mishakononov.com

I realize it's been quite some time since I last posted an entry about our house hunting, so here's a little (big) update.

Justine and I ended up putting in offers on three separate places, and we got outbid on all three of them. It was extremely frustrating. After some thinking, we realized that all three places were built within the last couple of years, and furthermore, all of them were built by the same company. We decided to go right to the source and explore the idea of building.

We met with the builder and discovered that we were on an extremely tight timeline if we wanted to close by December 1st and qualify for the Federal Housing Tax Credit. That same meeting, we walked around the neighborhood with the sales rep and picked out a lot. That same week, we chose the model of home we wanted to build, and most of the major upgrades we wanted to do. The following week, we met with a designer to choose our brick, cabinets, kitchen counters, etc. The week after that, we had our final preconstruction meeting and signed the work authorization. About two weeks later, they started excavation.

It's been a little bit of a whirlwind, but Justine and I are very excited about it. For anybody who wants to follow along, I'm taking pictures of the process and putting them up on Flickr. The titles show the current day and the amount of time left until the November 30th deadline. To give some perspective, we were told that the normal timeline to build a custom home from scratch is 150 days. We shaved a full three weeks off of that.

As of right now, we've watched them excavate, pour the footers, and frame and pour the foundation walls. Further updates as the process continues!