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Well I have said for a while now that I wanted to start a blog detailing the entire process of our house construction. So far, I haven’t been able to start that blog because we haven’t started the project, but that is all changing today. Yesterday we got a pre-approval letter from the bank (finally) and our lot was pinned and staked for excavation. I’m really excited as now can start to see some light at the end of this tunnel.

Last year around August, we really started thinking about building a house. Thank God that he didn’t let us go through with that plan or we would be in a big mess right now. We got some house plans from my aunt and uncle that they were no longer going to use and we really liked them. They were a very open floor plan with an open kitchen and living area. It included a walk-out basement and many more things we really liked. We took those plans to a good friend of mine, Shannon, owner of Rock Solid Construction, and had him start looking at them and start getting bids. We had a pretty strict budget and some pretty firm ideas on what we wanted. After a few months, we decided to hold off on the project for a while as it was getting too late in the year to be starting, what with fall setting in and everything. We just felt a little rushed, so we decided to hold off for the winter. Our plan was to convene early spring and continue where we left off, and that is what we did. Come early spring, we started asking Shannon to resume getting bids and putting a proposal together for us.

Our target date to start building the beginning of July. So, what is the first thing we had to do before we could start building? We had to sell our current house. Most of you are probably wondering, “with the housing market in the shape that it is in, didn’t you guys have a hard time selling your house?”. Nope, we didn’t have any problems at all. We put it up in early June and it sold in 14 days! That is pretty amazing and truly a miracle in this market. We were out of our house in less than a month and bunking with my sister and brother-in-law. Now the pressure was on to get these estimates done and start building. Shannon was great and worked extremely hard to get us a proposal and stay within our budget. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t make that work. We tried feverishly over the next few months to change things and modify things to get it to fit within our budget, but when it came down to it, those house plans were just too big and there were too many square feet. This was disappointing to say the least. Here we are a month past our original target build date and we don’t have anything.

At this point, we started questioning whether we were supposed to build. We just didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We started looking for houses because in this market, there are a lot of great deals out there. We looked for the entire month of August and we didn’t really find anything that was within our budget and met all our specifications. One of the reasons we wanted to build is because we are extremely picky. Not only do we want a nice house, but we also want to focus on energy efficiency.  We wanted high efficiency appliances, a high efficiency HVAC system, a heat pump, high efficiency windows and last but not least, and tankless hot water heater. On top of that, I wanted to be able to wire my own house with cat5e for network capabilities and an in house sound system. There are more things that we want, but for the sake of length, I’ll leave it at that for now. Needless to say, we couldn’t find a house that had all those items in it and I’m not exaggerating when I say we couldn’t even find a decently priced house with most of those things in it. So, here we were into September and we hadn’t done anything yet. Frustration would have to be the word we were feeling about that time.

Towards the end of August, we went to see a house in Battlefield, MO, not too far from where our lot was. It was an awesome, split level house with a walk-out basement. It was well within our price range and the floor plan was amazing similar to that of our old house plans. We absolutely loved it and after thinking about it throughout the night, we decided to see about putting a contract on it. Sunday we got with my dad, who just happens to be our realtor, to put a contract on it but come to find out someone wrote a contract on it the day before. Man were we disappointed…to use another similar understatement. After we got over it, we started looking at the house and talked to the realtor, who just happened to be the builder, and started talking about what it would take to build that house on our lot. The price was right, the layout was great and everything seemed to be right. Well, after a month of planning and bidding and working things out, we are just about to break ground on our new house. I hope I didn’t bore you with all the back story, but I wanted to give you a little insight into why this house is so special to us and what it means to us to have gone through all that and finally get started on building.

Throughout the next several months and posts, I hope to document and catalog the entire build process from excavation, foundation, framing, wiring, finishing and finally to decorating and moving in. I want this not only to be a history of our build, but also serve as insight and information for others planning on building in the future. I hope to be able to keep track of all the mistakes and blessings as we go along. I also want to thoroughly document, with pictures, the entire process to make it that much more appealing to everyone. I hope everyone enjoys these series of posts and finds them informative.

See the next post where I talk about the plan and the excavation.