I'm starting this blog to chronicle one of our biggest life events so far - we're building a house! It's not our happiest life event (those consist of our wedding day and sweet babies), but it's exciting (and just as stressful), nonetheless! And since writing's my gig, I thought it would be nice to have this to look back on someday.
When Justin and I got married, our five year plan was to fix up and sell the house he had grown up in. And we did it. This August we'll celebrate our five year anniversary, and hopefully, moving into our new home. We put our house up for sale on March 20th, and on the 22nd we had three offers. Now, the housing market hasn't been especially good in recent years, and the last thing we were expecting was to sell our house the third day it was on the market - but beggars can't be choosers and we were happy it was that simple for us. Especially with two one year olds to constantly clean up after to make sure the house was "showing ready". It really couldn't have gone better, but it gave us a serious push to figure out where we'd be living next.
We hadn't even considered building a house. It just seemed like too much work, and we have another baby on the way due in September. That project seemed big enough to prepare for - thank you very much! When Baby C arrives, we'll have three children under the age of two - in other words, our hands will be full!
So we let our realtor take us to homes in our desired area, and nothing was fitting the bill. Things were either out of our price range, or too similar to the house we have been living in. He slowly started dropping hints about building, which we laughed at politely and pretty much ignored. As time started ticking and our closing date drew closer, we stopped laughing and started listening.
We started looking at available land. Neither of us felt a big pull to move from our current town. We were close to Justin's work, and to Grandma and Grandpa's house - where the girls go every day while we're at work. Plus, we like where we live. So do a lot of other people, which means lots to build on are hard to come by.
After being pretty disappointed with the limited selection in the area, our realtor told us about an "interesting" lot he wanted us to take a look at. We met him there, and immediately thought the lot was beautiful. It was in our price range, about a half acre in land, and built in a neighborhood where we would never have any backyard neighbors - so lots of privacy. The neighborhood was full of young families like ours, with kids in nearly every house.
The "interesting" catch was that the land was bordered on two sides by what's referred to as a "navigable waterway". This was why no one had built on the lot yet. Bascially, it looks like a tiny little stream, but in an effort to preserve waterways in the area, law states that you can't build within 75 feet of a navigable waterway in any direction. That meant that this beautiful lot mostly had to be preserved - we could build our home in about 25% of it.
So...we went back and forth like crazy on this. Did we want to spend the money on a lot where our home plans would be so limited? There were so many pros and cons. Pro: a beautiful, great-sized yard. Con: how much of the yard could we actually use? Pro: Loved the neighborhood. Con: Would we regret a lot where we could never build a shed or deck?
We hemmed and hawed over it for weeks, but when it came down to it, we loved the location. You've heard the saying right? "When buying a house, the three most important things are location, location, location." We're all for preserving natural waterways, and realized we had never intended to have a deck or shed anyway! So we called our builder and said, "We're in!"
Today is 42 days from the closing date on selling our current house, and we need to be able to start building on that day in order to get in this house before Baby C makes his/her debut. (Side note: I say Baby C because our first two are twins, so the doctors always referred to them as Baby A and Baby B, which Justin and I still do sometimes. So, Baby C just makes sense!)
We're also building this house on a serious budget. We're not big spenders - probably partly because we don't have a ton of money! :) But I also think it's more in both of our nature's to do things frugally. We love things that look nice, but don't cost a fortune, and we love to get great deals on things. I'm actually excited to see how we can save money as we build our family home! Our builder is drawing up a rough sketch of our house as we speak, and we'll be meeting with an architect within the week.
