Some progress!

Hi everyone!

Well, this Saturday is the big day! (well, okay, a big day for this far into the process)... we're meeting with Dennis to sign the contract for him to build our home!

Once that is signed, he'll put together a list of all the subcontractors and when we'll need to have met with them and made decisions pertaining to the construction of our new home.

On the lot, more trees have continued to come down. Although, now that it's around zero degrees and there's snow on the ground the tree cutting has stopped for now. There's probably around a half-dozen larger trees (8" diameter up to about 24" diameter) to come down yet, as well as around a dozen little trees (2"-3" in diameter) that have to come down.

Of course, we still have a huge pile of wood to get rid of yet and an even bigger pile of brush sitting there too! lol

Paul

TimBERRRRRrrrrrrrrr!!!

...and the trees come crashing down!

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has a safe New Year's Eve!

Dad came out yesterday and the day before and we hit the task of knocking down trees in a big way (I got a chainsaw for Christmas -- thanks Mom and Dad! -- and so we had two saws going both days).

We knocked down somewhere around a dozen trees in those two days, varying in size from smallish ones near 4" in diameter all the way up to the biggest one so far at around 30" in diameter.

The trees would come down and we'd use Dad's truck to pull them out to the front of the woods (near the wood pile)

The growing wood pile and Dad taking a break

for cutting and easier piling, while all the brush and limbs from the trees were put on the brush pile to the left of the above pic (both pics above were taken early in the day yesterday.. both piles are much larger now!).

...and an already large brush pile...

There's still a ton of trees that need cutting, including three very large trees that are about 24" in diameter each.... probably the tallest of which is "Robin's Tree";  it's simply the nicest tree on the lot, it's pretty much exactly in the middle of our proposed house plan, and Robin is very sad to see it have to go (we would have to move the house soooooo far back on the lot to save this tree that it would cause other issues to do so).

That's Robin's Tree at the very center of this pic!

 We measured the length of smaller diameter (about 12") and somewhat shorter tree that we knocked down yesterday in an attempt to figure out how tall Robin's Tree is;  The tree we measured is right around 75' tall... and our best guesses based on standing height is that Robin's Tree is around 90' tall! (that thing is going to make a huge crash when it comes down!)

Dad is thinking about maybe visiting the lot again today and possibly knocking down Robin's Tree, so since Robin had to work yesterday the girls said goodbye to the tree for her:

Lyndsey, Rachel, and Robin's Tree

 The girls have been out on the lot both days with us and have had an absolute blast roaming around the woods and playing the entire time! (and getting absolutely filthy both days! lol)

Also, in other big news not involving cutting trees down... the builder (Dennis) and I sat down on the 23rd and went over the bids that came in for the revised/downsized floor plan. I have yet to sit down and go through the bids line by line (that's my project for tomorrow), but the overall price means that it looks like we have our plan set! We haven't signed a contract with Dennis yet, but more than likely will in the very near future.

Then the single biggest thing we have to do for the next month and a half is get our current home decluttered and cleaned up so that we can put it up for sale in late February.

We already have a decent amount of boxes and items in the storage garage, but that's only a small part of what will be in there by the time we put the house up on the market.

Paul

Elevations

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving...

Our builder, Dennis, is back from his vacation and sent us an updated pdf of the front, sides, and rear elevation of the outside of the house.

We're going to revise the rear elevation a bit to make more of the great room's wall all windows, and the 4 tall windows on the right elevation will be replaced by two smaller windows which will be just above the cabinets/shelving that are on the inside on other side of the fireplace. 

But as far as overall appearance, this is what it's going to look like. We're going away from any brick on the house to a part stone exterior on the front only. The look of the stone should help it fit in a bit better with the woods being all around it. Dennis also mentioned that he'll expect the re-bids to be back in about 3 weeks, so we should have the numbers back before the holiday.

I'm going to meet Dennis at the lot tomorrow to see if the trees Robin and I would like to be able to keep will actually be far enough away from the house to be kept or not.

Paul

Houston, we have a floor plan!

Well, that didn't take long.. :)

After my last post and talking to our builder, he started on "shrinking" the square footage first thing Monday morning... and by Monday noon had an updated plan back to us.

After several back and forths between us and him we arrived at what appears to be our "final" floor plan.

Our builder is going to be away for a week or so, but when he gets back the next step is he'll work up a front elevation and then once that is done he'll send this out for re-bidding.

In the meantime I'll get the guys here at my workplace to stake the corners of the house on the lot and work on a site drainage plan. Also this week, there will be some trees cut up and gotten rid of. For right now that will be only the dead ones and there few that are down from a storm earlier this year. 

Paul

We're good to go!

It's been a bit since my last post here.... Here's a brief rundown of what has gone on since August:

During that time we gave Dennis (who we've now selected as our builder for this home) the okay to go ahead and send out the house plans for bidding/pricing. The pricing came back at a favorable number (I had a range in mind I was hoping to hit and we were near the top end of that range) per square foot.

I've had meetings and / or phone conversations since then with soil testers, septic designers (for the mound system), and well drillers. Once we'd received estimates from those contractors as well it was time to run off to the credit union and see if we are even in the ballpark with being able to afford this house and get a loan for it.

...that appointment was Friday....

Without doing a credit check or actually going through all of the details of our finances (there were basic questions about how much we make and what we pay now on loans, etc) the loan office at the credit union told us that we'd have no problem qualifying for a loan for the amount we want! WOOHOO!

So then we ran some more numbers and found out the approximate loan amount that we'd need based on quoted value of the new home, approximate value of our current home and lot. (not including any additional cash we'd have available for a down payment)

At this point we came to realize that we need to cut about 10% off the total value of this new home. 

So I contacted Dennis over the weekend and talked to him about it. He said it's very common for this to be the procedure during new home construction and it's going to be relatively simple for him to come up with a list of suggestions on just how we can go about trimming the cost down just a bit.

With any luck he'll have those suggestions back to us yet this week. Once we decide on a route to take to this goal then I'm pretty sure Dennis will have to send out the plans to get re-bid depending on the changes made.

With Robin now working at Werner Electric (and thus being able to buy light fixtures at a much lower cost) we also took the opportunity to run a quote through Werner for the light fixtures in our future home. We came out very close to the allowance amount that was in the quote from Dennis, so that's good news as well.

I plan to watch those allowance numbers very closely and try to get us as close to them (or under them is even better) as possible.

Once we get an overall plan/design set that we can afford then we'll sign a contract with Dennis to build this home and then we'll have a bit of down time on this part of the process probably until after the holidays or so.

Recently as well, we've rented a storage garage to begin storing all the excess "stuff" we have in our house that we need to get out of there prior to putting our house up for sale/showing it (and we have a TON of "stuff" lol). This will be the single biggest part of what we have to do over the next two months in relation to our new home.

Paul

The Beginning....

Well, it has begun... kind of. :)

A few weeks ago we contacted two builders that we've had our eyes on for a couple years now. We met with them both out at our lot and talked with them for quite a while about our schedule and our thoughts on what we're hoping to do as far as building a new home goes.

We met with the owners of O'Brien Builders and Silvercrest Builders (Dennis and Scott, respectively).

Dennis does his own designing on autocad and Scott has an architect he works with almost exclusively. We chose to give Dennis the plans that I've been drawing up over the last few years and let him go to work on those.

Since we had the floor plans so far along already, his first goal was to get a front elevation that we liked. After he did that he went to work on tweaking the floor plans.

After a week and a half we had 3 versions of the floor plans to look at. All of them we the same except for a few changes to each.

As it sits right now, Robin and I have been sitting on the floor plans. We're really liking the last version he gave us, but I just haven't had the time to call him and set up a meeting to talk with him about it yet. As soon as we can do that then he'll throw together a rough layout of a basement plan (in case we are able to finish that off at the time of construction) and we'll be on our way.

Once that happens then we'll take the plan set to Scott for pricing and compare that to Dennis' pricing numbers. We're also looking into putting our new home into the fall Parade of Homes next year as an option as well.

We're currently hoping to begin construction in spring (once the weight limits come off the roads) with completion about August, and are thinking about putting our current house up for sale some time in Feb. of next year.

Paul

First snow

Snow storm Allison dumped well over a foot of snow on us over a 24 hour period of time. A few days later we stopped out at our lot to check it out.
As you can see, the girls loved it. I think it'll actually work out well to get some snowshoes and do some showshoe-ing back there as well.