The adventure begins

Well, this is already a busy first week as I look for temporary housing for our family and try to plan the building of our new house. We've already done a lot of research for subcontractors using Angie's List and personal recommendations, so thankfully we don't still have all of that to do as well. We've also been working on our plan and the steps we need to take in all of this ahead of time, so I feel like we're about as prepared as we can be. It doesn't make it any less scary that we will be responsible for this and we can't just hand it off to a builder, but I think it will be worth it in the end because this is allowing us to build our dream home.

Tomorrow I'm taking off a half day of work so we can meet with our mortgage broker about our construction loan and mortgage for our new house. We need to find out the specifics of what they will need to approve our construction loan. Based on what I've read, they will need our general contractor to get approved by them and they will need a portfolio of sorts with our price estimation for the house and land. So, as soon as we meet with the architect and get our blueprints, I will begin preparing quotes from the subcontractors and get quotes for all of the materials we will need as well as sitting down with whoever we decide to choose as our general contractor and go over scheduling with him. I will then present all of my info and price estimation to the bank and hopefully get it approved. Once it's approved, we can put our plan in place and purchase the land.

We meet with our architect on Wednesday and will show him the floorplans we like as well as all our other ideas about how to layout the house. We'll also talk to him about the different elevation options for our house and decide which ones we like the best. We already have a lot of specific ideas about what we want both in the interior and the exterior, so I hope it's a fairly smooth process. I'm most excited about meeting with with the architect because once we get our blueprints, all of this will finally seem like a reality. We will still have a long way to go and a lot to do, but this is the first essential step. Once we have the blueprints then we can get all of the quotes.