It took a year but we finally have a hole in the ground!

August 12, 2013

It took a year but we finally have a hole in the ground!

I should have known, but I didn't. It took us almost 10 months to buy the lot. It was just a long, hard process, but finally, finally it worked out. It was a lot of stars aligning to make it work.

Lik the simple fool that I am, I thought that getting to the house part would be easy. But alas, I was wrong. It has been decidedly UNeasy.

Let's go back to the beginning. We met a builder at the Parade of Homes last year. His house was beautiful, we liked him, we liked his agent. So we asked him to put a bid together for us. He did, it was great, we all verbally committed to move ahead. We didn't sign anything (thank goodness) and agreed when we were ready to pull the trigger at the first of the year, then we would work out the contract.

January rolled around and we started on the house plan. We made progress, but right away I started feeling tension with the builder. We just didn't gel. He was a super nice guy and his work was beautiful, but our working styles were very different. I was stressed out almost from the word go. Just getting to the final house plan and budget felt very hard.

We asked our agent to find us another builder to bid on the project. She did and we met with him. He was great and I instantly felt better. I had been clear with Builder 1 that I was getting other bids, so we all knew it wasn't a done deal. Still it was a hard decision, because I felt like Builder 1 had invested a lot of time with us, but ultimately, it just wasn't the right relationship. So though I felt bad, I told him we were going to move ahead with someone else. He was gracious about it. It could have been really ugly, but it wasn't.

Once we had a builder and a houseplan, we needed money. Ah, money.

If I'd thought it had been hard before that I was in for a real treat. We went through 4 lenders before we finally got it done. It was a variety of issues - they don't have the right loan product. We don't have 20% down in cash. The appraisal won't go through. We can do long term, but not construction. It's double fees to do the loans separately. Blah, blah, blah.

We started in March. We submitted paperwork over and over. Just when we would get through a process and they would approve us to move forward then our paperwork would be out of date. To which I wanted to scream into the phone - "Well of course it's out of date! You sat on it for 6 weeks before reviewing it!!"

But usually I stifled that urge to scream and just pulled new paperwork together. I've been saving all the copies of things I've submitted. The stack is 2 inches tall. I'm not kidding. I mean, come on, that's a lot of paperwork. And considering all the e-forms we signed, well it could have been much, much worse.

Once we finally got to the end - a lender, we're approved, we have a good appraisal, it looks like it's really going to happen. Then they came back and asked for one more appraisal. Seriously? There's nothing there.

Chad is a genius. "It's wonder woman's house. They are trying to appraise wonder woman's house."

Get it? Wonder woman has an invisible jet, so her house is invisible too? It's wonder woman's house...nevermind. Just trust me, its funny.

So they put a "rush" on that new appraisal and two days later we were good to go again.

Somehow it all came together and in two weeks we saw the following happen: