And we have water!

When we purchased our property, we were happy to find out that a well had already been dug. A few weeks ago, we hired a well company to get the well up and running again. This past Saturday, Ashley, his dad and a few of their employees ran pipes up to our homesite. So now we have water! After the guys finished working on the well, we grilled hotdogs and the kids (our nephews and niece were also there) played. Here's the view from the shop (where the well is located) up to our homesite (back right corner).
Gathering at the shop.
The well! The shop is in the distance.

Water pipes!
Just another step towards getting the house actually built.

Meeting with the Contractors

This past Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we met with the each of the contractors who will be submitting a bid to build the house. While Ashley's parents watched our boys, we asked and answered a ton of questions.

Some of the things that came up that we hadn't thought about were:

• What type of flooring will be used on the porches? (We decided treated wood)
• Will we use vinyl or wood windows? (Vinyl)
• Will we follow the plan for an open cornice or box it in? (Still thinking)
  
• What type of crown molding do we want to use (Simple, not overstated)
• What type of heating? (We already knew we were going to install a wood-burning stove instead of the fireplace. But we also need to decide if we want to have electric or gas heat)

Meeting with three different contractors meant we got to pick their brains and learn about other choices, too, such as:

• Rinnai tankless water heater
• MiraTEC for exterior columns
• How many recessed lights we want to use
• Having beadboard wainscoting on the stairs (one contractor definitely recommended this as a durability issue with boys--it looks great, too)
  

Although price will play a large factor in who we choose as the contractor, personality and reputation are important, too. All three contractors have built homes for people we know. All three are reputed to do excellent work.

Contractors A and B are the ages of our fathers, while Contractor C is a few years older than us. Contractor A's business is slow right now (meaning he's been chomping at the bit to get started), while B and C have several other projects they're working on. Contractors B and C came to the meeting with more questions and suggestions, while Contractor A seemed to be more likely to place the decision-making in our hands.

Our first meeting (with Contractor A) took 2 hours. I was exhausted (and a little overwhelmed/frustrated) afterward. Even though we had our list of our preferences, we still had plenty of things that needed to be decided. We spent a good bit of time discussing what should be done about the front window heights since we were lowering the ceilings to 9 ft. This was something I thought would be easy and straight-forward; however, Contractor A's nature seemed to be much more of letting us discuss it vs just saying "This is how it should be done." After that meeting, I realized there are some things I am going to have opinions about and there are other things where I'll trust the contractor (or Ashley and contractor) to make the decision.

The meetings with B and C took 45 minutes. It definitely helped to have walked through the plan with the first contractor and have some basic questions answered. We went into the second two meetings knowing much more about the house and our preferences.

Overall, I really enjoyed meeting with the contractors. It really made the fact that we're building the house REAL!

We should have their proposals by the end of this coming week (Oct. 22) or the start of the next.

The plans have arrived

Our house plans arrived via FedEx on Monday. It was exciting to come home from the grocery store and see a large package waiting at the front door. We ordered the construction set, which includes 8 plans printed on paper. We have a copy for ourselves and each contractor (there are 3) will receive a set to prepare their bids. Because we are ready to begin building as soon as possible, we are meeting with the contractors this week. To help us and the contractors, we've prepared a list of changes, such as carpeting the bedroom floors (instead of hardwood) and lowering the downstairs' ceiling height to 9 ft (instead of 10). We also included our preference for materials, such as HardiePlank for the exterior siding, galvanized metal roofing, and beadboard for the bathrooms and utility room. Ideally, we want to have few to none change orders once we start building--we'll see how that goes! Even with a detailed set of plans, it's hard to know everything until the project actually starts.

Finding the perfect plan

Some people have decided things like their weddings, unborn children's names and dream house plans since they were young. I am not one of those people.

Ashley and I got engaged and were married within three months (and we had a fantastic wedding thanks to our parents--and not having to deal with the stress of agonizing over decisions for months).

Our first son arrived 2 weeks early and in a town 2 hours away from our home. He was "Baby Boy" for the first 24 hours of his life until his name came to me in a dream. We also waited to name our second-born after he arrived (in our local hospital, though!).

And so, even though we had owned the land for many, many months, I drug my feet on settling on a house plan. The idea of picking a home that would grow with our family, that had room for all our current and future activities, overwhelmed me. Everyone else had lots of opinions about what we should build but I remained indifferent for a long time.

Because we're from the South and like a farmhouse/cottage look, we spent a lot of our time looking at Southern Living plans. Twice we ordered study plans from the Moser Design Group. But both plans lacked something or would require too many revisions. House plan names filtered in and out of my head...Aiken Ridge, Glenview, Wildmere. We even named unnamed plans: Master Master and Red Roof Inn. I had my brother, a contractor in Colorado, review plans. My friend Emily, an architect in Oregon, also offered to help.

Maybe it was the stress of having to move so quickly from our house or maybe it was knowing that we needed to find a plan ASAP...but regardless, one night I couldn't sleep and I came across a downstairs floor plan I loved. It matched the exterior of a plan Ashley loved. The next morning I contacted the Allison Ramsey firm and asked if it would be possible to combine the two? I knew anything was possible...more accurately, I wondered how expensive would it be combine these two pieces.

A day or two later, I was excited to learn that a plan that did that already existed. What luck! The only snag was it was larger than we wanted. All along we had been focused on finding a plan that was around 2500 square feet. We're just not a McMansion type of family so building a house that was was 3000 feet or larger felt too big. After a week of emailing back and forth with Bill Harris, the architect at Allison Ramsey (who was so helpful, by the way), we had a proposal for how much it would cost to redraw the plan and scale it back.

My heart sunk when I saw the quote of $4200. Yes, we could theoretically afford to pay for a redesign and have a custom house. It was the perfect house, after all! But $4200 is a lot of money (I'm saying this with the utmost respect for the architect profession). We really needed that money to go towards the actual construction of our house.

That night, Ashley and I had a long discussion about what to do. In the end, we decided we can be happy in almost any house. We were happy in our first house that was off of a dirt road and only had one bathroom. We were happy in the house we just sold--even though it smelled like nicotine when we first bought it and the neighborhood felt a little sketchy at times. And we are happy in the house we're renting from friends, even though it's smaller and one of us has to park on the street.

Happiness doesn't come from having the perfect house. Happiness comes from our family and being together in a home together. Realizing this, we revisited some of the plans we had looked at before. Could we build one of these stock plans and be happy?

Ultimately we decided YES and it was amazingly freeing. The hunt for the perfect house plan was over. For us, the perfect house plan doesn't exist. Or maybe it does exist, but we're not going to spend the time or money required to find it.

We're going to build the Glen View Cottage, a house designed Moser Design Group in Beaufort, SC, for Southern Living. The plans are ordered and should arrive this week. Here we go!

The land takes shape

The land didn't sell (or have any real interested potential buyers) so we decided to continue working on it. Our brother-in-law owns a large excavator so Ashley used this to take out even more trees and prepare a real homesite. The brush pile grew pretty large! These first two pictures were taken during the winter. Here Ashley using the excavator to grab a tree out of the ground. From there, he spun around to place it on the pile.
This May (2010) Ashley brought the excavator back to the land. Our almost 2 year-old happily joined him!

This is the view looking down the driveway. After all this work we were much closer to saying, "OK, we'll build there." We held off making any final decisions until after our second son was born in April 2010. As we adjusted to life with two children, we talked more about how we wanted them to grow up in the country, to have space to run around and be boys. So we put our house up for sale by owner in late August. Within 2 weeks, we had an offer and per the contract, we had to move out by the end of September. Yes, we know we were lucky--but I panicked because we hadn't settled on a house plan. Not having a plan would mean we would have to rent longer and we would be in limbo longer while we waited for the house to be built. Knowing this, we buckled down and spent many nights pouring over plans on line.

And then we cleaned up the property

In late February 2009 Ashley and his dad took a few days and used a CAT skid steer equipped with a special mowing deck to clear out a lot of the underbrush at what would be the front yard area of our land. They also used chainsaws to take down a good number of the pines, leaving mostly hardwoods. This really opened up the woods and gave us a better perspective of the land. Several large shrubs were overtaking the area around the shop so they were also removed.
This would be the view of our front porch looking towards the highway.
Despite doing all this work on the land, we still did not feel 100% about building on it. After a few months of indecision about plans, we put the land up for sale.

First there was the land...

In February 2009, we purchased 9.5 acres out in the country. The land was covered with pines, a few hardwoods, and a good bit of brush. In one area, we could tell that a previous owner had made a go-kart track around a stand of pines. A metal pole building stood near the front of the property, which was an added bonus. When we bought the land, we intended to build on it within a few months.

Here are a few pictures of the land when we bought it.

The lower portion, near the highway. From this location, the house will be to the left and back. We'll do our best to preserve this tree so our driveway can pass by it.
The highway is to the left; our house will sit to the right.
Pine trees where the go-kart track was.
The metal building, which will eventually serve as a workshop, etc.