin building!!!

EXCITING!!!

 

 

 



We found a house!!! JUST KIDDING!

A beautiful home came on the market and because I'm an MLS stalker we had an appointment within hours of it's posting. We went, we offered, we were out-bid :(
We were pretty bummed because this home offered an amazing view, lots of land, 2 ponds and a barn, most of what we had on our wish list.
This is the one that got away....

We picked ourselves up, and forged ahead!
We looked at several more homes after this but they all came up short.
I was still convinced we could build and Kyle was convinced that it wasn't going to be possible. In a last ditch effort to see if we could find a reasonably priced builder, I called TK Constructors and we scheduled a meeting with the salesperson, Jeff.

Here is the house plan we decided on pricing with TK, it wasn't our original plan but it had all of the things on our checklist plus, it was bigger and had a two car garage!

We made a few changes: We took the wall down in the kitchen and made the island bigger.
We also removed the capped wall at the entry way and turned bedroom 4 into a den with a cased opening on the side of the great room, instead of a hallway door. In the owner's suite, we decided to put the entry to the closet in the bathroom. With a bathroom entry, Kyle is able to get dressed in the morning without waking me up ;) I also had a combo bath/shower put in because I HAVE to takes baths!

We were SUPER HAPPY with the price of this home! I did decide to upgrade the cabinets and carpet because the standard was not very impressive. The cabinet upgrade cost about $4000 and the one-level carpet upgrade was cost $1000.
In my opinion, it was cheaper to upgrade the cabinets now instead of having to remodel several years down the road. Kitchens are expensive!

Ideally, I wanted hardwood flooring throughout the house but it was not working with our budget. For now, we'll have carpet  and vinyl on the floors.

Once we signed the contract it was on to bank approval...Stay tuned!

UMMM...We sold our house, now what?

Well, if that isn't the question of the hour! I was a stalker of the MLS (multiple listing service), I looked every day, just waiting for our dream home to go on the market. When our dream home didn't show up, we decided that we would look into building. Kyle designs homes for a living so he began drawing, HOW EXCITING! 

We made an appointment with a builder and went for the meeting, I was ready to sign on the dotted line...until they smacked us in the face with the outrageous price! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, it wasn't like we wanted to build a mansion, just a small, simple (or at least what I thought was simple), cabin-esque house in the woods. I wanted to cry.

Apparently, custom homes with complicated truss systems are expensive..who knew! Actually, Kyle told me all along but I am stubborn.

In the meantime, we had to go somewhere so we moved to my parent's house while all of our worldly goods moved into two gigantic storage units. I snagged a genius moving and storage template here http://shannonbrown.typepad.com/life_in_general/2012/05/how-to-move-1000-miles.html

 

So, all of our stuff is in storage and we are homeless with no idea where we were going to move!

Welcome home...for now!

Where it all began!

 Our family standing on the porch for the last time.

This is where it all began. Our beautiful, old, home in the heart of Georgetown where we lived for 11 years. We bought this house right after I graduated from college, before children were even a glimmer in our eyes because I couldn't say no to its historic charm. So what if Kyle had to travel 40 miles to get to work and we didn't know a single person in this town...we were ready to begin a new journey!

After kids, we quickly found out that having neighbors on all sides was not fun, especially if those neighbors let their children climb out the windows while they slept on the couch :( The kids had no room to play and our dog hated everyone that passed by...it was time to say goodbye!

Selling a house is FOR THE BIRDS!!! It took us 3 long, agonizing years to sell that beauty and by the time we did...we practically gave it away. We were desperate to move on and move out. We decided the woods is where we needed to be. Kyle wanted to hunt from the back porch and I didn't want to see any neighbors from my kitchen window. The search was on but not before we said goodbye to our very first home :( 

I tried to get Kyle to hire house movers but he wasn't taking the bait...it was worth a try.

If you appreciate old homes, check out the floors we re-finished just before selling, they are gorgeous!!