We have a hole!

Today was a big day in the saga of building our home. We FINALLY have a hole in the ground! This has been a long time coming. Perhaps I should start at the beginning...


Frankie and I started the process of building a custom home almost three years ago. This process began the day that we calculated the cost of sending two children to private school for 13 years. Well, the day when Frankie calculated the cost of private school. We soon realized that we could take the money that we'd invest in school and put that money toward building a house.

The dream of building this house officially started in April 2007 when we bought 1.3 acres of land - at the peak of the housing market. Which means we overpaid. That is a detail we'd like to forget! We purchased the land after thoroughly researching school districts and deciding on what counties and cities would suit our family best.


We were naive and optimistic in April 2007. We thought that we'd be in this new, custom home by the summer of 2008 at the very latest. In our minds, we minimized the details of the paperwork required, the home plans needed, financing, a builder, permits... needless to say, we were extremely naive!

Frankie has a gift for drafting and designing things, so he took it upon himself to develop the home plans. Once the plans were underway, we found an engineer to help us with the grading and building permit process. We thought he was a reputable engineer and he came highly recommended. However, after many months of no permits and limited activity on our package, we were becoming worried. In the spring of 2008, we discovered that the engineer we selected had died. Yikes. We felt horrible for his family, and soon realized we were back at square one with our permits.


Thankfully, we found another engineer and were able to get the permits submitted and approved in the fall of 2008. So you'd think that we'd be ready to break ground, right?? WRONG. Since the fall of 2008 we have been working on financing, finalizing plans, finalizing costs, worrying about neighbors - the list goes on and on! So TODAY IS A BIG DAY! We finally have a hole and things finally are getting underway! Yay us!

I've decided to blog about the home building experience since we certainly were naive about the process, and I'm assuming there are others out there who are equally naive. Plus, it will be fun to watch the progress as the house is finally built!