Footings poured. Concrete! Brick! Stuff!

 
 
 
 

Here's the full album if you're interested:

March18_Hillsborough

The first pictures of digging. Smells so good!!!

 
 
 
 

Here's the full album with captions if you're interested:

March16_Hillsborough

The ground has been broken.

Finally, finally, finally. After many many tries at buying land, getting frustrated and looking for a house, settling for a boring house then deciding we would fight on and try to get the house we really wanted, it's happening. It's been a very, very tough fight. Lots of frustration and an emotional rollercoaster, but I am so happy that we waited and waited and waited until the right opportunity came up. I'll post a couple of pictures of the progress so far.

Site layout

We've been trying to decide on how to lay things out. 10 acres is a large canvas from which to work. There are two high spots that make for better sites, as things can get really wet when it rains. Here's how I think we are going to lay things out. Hopefully this will leave us some room for animals and a racetrack for me (go kart or otherwise).

New house rendering

We've changed things to look more like a farm house now that it'll be on 10 acres, and nowhere near the beach. I'm not sure we're going to be able to afford the front porch all the way across, but otherwise it should look pretty much like this.

Deal is done.

We secured the %5 down and handed it over to Gail. It was a scary moment, as we've been renting a house in Wilmington (after living with my parents for 10 months) and suddenly we were going back to the "committed" column. We ended up feeling like the living room was going to be too small, after measuring LeAnne's parents living room, which feels kind of tight. We've now crossed the 2000 square foot barrier, and are definitely pushing the Not So Big House designation, I feel.

We've had to nix the garage for now, as the home cost and land is right at the limits of our budget. Gail has permits, septic stuff and engineering things to get done, so I don't think they'll get started for a few weeks, but it's finally happening- we can't believe it. We love the lot- 10 acres, which is far more than we thought we'd be able to afford, but the economic downturn has really devalued land (for the time being).

Holy cow how time flies. Update! House underway!

I can't believe it's been almost a year since I posted here. We got frustrated with the lending situation. The price to build was still much higher than we hoped for. We got a survey done on the land and found that it had 3 defects (easement, floodzones, etc.). Stuff that wasn't mentioned to us at all. So we pulled out of the lot. And then we pulled out of building in Wilmington, because my work picked up quite a bit and I was having to travel to Durham much more than previously. We eventually decided that we would have to move back, as LeAnne's health has been improving so much.

We started looking at houses in Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill, and thought we certainly would be able to find something we would be happy with in the whole area. Again we were frustrated by all the crappy houses everywhere. It's amazing how difficult it is to find a decent house with character that's not +3500 square feet.

So we came up one weekend with about 30 different land listings to look at and drove all over the Triangle. There were some really beautiful lots in Hillsborough. Much cheaper per acre than land in Wilmington, but still expensive. As we were driving down Orange Grove Road, we noticed 3 10 acre tracts for sale by owner, something that hadn't come up in our internet searches. We fell in love with the place, the price was right, and the land owner made it very clear to us he was willing to negotiate on the price.

We started shopping for a builder and settled on two. Stanton Homes, a cheaper high volume builder, and Gail Crabtree, a low volume more expensive builder. She was about $20,000 more, but was accustomed to building the kinds of detail we liked, albeit on a larger scale. We ended up going with her. Also, because she has building conservatively, even during the housing boom, is still in good standing with the banks and was able to get a construction loan relatively easy. We were trying to get the construction loan ourselves, to give us more freedom in choosing a builder early on, but found it incredibly difficult. Even with our good credit scores and steady income, anyone wanting to build a home in these hard times was looked upon as crazy.

I'll end this post here, so I can start putting up some pictures of things and show everybody where we're at.