Basement Walls Being Formed

I talked to one of the guys who were forming the foundation walls, I was wondering if they would get the basement walls poured before the weekend.  On this weekend (Labor Day weekend) we are expecting a large amount of rain from the remnants of hurricane Isaac.  The guy told me it would be close, but after seeing these guys kick butt at setting the forms for the basement walls, I'm thinking they just might get it done.

Footers Are In

Today they formed and poured the footers.

Excavation Complete

The excavation was completed in one day, August 25th and here is how it looked the next morning.  It's pretty HUGE!!!  But of course it's dug larger than the basement itself to allow room to form the basement walls and such.  The excavator did a fine job, very accurate.

 

Here we go!!!

After about 2 months of waiting for the VA Administration to approve us for a loan and for the bank to underwrite the loan, we are finally here.  The ground has been broken!!!  Unfortunately I had to work on this day, but Lisa was able to drive by and get a few pictures to at least confirm that they had started digging. 

Getting closer...

Ok, so it's been a while since my last post.  We finally closed the sale of our house on June 8th, and since then we have been living in a rental house out in the country near Pittsboro, IN.  This is a good location since it isn't too far from my work, Lauren's school and the new house location.

So the day after we closed, I submitted my builder's application to the bank for the construction loan.  Later that day, I received an email from the bank that stated our builder could not be accepted due to something that came up in his credit check.  This was on a Friday, the next morning I decided to look up a builder on the internet that I had heard of and noticed they were building a house just down from our lot.  It looked like a well built home with quality materials and seemed to go up pretty swiftly.  I found their website and noticed right away that they offered financing through one of their prefered lenders and one of the lending options was a VA construction loan.  With Lisa being a Veteran of the Air Force, this was a no-brainer.  So I called, not expecting to actually talk to anybody, someone answered and invited us over to their model home in Brownsburg.  So I loaded up the girls and brought our house plans with us to talk to this guy.  After about 30 minutes of talking, he gave me a pretty solid estimate.

To say the least, the process of planning this house has become much more streamlined.  Our house plans were tweaked and re-drawn to fix some mistakes.  We had to make selections of everything from roofing to flooring.  Of course, we were almost ready to get started once before, so we had a very good idea of what we wanted.  The builder sent us to their prefered suppliers to make some of the selections such as, hardwood floors, tile, carpet, cabinets and lighting.  The suppliers that this builder uses are all local businesses and they have all been amazing to work with.

Currently we have a July 25th pre-construction meeting where we will meet the project manager and go over our selections one last time before construction begins.  Then we are scheduled to close on the construction loan on July 30th, so construction should begin shortly after that.

Here are the plans as they stand right now, with a few things still needing to be changed, nothing major.

Still Waiting...

So here we are, waiting for the closing of our current home to finally happen.  Our most recent closing date was yesterday, and yet again something came up and it had to be re-scheduled (for the 5th time!!!).  It's been almost 2 months since we accepted the offer on our house, to say we're OVER this circus act of a process would be an understatement. I'd love to say that we will be starting to build soon, but that is too hard to believe at this point.  We will just have to keep our hopes high, and wait, again...

Accepted Offer!!!

Hey,

Last weekend on Easter morning, we accepted an offer on our current home.  We just have to wait for the inspection and appraisal by the bank to pass.  Then we can close the deal!! 

As far as the new house, we recently finished the septic and site plan design.  So as soon as we get financing arranged for construction, we can get started.

Stay tuned...