Groundbreaking day and a Christmas snow!

It's been another week and progess is slow with the holidays, but it's still going. Last week, we got our building permit on Tuesday and the site prep guy was out Wednesday morning leveling off the pad where our foundation will be going here shortly. They also brought in a HUGE load of rocks for our temporary drive-way for all the big trucks to enter/exit the lot. The guy leveled the area within one inch all the way around, luckily it started out pretty flat but it's still cool that he's that good. Rob learned all about the laser surveying equipment and the guy showed him how it all worked.



Before

During

Learning about surveying

Rock Delivery

Loud noises.

All done!



Nice and flat!

We've also been searching for random appliances on sale/craigslist and spotted some beautiful double ovens over at the Sears Outlet in Carrollton, they looked brand new and were half price, so while the site prep guy was doing his thing, we went shopping. Too good of a deal to pass up. So far we've also got a Jenn-Air refrigerator and Wolf vent hood/motor from Craigslist. Still looking for a microwave, dishwasher, and a range top to complete our appliance set but we have plenty of time for that.


Double ovens and refrigerator

On Thursday, our electrician came out to set our "T-pole" for temporary electric power that all the sub-contractors will need for their tools and whatnot. Before the electric company will run power to it, the town inspector had to come out and give us our first green tag after inspection, which we got on Friday.

T-pole, fascinating...I know.

That's about it for exciting things so far. Since this week was Christmas, we haven't had luck getting the electric company to come back out and hook it up, but as soon as they do we'll have the foundation guy out to set form boards and get a bunch of inspections to make sure everything is all set correctly to pour the foundation. We'll have to get a survey done, a pre-pour inspection (by the company who engineered the foundation), an independent inspection (just in case), and the city inspection (ya know, to follow the rules). In the meantime, it snowed on Christmas and we got some fun pictures off the field cam to prove it. :)

Just starting to fall Christmas morning

And it's sticking...

Full on Christmas blizzard!

Still here, Dec 26th

Starting to melt

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, and looking forward to a great new year in 2013! #1 NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: BUILD A HOUSE. BOOM. HERE WE GO.

Exciting Day!

Well, today is a very exciting day! We FINALLY received our building permit!!! Woohoo! It has taken many many many steps to get to this point, so let me just enlighten you on that whole process and then starting tomorrow I can hopefully update with actual pictures of work being performed. Like I said, exciting stuff. We also have a camera up taking pics occasionally throughout the day so we can make a video of it all being built at the end. Here's all it captures on a regular day so far-

Morning -

Visitors...

Evening -

 

P.S. This is about the end of the exciting happenings for this post, so check back soon for updates - or feel free to continue reading the following very boring things only being documented for the purposes of our wonderful memories or those wanting to go through this process in the future.

----------     WARNING: LOTS OF BORING DETAILS TO FOLLOW (+ 1 PICTURE)    ----------

In order to get approved for a loan, we had to first decide what we were going to build - DONE! But I guess the banks don't just hand you blank checks and cross their fingers that you build something they could eventually sell to get their money back if they had to. So now that we had our dream home designed, we sent it off to our OBN point of contact and he reviewed it and sent us back an estimate of how much it would cost to build, based on what type of flooring, appliances, exterior finishes, etc. that we wanted in it. After we had the initial heart attack, we decided we could handle it. Towards the end of July, he sent those plans off to the bank. The bank then sent them off to an appraiser, who contacted us a few weeks later for some additional details. The appraiser goes out and looks at the homes around our lot, similar homes sold recently and those currently for sale and does adjustments to those prices to tell the bank what they feel our home would be worth if we built what was on that piece of paper. On August 28th, we got our appraisal back with exciting news. The estimate to build our house with OBN came in much less than the appraised value! Yay for instant equity! (Although I wonder how much we should offset that with all the time we'll put into it...time will tell.)

So bank says, alright...house appraised for this much, after you pay this much...we'll give you this, sound good? We said, "Yep sounds great. Can we have our check now?" They said "Not quite." We had to go through the whole loan application process, gathering documentation and whatnot. Well apparently while they were doing that, the tax bills for the 2012 taxes got sent out. And that "lien" takes priority on the title for the property so the bank told us on Oct 10th that they couldn't give us our loan until that was all settled. Great...considering the taxes weren't actually DUE until January 2013.

Now it was time to meet the neighbors. Remember that first post that mentioned it was a 6 acre tract that got subdivided into 3 lots? Well the tax bill went to the old owner and it was for all 6 acres. So us and the other 2 new owners were responsible for paying the whole bill, and it took us a few weeks to all get on the same page and go up to the county to pay the taxes all together on October 28th. Luckily they were both pretty nice and understanding. One of them had already started building before the tax bill was sent out so it wasn't really his problem, and the other one was going to run into the same issue soon so we got it all worked out. Meanwhile, we told the bank they were paid but then they didn't see it on their side yet...so we waited and waited for them to post. That whole process took from early September until we got the call on November 8th that they had posted as paid. November 9th we closed on our construction loan! Another exciting step in our journey was completed.

Meanwhile, actual house building/non-loan related steps were being completed...we had to get our soil tested to see what was under there so they could tell us what kind of foundation we needed so that our forever home will actually last forever. We sent our plans off to a company on Sep 10th, who subsequently took some kind of tractor thing out there and dug two 35 ft deep holes into our lot and took some samples back for analysis. They sent us back a report a couple weeks later, that was a bunch of technical jargon that I didn't understand. Luckily, we didn't really have to understand it all. October 15th, we took that report and sent it to someone who we paid to understand it all for us, and they designed us a lovely post-tension slab foundation based on the information in that soil report.

So we knew exactly what kind of foundation we needed, so just go pour it on there right? Well...again, not quite. The town frowns upon building houses without permits, so we decided to follow their procedures. But as part of the permit application, you also have to tell them who your contractors are going to be for electrical, HVAC, and plumbing work AND they have to be registered with town in order to get permit approval. So before we could decide on our contractors, we had to get bids. Lots and lots of bids, and make lots of decisions. For the most part, we sent them plans in pdf that we had from the architect, they would call and ask more specific questions about what type of A/C system we needed, and water heater and all that good stuff. Luckily, Rob was very interested in these things and asked lots of questions to make sure we got what we needed. The guys were all very knowledgable and answered all the questions so in the end we picked ones that may not have been the lowest price, but we felt confident in the work that they would provide for their bid. We accepted the bids for contractors we liked and got them registered with the town.

Once we had all of our paperwork ready for our permit application, on December 6th we proudly marched into Fairview Town Hall with our packet and plopped it down in front of them, held our hands out and said "permit please!" Well maybe not exactly like that. Have you seen Fairview's monstrous Town Hall in the Village at Fairview? It's quite lovely, see?

 

Sadly, they said it would be a week or so until the plans had been reviewed and then they would issue our permit. Again, we waited. They came back last Thursday and said well, you're required to build an Energy Star home and this doesn't say Energy Star on it. So we gave them our paper work that showed our home would be 15% more efficient than code, which is the Energy Star requirement. Still, not quite good enough. We had our Energy Code contractor run us yet another report that had the official Energy Star ratings and we were in business. That was just what they needed and they issued our permit today! As soon as we handed them a check for all their wonderful fees. Guess that building doesn't pay for itself.

 

Lot - CHECK.

Designs - CHECK.

Loan - CHECK.

Permit - CHECK.

Contractors - SEMI-CHECK. First ones down, many to go.

 

Calls were made today and the site prep guy should have been out to stake the property by now and he'll be out tomorrow with the tractor to level it out and drop off our load of rocks for the entry so that all the trucks don't track mud onto the town's streets. We're off work for the next few weeks, so hopefully we can update with some more exciting things and more pictures soon!

Designing our forever home...

So, last we left off we had closed on our lot. Just a few weeks before that, we had our first meeting with the architect. Apparently, before you can build a house...you have to design one. This isn't a normal, go to a builder, look at their floor plans, pick your favorite and go kind of thing like we did with our current house. It was a...you can have whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want kind of thing. Quite overwhelming - enter Pinterest & Houzz.

If you haven't been on either of those sites, go. Go now. Wait - finish reading this post first, then go. However, carefully reconsider going to those sites if you have important things you were needing to do. Otherwise, proceed. Both of these sites gave us plenty of ideas for how we wanted the house to look decor and "style" wise, but we had never found a floor plan that was "perfect". No worries, I guess that's what we pay architects for? Before we met with Dave for the first time (May 10th), he said to gather ideas for what we like...bring them to our meeting and we'd look at them on his computer and tell him what we liked and what we didn't, etc. So...with 400+ pins and ideas between those 2 sites and only an hour or two to meet with him, we had to cut it down. We took him a powerpoint slideshow and a list of our requirements. Some of which included - required passage way from laundry room/master closet, "hidden" room (you'd never know it was there unless you knew our secret floor plan), sliding barn doors on study, must be able to see TV from kitchen, no formal dining room, 3 bedrooms- 2 upstairs, balcony, master downstairs, media room, study, large patio, etc.

So off Dave went, drawing a floor plan and came back with one June 7th from scratch, out of nowhere. (Keep in mind, we didn't take him a single floor plan we liked). It was mind boggling, this was a house no one had built before...just for us! Ok, well not quite...it was almost there, had pretty much everything we wanted, but we hadn't quite thought through it all. So we got it back and decided we needed to go look at some houses and really walk through them all to get a perception of how big of rooms we wanted and all that fun stuff. We went out looking for new construction homes in the area, lo and behold we find this house being framed in a nearby Lucas subdivision (not the only house we looked through, there were several). But we both kind of walked out of it thinking...this could be perfect if we could just move this, this and this. So...with a little photoshop assistance, we went back to the architect with a better layout in mind. We nixed the idea of a two-story and went with a really wide one-story so it would look better on the space of the lot.

This was the first photoshop attempt at a sketch, using a floor plan to start with.

So, from there is where it all came together. We made a few tweaks bath and forth through e-mail, met with him again in person a couple more times and voila. We ended up with our perfect floor plan. It only took 5 major sketch revisions (moving walls/rooms around) and a few smaller tweaks (appliance/door placements/ceiling treatments)...I think that's pretty good, but who really knows. Reading over it, that sounds a lot easier than it really was. We debated on room dimensions, bathroom locations, door openings...all in all though, it still almost looks like that first terribly photoshopped mess. :)

He also drew the elevation based on a few photos we sent, but nailed it spot on with his first design. So for those who haven't seen it up close yet (other than grainy instagram/facebook photos), here it is! Ta-da. Grainy blogspot photos!

Now, at this point...we can't really change too much so if you think we should have moved something around just umm...don't tell us. Just tell us what you love about it haha. We're pretty pleased with it though and think you'll enjoy visiting us here, someday. Here's what it will look like from the front and the back too.

Next up in the blog series, how do you get a loan for something that's not built yet? And then what do you do? Stay tuned.

The beginning...

So..where do I start? Well, most of you reading this know that we are embarking on an exciting journey to build our own home, with the help of a few experts along the way of course. With the actual building about to commence in the next week or two, I thought I'd take a moment to remember how we got here...then I'll fill you in on all the pointless details as we get going, and post pictures, lots of pictures. : )

We had been in our current house for about 5 years and were looking into where and how we'd build our next home. We first met our Owner Builder Network consultant/project manager, ML, at the Dallas Home and Garden show a little over a year ago and started looking into what it was all about. We met with him at their office in Arlington and really liked what they had to offer (If you don't know anything about them, definitely check out their website). They basically give you all the resources and guidance you need to build your own home, while cutting out the cost of a builder, but...you have to do all the things a builder would do, get bids, schedule contractors, make sure work gets done right, on time etc. Sounds great right? We thought so. But first we needed a place to build this so-called dream home...

We had already been searching for land for years...literally years. We are quite picky. We wanted to be close to important things (like work and shopping), but also have enough space and the ability to build a (BIG) shop without HOA restrictions that most neighborhoods these days have - I'll let you decide which of us wanted each of those things. In March of this year, we finally found what we had been waiting for. I'm pretty sure I contacted the selling realtor for the lot within hours of the posting (March 11) and drove out to check it out the same day. It was located on 6 acres that the owner had decided to subdivide into 3 separate, 2 acre lots. One of the lots already had an older home on it, and the other two were empty. We wanted lot 3 and it was just about perfect. No building restrictions, 5 mins away from the mall in Fairview/Allen. What more could you ask for? :) 

The realtor mentioned that they were accepting contracts, but since the property was being subdivided through the city's process, we would not be able to close on it for a few months. At this point, we had zero design plans, just lots of ideas...so the delay would not be an issue. On March 26th, we met with the realtor, signed our contract and the seller signed the following day, woohoo! That required a photo of the pending sign.

A few weeks later, we had our financing arranged and from there, we waited. First the re-platting had to go through the town's planning and zoning commission for their approval (May 10th-approved!), and the on to the "Town Council" for further approvals (June 5th-APPROVED!). We finally had a lot to buy, that actually existed according to the city. Then the seller decided he wanted to go out of town, so we extended our expecting close date to July. Finally, on June 28th we were able to close and purchase our very first lot. After buying our first house in 2006, it was kind of odd to go through all of those signing papers again, but this time you walk away without keys and without being able to move in...any time soon. But there we were, with this beautiful piece of 2 acre property, trying to figure out what in the world we were going to do with it. 

For the next post, get ready for an overview of our experience so far with the whole design process...hold on to your hats.

A few pictures from October - 

                             

 View from the back of the property -

Finally got a pic of us with our SOLD sign. : ) It is December though, so not as pretty as it looked then.