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.