Building A Farmhouse - Our Custom Home Construction

  They poured the concrete into the forms early last week and took them off within a day. They then came back and cleaned up the job site and let the concrete cure for the rest of the week. I love the view here facing that sunset! While we were waiting for the concrete to cure we met with our builder and the distributor that they use for their windows and exterior doors. They had bid out the windows based on the plans and we were meeting to go over everything and clarify questions. Before the meeting I reviewed the plans and compared it to the bid and found that they had missed one of windows in a guest bathroom and the bid had mentioned that two windows shown on the elevation plans were not on the actual floor plans and so we had to be pretty thorough. They had the windows drawn in as casement windows but in my mind I had always imagined single hung windows. I didn't know what these were called but I visited the  Anderson Windows website  and as I looked around I found o...

 Well, the appraisal came back but it came back a little lower than we had expected. This is a small bump in the road and I'll try to explain why.  The bank can only give up to 80% of the appraised value of the finished home/project. This total includes land and the home so even though we own the land outright its not like they can take the purchase price of the home and deduct it from the total cost.  So, for easiness lets say the land costs $80,000 and the cost of the build is estimated to be around $500,000 for a total cost to us of $580,000. We would hope the appraisal would come in at $580,000 and then the bank could loan us up to 80% of $580,000 or about a $465,000 loan and that would cover most of the cost of construction and the land would essentially count as our down payment. We'd have to put down about $35,000 to make up the difference of what the bank could loan us ($465K) and what construction would cost ($500K) but we just sold our house so that wouldn't be ...

I'm writing this blog for two reasons. One, I want to be able to remember all of this. Two, I have so many questions about what is next, whats the timeline etc. that I can't find answers to and I am getting step by step stuff along the way from our builder and all that but I am a planner and they can't tell me anything too far out because they risk not being able to follow through due to unforeseen events and I get that but hopefully this could help someone else who is in a similar situation at some point in the future. My focus will be mostly on timelines as price can change from location to location and varies over time and as markets change.  My wife and I purchased a 1 acre plot of land in a new subdivision in June of 2019. We had hoped to save up some money and build a custom home on the lot at some point in the future, likely several years down the line. Well, the housing market took off in 2020 despite the pandemic and we had an opportunity to sell our home and make ...