Where are we now?

As I mentioned, the idea for this blog came to me after we started the project.  Had we started this whole thing in earnest sooner, we would be a lot further down the road than we are.  I thought I knew exactly what I wanted for a house... well, I did know but then I realized the money wasn't there to do what I really wanted, so I had to change my plans.

If I could give anyone advice, it would be to start showing your plan to people who know about how houses are structurally put together.  Maybe you already know that, but feedback from people is important, because they think of things you didn't think of.  Also, the sooner you show it to people, the sooner you get feedback.  You may think you don't want or need feedback, but as long as you are able to filter through the good and bad feedback, you'll end up with information you might not have had before.  For instance, some advice I got was to put the master bedroom and the kitchen on the same side of the house as the garage.  The thinking was, if you come in from the garage, those are the two rooms you are most likely going to drop things off in.  While strong advice, it was coming from someone who doesn't have kids.  That changed our thinking, so while the kitchen is near where we come in from the garage, the kids rooms are there rather than the master.

In any case, once we discovered that our plan wasn't going to be affordable to build, we went into a complete state of discombobulation.  I spent hours on end looking at different layouts and trying to manipulate them into something that would work with our setup.  I am lucky enough to have a resource who knows about how houses are built.  While it was frustrating to be shut down on a lot of my ideas, we just came to a point where all the ideas fit with what we can realistically do with the budget we have.

Another thing that was unexpected is the inability to do things concurrently.  There are some things that can be done.  For instance, looking for a loan, builder, subcontractors, etc, we can do concurrently.  However, there is an order in which some things need to be done, which can make things last longer if you don't follow that order.

So, while we had hoped to break ground this week, we're just at the point of deciding on a floor plan.  This week we are taking the floor plan to a few local suppliers(Menards, Home Depot, and Lowes) to have it estimated for materials.  Also, this week the health department is coming out to inspect the soil and placement of the septic and well.  Don't underestimate the cost of fees, inspections, and so on.  They need to be done in order to get your permits and while their individual cost is relatively small, in aggregate it will cost probably around $2000 just for inspections, permits, and so on.

Also, this week we are going to be selecting a bank for our loan.  This has been another unexpected difficulty.  In order for a bank to give you a loan, you must have a licensed builder of some kind to guarantee that the work will be done to code and that the project will be completed.  This seriously limits the amount of work you can do yourself, so if you don't need the bank, you are in a much better situation.  The regulations vary by bank.  For instance, the bank where we have the rest of our accounts(albeit not for long because of their failure to work with us) is Fifth-Third bank and they would not allow us to do any of the work.  I was astonished when they told me that and they are going to lose us as customers because of it.  Long story short, I spent about 4 hours on the phone with banks this last week and every single national or large bank I went to wanted a builder to do the majority of the work.  That was simply not acceptable to us.  In this process I have found that it's the local banks that do things the same way they did years ago, so it is more than likely going to be a local bank that we get our loan from.

Up to this point it has been a long, frustrating process.  I hope that as we go forward things will get smoother or this is going to be one hectic summer.