Happy almost new year, friends! I mentioned on my Instagram the other day that I have some big news to share with you! Rest assured it is not a baby announcement, definitely not like our Christmas card last year. Let’s just say that working at home while raising rambunctious little boys, including one babe who is keeping me up at all hours of the night (BOO TEETHING!) is more than enough to keep me on my toes. I am nowhere near catching the baby fever (ever again).

So the big news has been in the works for most of 2017. I’ve gone back and forth on when I wanted to write about it. But, now that we’re getting to the exciting part of it all, I figured the start of 2018 is a great point to start documenting our journey. Let me stop the rambling and announce that…

We’re building our forever home!

Long story short, this is a topic that has come up and shelved a few times in the last couple of years. We’ve lived in our first and current home since our engagement back in 2009. When we purchased the house, we knew that it wasn’t going to be our “forever” home, but it was a great time to buy and knew that we could easily start our family here. To be honest, there’s probably enough space for us to stay. But, for a variety of other reasons, we started exploring our forever home options in nearby towns/cities.

After many months of back and forth conversations, meetings, legal reviews, negotiations and lots of paper work, we signed our contract in August! Here’s an overview of information:

What kind of house are you building?

We will be in a fairly established neighborhood and building a semi-custom home. For us, it’s the best of both worlds. We don’t have the time or luxury of working directly with a builder on a fully customized home. But, we also wanted to have a say in certain design aspects. This is our forever home after all! We were lucky enough to find our neighborhood that is designed on a home by home basis with a plethora of custom options, starting from the home layout to all of the finishes. We’re not starting from scratch with having to design everything ourselves, but we’re able to customize so many different aspects of the house. It was the perfect solution for us.

What have you done since August?

I can’t believe that it’s already been four months since we signed our contract to build. Since last summer, we’ve been working with the architect to design the layout of our house. (All three floors: first, second and basement). After several rounds of designs, we finally submitted our paper work to the city for permits. We also had first round of meetings with different vendors like cabinetry, electronics, appliances, plumbing etc. To be honest, there isn’t any building being done at the moment, but we’re doing a lot of our work up front to ease the pain of the building process in 2018.

Where are you today?

A week before the holiday, our permits were approved by the city. We have a meeting with our site supervisor this week and as soon as it gets warm enough, they’ll start digging our lot. Right now, our lot is just a big pile of dirt, snow and ice.

What’s the timeline look like for 2018?

We’re going to assume that it’s going to take the better part of the year for the house to be move-in ready. They’re averaging a 9-11 months time frame from digging to finished home. We are lucky enough to stay in our current house until our new house is complete, so technically we’re not in a HUGE rush. The only thing that I am cognizant of is that our oldest will be starting Kindergarten in the new school district, so the faster we’re in our new house, it will be easier on the work/school/home commute.

The winter will be filled with more meetings with vendors as we finalize our selections. The spring and summer will be spent with on site visits and going over details as the house is getting built.

Overall, this entire process is new to us. We have friends and colleagues that have been through the home building process. So, we’re learning as we go and picking up advice from them as we can. Excitedly, we’ve also met our future neighbor(s) and are in touch with them throughout the process for any advice and lessons learned with our builder as well.

While building a house is complex, I’m keeping my hopes up that we will survive the journey without too many bumps in the road.

Those of you who have built your home: Help! Give me all the tips! Any lessons learned and your biggest piece of advice for us?

A Big Announcement for 2018: Building Our Forever Home!