It's Slowing Down Again!

On the first of July we arrived to find that the outlets and light switches had been installed, as well as the toilets and vanities. We made some changes in the master bathroom so the drawings I posted don't portray the true layout of the bathroom. We borrowed room from the laundry to sink our vanity into the wall, which opened up the space.

Master bath vanity

Toilet in the master bath

Vanity in the hall bath

At this point, the fixtures have been installed, the doors have been painted and the hinges have been hung. They have also installed our sump pumps (they used cruddy pumps during construction) and a breaker box in the basement.

We are waiting for the last few tasks to be performed:

water needs to be run from the street 

electric needs to be run from the street

doors hung

final coat of paint

carpet

and here's the kicker....THE SEPTIC SYSTEM!

The septic system will ultimately put our move-in date on hold. In our county, we are required to install a mound system, it has to be the ugliest most unattractive thing you have ever seen! Kyle, my dad and I worked on clearing a portion of our property that is about the size of a football field, for the system. The Health Inspector in our County will not give the workers an OK to install until conditions are near perfect and we have had nothing but rain for the past week...isn't life grand!

Now our house is a "make-up" house for the contractors. That means, the contractors will now only work on completing our house when they have nothing else to do since we are on hold anyway! We have no idea when we'll be able to move in. Originally, our move-in date was June 15...today is July 6 :(

Kitchen Progress!

Possibly one of the most exciting days so far (for me) happened on June 24!

So, as mentioned earlier, we upgraded the cabinets and went with a larger island. I am really pleased with the choices but we are working out some kinks. You'll notice the unfinished side of the cabinets where the stove will be placed. We aren't sure why it's unfinished but for the cost of the upgrade we're trying to find out.

Other exciting news: the mantel and beam on the ceiling were installed! I love the dark stain!

When making selections, we could elect to have white or cream paint put on the walls. We opted for the white and then we'll go back in and re-paint the house with our desired colors.

Exciting Progress!

On June 11 we had (almost) finished drywall!

 I will admit, I had some problems with the drywall job.The work seemed sloppy but we were assured that everything was fine and they would finish it appropriately. I wasn't sure if this was a case of slapping lipstick on a pig or if it's always done this way but it seemed to be fine once it was finished.

On June 21 we found vinyl flooring in the kitchen and bathrooms and also brick on the fireplace! The brick was the hardest decision we had to make and I could not be happier with our choice!

 

 

Kitchen and bath flooring

The mortar was still wet in this picture but you get the idea.

SIDING!!!!!

We were completely overjoyed when we drove down our driveway to see this on May 31:

Shingles and More!

We were excited to see shingles on May 30 and our fireplace!

We chose to go with an insert because we plan on heating with wood during the winter. This insert should heat the entire house! It was a significant additional cost that we added to the price of the house but the cost should be re-claimed in the heating bill savings.

 

Our Home Needs Prayer!

This home building adventure has taught us a lot but, more than anything this:

Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank Him for all He has done.

Philippians 4:6

So, with that in mind, I wanted to blanket our home with words of wisdom from the Bible.

Each verse location was given special consideration and I prayed over each one as I wrote them in the house. Kyle also wrote some without my knowledge so I didn't have the chance to take photos of those.

Over the location of our table

Master bedroom

In our son's bedroom

In our daughter's room

In the hallway between the kid's room

Son's room

Daughter's room

 

Roof Sheathing! A pleasant Surprise.

On Friday evening, we pulled into our drive to notice we had trusses! We weren't expecting those until Monday!! As you may imagine, the fact that something happened BEFORE it was scheduled was so exciting! 

On Monday evening, we drove out to see what the day had produced and we saw this:

We aren't really sure why 1 roof section was left incomplete but we were celebrating regardless!

We were also excited to see a roof over the porch, window and doors.

Here is a back view:

And, here's an inside view of the sliding door in the kitchen:

The kids were having a blast running around the property with the neighbor's dog, "Red".

We can't wait to see what today will bring...hopefully, shingles. We're scheduled to get more rain tonight :(

The Cutest Guided Tour.

Last night the boys went to a 4H meeting and the girls decided to go check out the house progress. We were thrilled to see that all the interior walls were complete!

We received yet another monsoon during our drive to the property so the sub-floor and all wood everywhere was completely saturated! The basement sump pump was still chugging along as there is no shortage of water in that pit.

I'm slightly freaked out regarding the dry-time of all the walls and floor...are they going to cover it all up before it's dry, resulting in mold? I've been assured that my fears are ridiculous but it wouldn't agree with my character to not question every professional involved..imagine that!

Our fearless 7 year old has been obsessed with Kids YouTube lately and she insisted that I record her while she gives the first official tour of our home. So without further adieu, enjoy!

PS. Please don't judge her mismatched PJ's, we tend to get comfy as soon as we get home regardless of where our night activities may lead.

So, there you have it! Hopefully, she'll give another tour after the home is complete!

As long as things progress as scheduled, our roof should be shingled by next Wednesday and we'll meet the electrician next Friday to choose our outlet placement!

We Have Walls!

So, after being pushed back on the builders "list" we had to wait what seemed like FOREVER for framing to start.

(I couldn't help myself)

On May 7th, we were told our lumber would be delivered on Monday, the 9th and the framers would get to work! Again, I was giddy to finally see some progress!

On Sunday night we sat down to look at the forecast and this is what the week had in store for us!!!

EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

On Tuesday, the rain held off for most of the day and when we went to the site we were able to see some progress:

The decking was almost complete and they had the two garage walls erected. I prayed a hedge of protection around the house due to the impending straight line winds. I assume you know what those are...tornado strength winds...go figure!

Wednesday was a glorious day! The sun was shining and I couldn't wait to see what kind of progress they had made. It was so exciting to drive down our demolished driveway to see this sight

Once we were closer it came into view...

And then, the angels sang :)

Here is Kyle standing in the kitchen. At this point, the kids were sitting in the garage because I was terrified they were going to fall down that hole you see that leads to the basement, or indoor pool. We're hoping to see the interior walls up tonight. I think Kyle would bring a sleeping bag out to sleep here if we weren't  going to get another torrential downpour for the next two days.

Concrete Floors!

When you're in the thick of this building thing, it's easy to get excited over crazy stuff. I should know. I almost cried when I finally saw concrete on our porch, in the basement and in the garage.

Isn't it beautiful???

Our good friend came out to do the concrete work and we're thrilled! I really wanted to put  my hand prints in the garage but I was quickly shot down. Oh-well, you can't blame a girl for tryin'!

FRAMING IS NEXT! BRING ON THE WALLS!

Another Week of Crickets

We waited another week for more progress. This was a welcome site on April 13

ONE  WEEK LATER...

 

After another week of sump pump installation and window installation, we have a real basement (with gravel floors but, whatever, it counts)!

In the photo you can see both sump pumps, one is already working overtime, this weather has been insane!

Mother Nature has even provided us with some natural ponds, (mosquito larvae heaven).

Some time in the near future we're going to have to get those holes filled in. They're old pathways farmers used to get back to the fields and also paths used to harvest trees. Basically, our whole site is a swampland right now. We've received 15 feet of rain this spring! (not really, I may be overly dramatic)

Basements...The Next Slow Step.

One more week has passed and progress is dragging! 

On April 7th we found that our footers had been poured and we had a gravel base in the basement.

In case you're wondering, I asked about 15 times what a footer was and I didn't figure it out until I saw it. Again, poor Kyle.

You see those strips of concrete? Those are footers...you're welcome.

 

We once again had another unexpected surprise when the crew was excavating. They told us the front porch would need to be completely excavated due to the unstable ground.

These days I can hear the Wayans brothers in the back of my mind in their classic SNL skit:

Don't judge me, I'm a product of the 90's.

Now we wait for wall forms to be erected and then we get to move to floors.

More Excavating

We visited the job site on March 30th to find a bigger, cleaner hole:

Things were starting to take shape...and fill with water! The trees being uprooted, left pockets of water in the ground, those pockets began pouring into our hole, causing a sump pump to be put in the hole to drain the water. 

The sump pump was pretty effective at extracting the water but it did cause us to make the decision to put 2 sump pumps in the basement. Brown County is completely flat and notorious for  bad drainage. We want to be safe rather than sorry so we paid an extra amount of money to add the second pump.

I tend to ask rather stupid questions regarding the building process and Kyle thinks it's comical. I was concerned that the "Walls" of the basement didn't look like 8 ft. tall walls. Kyle just chuckled and told me they will. Once again, my impatience is starting to get the best of me!

We Have a hole!!!

We decided our little gypsy family needed to get away for a few days. The frustration of absolutely nothing happening at our site combined with the need to give my poor parents a break from having a house-full of people warranted the decision. We headed south for spring break to hillbilly heaven...aka: Gatlinburg!

While in Gatlinburg we received a call from some guy (there are so many people involved I don't even try to learn their names). He told us there were tree stumps on our site. BIG SHOCKER THERE! We were told to leave the stumps and the excavation crew would pop them out. Kyle had a "heated" chat with said guy and I quickly escorted him out of the leather store we were perusing.

That delayed our dig by one more day as we made the decision to let the crew pop them out (as we were told they would do anyway)

On March 29th, our good friends who actually happen to be our new neighbors sent this picture.

Amen! Pass the Tylenol! We finally have a hole!

68 Days with NO ACTION!

So it's been 68 days since closing and this is what our site looks like:

That photo look familiar? It should, it's the same photo taken on January 27. NOTHING has progressed! It's been a pretty mild winter but we've also had more rain than normal. Now we're hearing that because it's so wet we have have to wait for the lot to dry so the excavator can get his equipment back there. SOMETIME BETWEEN NOW AND SPRING!

This has been so frustrating, have I mentioned that we're still living with my parents? I'm sure they will be thrilled to hear this news. There were several nice days that could have been taken advantage of but for one reason or another were not. We were told in the beginning they couldn't dig unless we had our electric hooked up. Ummmmm....do you have to plug your bulldozer in to make it operate? I do realize that they operate pumps once the hole is opened but we did offer to provide generators and that was declined.

Communication has been pretty crummy thus far. Nobody has been proactive in calling us to keep us informed and that is incredibly frustrating, at one point in time we both contemplated just cutting our losses. To say we're defeated is such an understatement.

In the meantime, we're making interest payments and realizing each day that our original June 15th completion date is slipping further and further away. Today we got 2 inches of rain and tonight we're supposed to get a couple inches of snow (imagine that)!

I know God's timing is perfect, I'm trying to rest in that.

We have a driveway and temporary electric!

Our dig date was set for January 18...this photo was taken January 27 :(

It's safe to say, things aren't going as planned.

We had some hold-up getting the proper permits and then there was confusion as to who set up the temporary pole for electric. We finally got all that worked out and we now have a driveway...and a portable toilet (not pictured)!

Have I mentioned that I'm not the most patient person? Well, I'm not.

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!