So much for that!

**spoiler alert* haha. I was supposed to be updating along with the building process, and here we are, about 3 weeks out from completion! I can't believe how fast things have gone! Nearly every night we have been out at the house in addition to running around all over the place getting every last thing picked out. I guess I'll start from scratch and catch up on the last few months now! 

So needless to say, the appraisal came back only $700 less than the contract price. Unheard of! I had read so many horror stories about the construction loan and appraisal processes, but it was nearly painless. Well, except for closing where we had to cough up a pretty penny!

It seems that every time I want to update my blog, I always forget about it! Hopefully going forward once things really start moving the information will start flowing more freely. Well, for an update, we applied for our construction loan/mortgage with the local bank in town two weeks ago tomorrow. We were hopeful after the meeting, but know nothing ever goes according to plan, so we didn't want to get our hopes up. The construction loan process is a two-step one; step one: apply for mortgage and get approved for xxx amount. Step two: go through the appraisal process to find out how much of that approved amount you're going to get. Nowadays, most banks only finance up to 80% of the project, so you would need a 20% down payment. Since we bought our land and own it outright instead of doing the land and house under one loan, our land can go towards that 20%. For example purposes, say we need $280,000 to build the house, and say our equity in the land is $50,000. In the appraisal for this example, we would need the total project to appraise for $350,000 to not have to come up with additional money ($280,000 is 80%). I'm not the best at explaining things as you can probably see!

So, we were approved for the full amount of the loan we were requesting, and got a great interest rate too. Now, we are nervously awaiting to hear back on how much our project appraises for. We should have the answer within a week now. To say we're nervous wrecks is an understatement. The project costs are very reasonable for what we are looking to build. But like I said earlier, nothing is ever easy.

Last week, after a few months of work, we finished clearing the lot, with the exeption of the wood we plan on burning and the stumps, which will be removed by the excavator. Our lot is 1.2 acres, and we cleared roughly half of it. Here are some pictures of the progress!

January 2011

Terrible picture!

 Winter & Spring 2012

 

Our House Plans (minus the 2nd floor, oops!)

To get an idea of the size, the house is 2500 sf. The master bedroom itself is 16x18, walk-in closet is 8x10. We added an angled breezeway to break up the length of the house. We plan on having an office in there. We went back and forth on whether we wanted the house to have it's length parallel to the street, or perpendicular. I felt the house was too long with the garage and the master wing on one elevation. So, the solution was, angle the breezeway! For exterior appearance, the house is going to have shakes on the front, and regular clapboard siding on all other sides. Our other home is Cape Cod, so we're taking a lot of the styling from there. The windows are going to have 12 over 12 panes, to give it that colonial feel. We're unsure of shutters at this time. Here are a some of my favorite houses which I'm using for inspiration:

Okay, I think this is enough for today! I'll check in again once we hear back from the bank!

-A

An introduction of sorts

I actually first started writing this post back in January of 2011! Wow, where does the time go? I never ended up finishing it or posting. Today I am going to change this....

Hello there! I believe an introduction is called for. This is a personal blog I have set up to track the progress of the building of our first house. I'm not really planning on anyone actually reading this (haha), but it's here for my use to explore ideas, document the experience, cry, vent, and ultimately (and hopefully) love the end result. My new journal, because seriously, with all of the technology these days who has the time to keep a psychical diary!

I'll tell you a little about myself. My name is April, I'm 27, and live in Connecticut. I graduated from Central Connecticut State University in 2006 with a Bachelor's Degree in Criminology (minor in Psychology). I was at the top of my program, and also interned with the Federal government my last semester. I started working full-time less than 4 months after graduation in the insurance industry for a well-known insurance company. When I'm not working, I enjoy sleeping, watching TV, and procrastinating. Especially when it comes to exercising and getting back into my former svelte shape. My boyfriend and I have been together for over 8 years, and have rented at my mother's house for over 7 of these years. Together, we have 7 animals in the household; 4 cats and 3 dogs. As you can see, we're animals lovers. Well, I am at least! 5 of the animals belong to Chris and myself- Cooper (Shih Tzu), Maggie (Shih Tzu), Lily, Billy and Serena (all Persians).
I enjoy hockey (Go Whale! Rangers! And Whalers RIP), theatre, traveling, reading, cars, and interior design.

So, you may be asking yourself, how are a 27 and 33 year old able to build a new home so early in their respective careers and in this horrible economy? Well, there's been a lot of saving and investing involved over the last few years. I mentioned above that the man-friend and I have been renting from my mom.. emphasis on the word RENTING. Yes, there has been no freeloading here! We didn't start getting serious about moving out until about a year & a half ago. I never wanted to leave my mom. What Chris and I had originally envisioned was staying at my mother's house but buying a home on Cape Cod to initially have weekends and vacations at. That was the plan for a while, until we started realizing it may not be the most beneficial at this time. Things really started kicking into gear when conversation started about buying Chris' family land from his grandfather and building a house on it. At first it seemed like a wonderful idea; 41 acres of land to roam, future investment potential, and keeping the land in the family. We tried for months to make this work, meeting with brokers, banks, and lawyers trying to get things straightened out. After a few months of not being able to get anywhere (due to the property being in distress and the size-deemed too large for residential purposes), and meeting with our lawyer, we finally decided that it just wasn't going to work out in the end. We had a stripped-down 1700sf home plan from Connecticut Valley Homes (a modular builder out of Niantic) because that's all we thought we could afford after the initial price of the land. In the beginning of the process I said if the family land didn't work out, I would look elsewhere to a town I desired to live in; Ellington. There were no homes built that remotely peaked our interests in the area (believe we, we have been looking for years.) My mind soon changed, when we started looking for individual pieces of land in town.

Stafford, Connecticut is a charming old mill town in eastern CT, right on the border of Massachusetts. What it lacks in population it makes up for in size. Many of the families have never moved out of town, and nearly everyone knows everyone. My boyfriend grew up there until he moved out in his early twenties. The town always gave me a "warm", at home feeling whenever we stopped by to visit his family. From the old Main Street with old remnants of once glorious mills, to the small parks and bountiful hills, this town grew exponentially on me over the past years.

We started looking at pieces or land in Ellington but didn't find and land we loved that was also in the price range. We ventured over to Stafford as well, checking out 20-30 lots. We found two promising lots in Stafford; one was in a new development in a very quiet area of town, a quick drive down to Main Street and the highway. The other was in a small, older development farther north in town and right by the big lake. Number one was pricier and had deed restrictions and we didn't think it was in the current budget. We went to number two with our broker and walked the lot, but it just didn't feel right. Now I'm big in to "signs" and listening to the universe, so check this out: I had sent an email to this broker a day or two before we drove out to town to check out number one. We were driving on the street through the development and stopped momentarily at the culd-e-sac, and my phone rings. It was the broker calling me back for the first time :) Anyways... to make a long story short, we decided to try for number one and drew up a contract at the office. We actually met with a builder who had built a few of the houses in the neighborhood and who had a few packages listed with our broker in the development. We didn't go back and forth more than once each before the seller accepted an offer. Back then we thought we needed to draw up plans and get the mortgage before we could pay for the land. After much discussing, we decided to just buy the land outright with some of the money we had saved up. Our finances weren't in order a year and a half ago by any means come to find out. We decided that my new car needed to be paid off and along with a couple credit cards before we applied for a mortgage again. So, on New Years Eve 2011, we closed on our land and now owned it outright! We had a plan and blue prints from the builder, but we have recently changed everything around. The plan right now is to start breaking ground the beginning of May! The house will be a colonial Cape Cod. Now that the back story has been told, I will start updating with more details and thoughts as we go through the process. Thank you for sticking through my rambling!

~April