Day 7

Blame it on Pinterest.  No, that's not fair.  Blame it on my learner's brain, the constant need to research, dissect, investigate everything aspect of something.  I stumbled upon a blog a woman had wrote about building their home.  She marked posts by how many days into the project they were.  I found this fascinating and extremely useful in my, "how long is this going to take," category of research.

I mark this as Day 7 because we have been living in our rental house for exactly one week.  Its a bit of a stretch to call it a rental.  We are extremely fortunate that my Grandfather's brother had a house sitting empty in town.  He's allowing us to live in the home, rent free and sending him the money for the utilities.  Even more fortunate, its a rather large home, enough room that we were able to store all of our belongs in the basement, throughout the house rather than need a storage unit.  It's about as ideal as it can get. 

So as of day 7;
- Our first home is prepared for sale.  We have a buyer, a sales agreement and we're hoping to close within the next week. 
- Our new construction loan is in process and we should close on June 25th

There's so much more than just that.  Much more than I had anticipated to build a house.  But first, how did we get here? Most people were shocked when we said we were leaving our beloved farmhouse. We bought our first home in November 2011.  It was love at first sight.  Perhaps love at what it could become would be a better term.  An old farmhouse with almost 10 acres of ground in our price range was certainly hitting the jack pot in our opinion.  Steve could walk in every room of the house.  Even mostly able to stand in the basement.  We poured so much love, sweat and equity into that home.  You can see our last big project in previous posts.  However, in the back of our heads, it had always been a dream to build something of our own.  We had reached the point with our farmhouse that we either finished our projects entirely and stayed or sell and give someone else the opportunity to increase the equity.  We would mildly browse real estate websites.  There was never something that caught our eye enough to give up what we had.  Until one Sunday drive, sometime around February I think, we wound up in the driveway of a family friend.  They farmed and Steve had worked for them while in high school.  It was a visit that was meant to happen as it turns out.  When we asked if they'd ever be willing to sell a few acres, their response was that it just so happens they had been discussing that very thing a few weeks ago.

So here we are, a few months later, awaiting closing dates, permits and all the other specifics to get the Big Project started. 

And what the future holds looks so bright.

Views from our future front porch