First Steps

On Friday we officially accepted an offer on our house, so I began the first steps of the house building process. First, I started calling around to find temporary housing for our family while we're building our new house. Then I called an architect that we had found that would draw up the blueprints for our house a lot cheaper than most. We are scheduled to meet with him on Wednesday to go over the floorplans for our house that we have decided on.

Also in doing the research leading up to this we found that banks would not give us a construction loan without a licensed general contractor as part of the project. So, we had to change our plans slightly and had to hire a general contractor to help me. My plan is to work with him on putting together a schedule for the subcontractors and also a schedule for material deliveries. So, I called a couple of general contractors that I located through a reputable service locally and set up times to meet with them. Once we have our blueprints, I will meet with them and get quotes from them on how much they will charge for doing some project management for me.

On Tuesday we are meeting with a mortgage broker to go over the specifics of the construction loan and to find out exactly what they'll need in order to give us this loan. Based on what I've read, they need blueprints as well as all of our quotes from subcontractors and any material prices we can give them, but there could be other things that we don't know about.

Today my wife and I took some time to drive around and look at the exteriors of some houses and took pictures so we have ideas for when we talk to the architect on Wednesday. Here are some of the exteriors we are looking at and we might like for our new house.