Progress!

We had a busy weekend so we only went to the lot once (or maybe twice) to check on the house (I know, I know... it was the weekend, what did we expect?)  So today we went to the lot after dinner and look what we found:

We thought nothing had been done.  But wait!  Look closer...

 And closer...

 Okay, you probably can't see them.  Here is what we have around the front of our lot:

My Secret Obsession

I don't know if I should publish this blog post.  Do I really know you well enough?  I feel pretty exposed putting this on the World Wide Web for everyone to read.  Strangers may read it. Friends might read it.  Family surely will read it.

Okay.  Here is goes.  I am obsessed with my blog stats.  If you are not a blogger, that probably won't mean anything to you.  I just realized a couple of days ago that I can see how many page views that I have every day and for every post.  I can see whether you read my blog on Windows, an Android phone, or an iPhone.  I can tell if you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer.  I can see whether you are in Turkey (hi, Heather!), the United States (almost all of you), Qatar (hi, TAMUQ friends), or Russia (do I know someone in Russia right now?)

The bad thing about my obsession is that I think it comes from my need to be liked.  I check to see how many views I have for each post and wonder if maybe you didn't like my post one day so I lost you forever as a reader.  Just in case that just struck fear in your heart, I can't see whether YOU personally read my post or not just whether YOU collectively read my post.  I know that it shouldn't matter and this isn't a popularity contest, but...

So, just in case you are wondering, the blog post with the most views so far is "The Dilemma."  Surely by now you realize that the reason the title of this post is "My Secret Obsession" is that I was pretty sure that would give me my highest numbers yet :)
   

For Lease

"First showing of property will be tomorrow at 430pm. Thank you. Ian"

This was Joe's text message yesterday afternoon.  That is one real downside of renting.  When it comes time to move, you don't get much say in people tromping through your house.  There are mixed feelings about how much work we should put into the house looking good. 

• On the one hand, who cares what it looks like?  We are moving out whether it is rented or not.
• On the other hand, what if we know the people who come to look at it?  We have pictures everywhere so they will know who we are and they will know that we are secretly slobs who just pretend to be well put together in public.
• Plus, the management company rep will be there.  We want to look like we take care of the house so we can hopefully get some of our deposit back.
• And the main thing that swayed us... the sooner they find someone to rent the house, the sooner people stop tromping through our house and we can go back to our secretly slovenly ways!

 Someone definitely came to the house today because this was in the yard when I drove up after work:

I can't write this post without giving props to our oldest daughter.  She was amazing with the quick clean and we are definitely going to put her to work in the garage soon!

What's in a Name?

When we first started thinking about writing a blog, I wanted to get started right away.  One thing kept me from getting started as quickly as I thought.  You have a have a name for your blog before you start to develop it (and it can't be taken by anyone else).  Amazingly, the name came to me quickly.

I am not a huge country music fan (although Garth Brooks brings back some great college memories), however, my middle daughter loves all kinds of music and singing and Miranda Lambert's "The House that Built Me" is one of her favorites.  Since this is a house for all of us, I had to change it to "us" and "The House that Built Us" was already taken so I dropped the "The."

Here are the lyrics that convinced me:

"Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
From Better Homes and Gardens magazine
Plans were drawn and concrete poured
Nail by nail and board by board
Daddy gave life to mama’s dream"

I haven't really cut out pictures, but I have watched lots of House Hunters episodes.
We haven't really drawn the plans or pounded nails, but we did decide what we wanted for our family.

 Most of all, we want this house to be a home for our girls.  They are getting older and will leave home at some rapidly approaching point, but we want them to always feel that this house is a safe place for them.  We want it to be the place they come home to when they are excited, when they are disappointed, when they are rejoicing and when they are hurt.  We want them to know that they can always come home and we will always be there for them.  Most of all we want them to know that they are loved beyond measure.      

The Dilemma

I know lots of people have experienced this dilemma when moving. We had hoped to avoid it, but no can do.  Our lease is up at the end of July and our new home won't be finished until the end of September.  We could live in a tent for two months, right?

In some towns this might not be such a big deal, but we live in a college town.  Rental houses are very cyclical.  Us moving out at the end of July is perfect for the management to have a little time to make sure it is ready for the next renters to move in at the middle of August.  Our management company is actually very good, but no way do they want us moving out in September/October because they will miss their window of getting the next renters in.

So here are the options we have thought of so far:

1. Refuse to move out until the house is done :)  Just kidding!
2. Move in with Joe's parents.  Five people can fit in one average sized bedroom and one small bathroom with one sink.  It's just two months, right?  
3. Move in with my parents.  We can all leave the house at 6:30 each morning to get to work and school, right?  It's just two months.  (Maybe they moved 45 minutes away so none of us would move back in with them again?)
4. Put up a tent on the common area right next to the new house.  There is a nice tree for shade.  I guess that bathroom thing might be a problem, but it's just two months.
5. More realistically, find someplace to rent month-to-month.  That means two moves and no chance of saving money on rent :(
6. My favorite idea: Find someone who needs a housesitter for a couple of months and doesn't mind three kids, two dogs, and a hamster moving in.  If you know anyone, send them our way!  

I'll keep you posted!

Welcome to the Neighborhood!

Joe and I had a little time to ourselves today (yay!) so we drove out to the lot to see if they had done anything yet.  We knew it was a long shot, but we wanted to check.  They had mowed the lot, so there is something :)

Our next door neighbor-to-be was outside working on his yard so we introduced ourselves and found out that he has two children close to the ages of our children.  That can be good or awkward depending on how the kids get along, but he seemed really nice and it was good to introduce ourselves.  We have lived in rental neighborhoods for the last several years, so it is nice to actually get to know neighbors who built their house and are planning to stay there.

We did take a couple of pictures of our lot and the tree next door so I thought I would share them.

One of the reasons that we chose our lot is that we are on a small cul-de-sac at the end.  Because of the way the lots were drawn there won't be a house directly behind ours or next to ours except for on one side.  There is a house to the right when you are facing our house and to the left is this:

Isn't it wonderful!  We are excited to feel like we have some space inside and out even if it isn't the country house that the girls' wanted.  At least we are not surrounded by neighbors and we have a beautiful tree.

Pre-Construction Meeting

This was one of the most important days in our house building process.  Today we met with Bill the Superintendent and Theresa the person who will solve all our problems (no pressure, Theresa!).  We went over our plans in detail and talked about things we hadn't talked about before or even thought about:

1. Do we want to move the phone jack?  Doesn't seem so important since we haven't had a landline in a long time...
2. Where are we going to put our TV?  I must admit I panicked at that question.  I had to quickly look at the plans and think about our furniture.  What if we buy new furniture-not likely for awhile since we are putting all of our money into a new house :) I did look at where the windows were and where we would most likely put furniture and decided based on that.
3. Did we want to get the blinds that go in the back door window instead of just blinds that hang from the door.  (There is a word for them, but I don't remember what it is).  Of course!  They are totally worth it!
4. Did we want 2 shelf, 2 rod closets or 1 shelf, 1 rod closets or 5 shelves and in what configuration?  Where did we want the 2S 2R?  There were a couple of times I think I may have zoned out.  We really aren't that picky, but then we worry that we should know what we want so we don't get into the house and wish it was different.

I was actually surprised that we had some changes at this point.  I really thought we had it all down and as I said, we are pretty easy going.  Don't be surprised if you are building and decide to make some changes at this stage.  We are definitely set now and not going to change a thing because each change from here on out will be more $$$ than we want to spend.  

Our floor plan... it looks huge (to me), but it isn't really THAT big.

After establishing all of that (and making sure we added some extra ceiling fans since we do live in Texas), we got to start picking our "colors."  I thought this would be super hard since I know NOTHING about design and have no eye for how to decorate.  Lucky for us, we got to work with Eric again and he was super helpful.  Here is what we ended up with:

Our bricks, stone, HardiPlank color, granite, vinyl looks like wood floor but you can put water on it (not the technical term), cabinets, and tile.  Ignore the wood floor they are sitting on :)

Our carpet, paint, and tile

The granite that we choose in the model home with the cabinets and flooring

Better view of the bricks

We are really excited about our choices and can't wait to see how it all comes together.  If you don't like them or think that we should have gone with something else, please don't comment on them!  I told Eric it was like naming a baby.  I was afraid to tell anyone what we chose in case they decided to tell me that they thought it was ugly.  So, only positive comments on this post about how brilliant we were in our choices and how amazing our home will be.  Thanks!

The Waiting Game

The last couple of weeks have been a little strange.  Besides the SOLD sign going up, nothing is really happening with the house.  That isn't bad since we have a lot of other stuff going on in our lives right now, but it makes the home building process even more surreal.  We are starting to tell more people that we are building a house, but there isn't any building happening yet.

On the flip side, however, we have done something REALLY fun with the house.  This Wednesday we will be meeting with the designer at Stylecraft to pick out our tile, flooring, granite, materials for exterior, etc.  So during the last couple of weeks, we have been going into the houses in Bryan/College Station that Stylecraft has for sale to look at what the different options are in an actual house rather than just in a picture or a small sample square.

Theresa at Stylecraft encouraged us to go have a look in the houses and even told us to get a key so we could go in if the doors were locked!  It felt a little weird to go walking into the houses, but it was SUPER helpful.  We are not good at interior design at all, but going to look at actual houses and comparing the different options made it a lot easier for us.  We think we know pretty much what we want and are much more confident going into our pre-construction meeting than we would have been without checking them out.

The added benefit is that we also get really excited about our house when we see the other houses.  The quality of the workmanship and the attention to detail is superb and we can't wait to see how awesome our house will be!

And in case you were wondering how to measure with no measuring tape...

This bedroom appears to be about 2 1/2 children long!

SOLD!

We went to check on the lot today and there was the SOLD sign.  For some reason the sign made it so much more real.  We haven't done anything official with Stylecraft for a couple of weeks while we wait for our preconstruction meeting, so the sold sign made it real again that we are building a house.  Not only was the sold sign there, but this sign was also there:

Our new address!  Well, not really.  We decided in this day and age we might want to edit the address part out.  Suffice it to say that Joe almost didn't want to build on that lot because the street name was too long :)  I had no idea that there would be a sign with our name on it and our floor plan listed.  Once again, it is exciting and scary all at the same time.

No turning back now!