We're in, but we're not finished....

So much has happened since my last blog, that it would take a book to bring you up to date.  We did move in the last week in May, but our home was not complete.  Here we were in this large home, with our dryer vent hanging out the window.  You heard me right.  Our builder forgot to put in a dryer vent, so my husband put in a cardboard rectangle with a hole cut out for our dryer vent.  I hope he took a picture of that. :)  But, that was a small thing compared...

I can't even tell the story in one blog.  I will have to blog more frequently to cover everything.  In a nutshell, somewhere along the process, we realized that our builder was not being fiscally responsible.  Maybe it was when I noticed that most of our receipts lined the floorboard in his truck.  He told us it would be more affordable for us if he didn't show up, because his hourly rate was too expensive.  We took over the build.

Neither of us had building experience or expertise.  We hired crews that worked on nicer homes in our area to finish it out.  I took two jobs to pay for what remained. I have a teaching degree and started substitute teaching to pay for coursework to get my real estate license.  I became a licensed real estate agent in late March.  After that, I  subbed at least 2-3 days a week, hit the streets trying to get listings the other two, and worked both Saturday and Sunday at open houses to meet new clients.  It was exhausting, but I sold 15 homes! Amazing what one can do when you fear losing your home, or worse, not finishing your home and being in default.  My first goal:  Finish the house.  My second goal:  Pay off the no-interest credit card that covered some of our overage by next December.  

Our kitchen.  We have had up to 5 cooks around the island.

We dealt with lots of emotions. For me, mostly fear.  I don't like debt so that has been the hardest part of it all.  I dealt with anger towards our builder, and trying to forgive him for forcing me into debt and back to work a year early.  My youngest isn't in school yet.  When we should have been paying for window treatments, we still needed to pay to put gutters on, landscaping and even foam insulation in the attic.  We will also need to repaint much of what was done on the exterior, because it was done so quickly in the end because we were running out of money.  So, no, we probably didn't save any money.  Maybe we did.  I'll never know.  We ended up managing to borrow only 80% of the value of the home, which was our goal, but I wonder how much we scraped together from working and throwing every penny we had into the project those last few months, not to mention the money we are still earning to finish it.

So, it is Fall now, and four months since we moved in. I am starting to find happiness in this home.  I am at peace, even with things still needing to be finished.  I ended up loving my new career.  I don't love the time away from my kids, but I love being a realtor!  I always knew it was my passion and I'm finding that it truly is.  I love my home.  And I guess, in the end that is what matters in a home build.  It has been a struggle, but I love working on it, piece by piece.

Now that the summer crazy season, of having 8 kids at home while I spent hours on the road, listing and selling property, is over, I have moments where I can stand on the porch, and look at the pond, and dream of the swing that will go in the corner where two hooks were installed during the build.  I was promised the swing on Mother's Day.  We will buy it when we can afford it. :)  I'm not sure when that will be.  But, I'll keep you posted.

Our front door.  Greg picked the color and the style.

God Cares About Toilets

I just couldn't wait to tell you!!  I have attempted to tell our story in chronological order, but I just couldn't wait to tell you.  So today we go into the present.

 I found my toilets!!  

Now some of you are going to think I am very strange.  Understand that we have herds of people using the potty at our house.  11 of us, in the summers!   But, even when our numbers dwindle to 7,  during the school year, we have a terrible problem with toilet overflows.  I've tried talking to the children about the number of squares that are appropriate for toilet use.  Has anyone else had this conversation with their children?  It just feels strange even while you are teaching it.  But, without this lesson...  you can count on an overflow.

I will try not to digress too much, but I believe one of the primary reasons for our regular stoppages seems to be the fact that toilets use such a small amount of water.  This is a topic that Greg and I talk about often.  We get so annoyed with water conservation and how it affects our daily lives.  A few years ago, I invested in a set of those beautiful red washer and dryer sets.  I convinced Greg I deserved them, since I easily wash more than 3 loads a day to keep everybody's clothes clean.  For those who may not know me as well, I drive a hail-beaten used gray Sequoia.  I don't think I deserve the best of everything.  I'm too cheap for that.  :)  But, a washer is just plain practical.  We installed them.  They were quiet and beautiful, but they didn't work.   I found myself smelling socks to see if they were clean, because they looked almost the same going in as they did going out of the wash.  We returned them and got another brand of front loaders.  Same song, second verse.  I installed that set in my rental unit and bought a cheap rusty set from a used appliance dealer.   I LOVE them.  They are ugly as sin, but I love them.  Shhh...they use lots of water.

So, back to the toilet.  Now that we can only use less than two gallons of water per flush, potties never seem to be clean and they are extremely prone to clogging.  At least at our house.  If I'm the only person with this problem, please feel free to comment below and let me know how I can improve my family in this area.  I'm out of ideas.

Due to our "toilet issue,"  I knew that we had to find a clog busting toilet.  I went on consumer reports and found out that the Champion 4 was rated the best.  At $200, it was double the price of the standard toilet.    I had a hard time spending double the price on something so ordinary, but practicality overruled.  Preventing even one overflow upstairs, that could potentially destroy our subfloor and possibly the ceilings below, helped me part with the money.  My husband, an insurance adjuster,  adjusts claims with toilet overflows pretty frequently.  An insurance deductible of 1% on our home would be more costly than a mere $400 more for all 4 toilets.   I put $200 in our budget for each toilet.

Well, several months ago,  I started actually shopping to buy toilets, and ran across all of these home blogs and reviews that were saying terrible things about "my Champion," and raving about this other brand called the TOTO?  Here's one of the reviews of many I found:

http://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm

The people who were recommending the brand were plumbers that were installing them, and having great results.  I was interested.

So, I decided I would call and find out how much they were.  $400!  I really wanted one.  I know some of you out there are saving for a Coach bag.  I wanted the Toto.  But, it was WAY too expensive.  I even offered my request as a prayer.  I'm serious.  I figured God cares about the woes of a mother of children who clog toilets.  Well, before you call me crazy....  Guess what?

God answered.  I was shopping for fireplaces on Homeclick and I am not kidding...a huge pop-up flashes up.  I had been in and out of this site all day and nothing like this had come up.  But yesterday evening,  it pops up.  "MARKDOWNS"  I faintly see in the background, as it fades away, that there are toilets...  "Was that a Toto?"  I ask myself.  I quickly click on "Markdowns" and lo and behold, if the Toto is not $215 dollars marked down, and just for today, Toto is offering a 7% off deal.  That's right, just a little less than I budgeted.  $199.95.  A coincidence?  Maybe.  An answered prayer?  Probably. :)

Some of you non-believers are thinking that it was cookies.  I thought about that.  But, I haven't shopped for toilets in at least two months.  If you ask me, I think God cares about my budget and even my potty struggles.  What a loving God He is!

Sorry so much potty talk, today.  I'm also potty training my three year old this week.  But that's another blog.

A Muddy Mess

Lesson 2:  Always check the weather.  So our reckless tree guy did get our culvert to the lot.  We then started our dirt work with two other guys from Jacksonville.  Labor's cheap in the country, you know?   Here's a photo of that:

They pretty much leveled the lot and pulled up the stumps.  Pushed dirt around.  Nothing exciting.  I'm sure this is a very important part of the project.  I found it uninteresting.  They packed in some clay around our culvert, to create a road over our ditch to get in and out of our lot.  Seemed simple enough... until raindrops started to fall.  Turns out our lot, and especially, our ditch, turn into the Mississippi River when it rains.  But that day, it didn't just rain, it poured!  The neighbors said it hadn't rained that hard in a long time.  Well that "Mississippi River," that used to be our ditch, carried off our culvert and all of our fresh dirt downhill into our neighbor's ditch, who thankfully wasn't worried about it, and onto the road.   

We hadn't planned for this in our "budget" so we all pitched in to clean up the mess that day.  Here are a few pictures of the kids helping in the cleanup.  I helped, too.  But, I'll spare anyone from seeing that horrible shot.



Red dirt is heavy being carried uphill

 If we hadn't already made a good impression with the fire, maybe a "gully washer" would do the trick.  Looking back now, I don't know how any of the neighbors talk to us.  So any of the savings on the dirt work were spent on the cleanup.  Sometimes you do get what you pay for.  Have I already said that?  No, really, I don't know that they did anything wrong, other than not checking the weather.  A light rain would have packed down our dirt nicely, they said.



I love this shot.  Note the expert shovelling technique. :)

  I assure you that our build so far has not been totally mishaps.  Our first few weeks of building, however, seemed to be riddled with them.  Not only were these mishaps inconvenient, but the dirt washout, especially, has also been costly.  We have had to pay laborers more than once since then, to bring dirt back uphill, even after all precautions were taken.  I'd make Lesson number 3 "Don't buy a lot on a hillside," but the view is so nice, I can't say that, yet.  Maybe when I start selling my blood plasma, but not yet.

Conflict in Paradise

They say that building a house will put a strain on your marriage.  We were off to a good start.  We loved our lot with all of its trees.  We'd paid dearly for them, and Greg was intent on keeping every one of them.   Of course, we also wanted to have a good view of the lake from what would be our front porch.  Greg and the builder started plotting out our spot with string.  We had just started and already we disagreed.  He wanted to save the trees and move our house close to our neighbor's fence.  I didn't care if a tree had to go, I didn't want to be in my neighbor's business.  There was a pool in our neighbor's back yard.  The house was for sale.  I'm pretty modest.  I was just hoping a nudist family didn't move next door with our porch looking over their fence.  I've only thrown a fit for a few things.  This was one of those.  Move the house, or we change plans to a plan that ran front to back.

David, our builder, has been in the business a long time.  He is also a peacemaker.  He found a way to move away from the neighbor's house,  shave off the end of our porch in one spot, and save the trees in another.  Marriage saved.

Following that, we started clearing trees.  Lesson number one:  Be careful who you hire.

David knew this character from Jacksonville.  He'd give us a good deal.  He'd cut down all of our trees, burn them and get us the culvert all for a good price.  We should have had our doubts when he showed up in his dented trailer.  First, he had a collision with one of Greg's million dollar trees.  Pine beetles promptly moved into the damaged tree.  Then, he burned the trees in a huge heap, and left it unmanned for his "lunch break."  We got there that evening to find our new neighbors with water hoses trying to put out any remaining flames.  Not the best first impression.  The next morning, another neighbor came down to let our builder know that our tree guy had attempted to turn around in his driveway and had run over one of his wife's trees.  David gave the neighbor the tree guy's contact information.  The sheriff gave the tree guy a citation.  Yes, sometimes you do get what you pay for.

He did bring us the culvert in one piece.  But the culvert's another story...

The Sound of Wind in the Pines

Ever since my husband was a boy growing up in deep East Texas, he has always loved the sound of wind as it passes through pine trees.  If you've spent any time in the piney woods, you know just what I am talking about.

Six years ago, when my husband and I were first moving to Tyler, we looked into all of the school districts.  We had always heard that Whitehouse was a great school district, so we had looked for homes in that district.  We found one home in Whitehouse that was in our price range at the time.  It had an upstairs master, which I've mentioned before didn't appeal to me.  It was also VERY lived in and needed a lot of repair.  The neighborhood was only so-so.   On our way to look at houses, we passed by this beautiful neighborhood with lots of trees.  The houses were further apart. There were lakes, okay, large ponds, and woods.   I fell in love.  The neighborhood was Country Place.  There were no houses available in our price range and/or there were no houses with enough bedrooms.  (With six children "in house," finding a home with enough bedrooms has always been our struggle in house-searching.)  We found a five bedroom house in Flint a few miles down the road and in a different school district.  My husband had to sacrifice his love for trees.  The house was on a one-acre lot in what used to be pasture land.The rooms were small, BUT the house was priced well below market.  We were sold.  But I never forgot Country Place and heard, after living in Tyler awhile, that it was a very close-knit community with lots of activity and interaction between neighbors.

Country Place entrance today

So fast forward to January of this year.  We were quickly outgrowing our house.  We could no longer all fit in the kitchen, or at least not seated.  We had six chairs around the table and three seats at the bar. When our youngest at the time, Lainey, grew out of the high chair, I gave up my chair and started standing during mealtimes.  I didn't mind that much, since it meant I didn't have to get up and down to serve food.  But, I care about making memories, and I couldn't help having this nagging feeling that I didn't want all of my kids' memories at mealtimes to be of their mom standing beside the table, or worse, absent because I was standing in the kitchen instead of near the table.  Then, Landon was born.  We moved him into the highchair.  At that point, we knew we had to add on or find another place with more room.

I have always loved real estate.  I love looking at houses.  I would call it a pastime.  Well, one day, a farmhouse-style home came up on the market.  It was in Country Place.  My husband and I rushed over to see it.  It was our dream house.  We have very different tastes at times, but on this house, we both agreed.  The kids went to see it.  It was their dream house.  It was the right size.  It had a wrap-around porch.  We envisioned ourselves drinking lemonade on the swing.  It had an area for our teens to hang out.  It had a picket fence.  It had room for a huge table with a seat for every one of us.  Did I mention it was in Country Place?

We immediately went home.  There was never such teamwork in our family as those two weeks that we got our house ready to sell.  We hired painters, bought shutters and moved out half of our stuff.  Two weeks later, I put it for sale by owner.  Two days later, it sold.  The next day we put in a full price offer on our dream house.  The seller wrote "Welcome Home" on the chalkboard in the kitchen.   Three days later, we got the call that another buyer had turned up and that we'd lost the house.  I used to think it was dumb when people cried over a house.  Now, I get it.  The house had been a great deal and priced below market.  There was no way to replace it.  Our house in Flint was now sold.  A month later, we moved into an even more crowded rent house.

Well, those who know me know that I don't take 'no' for an answer very well.  My family belonged in Country Place.  I didn't know how we would move there, but I was intent on trying.  I called my favorite realtor friend and she suggested that I look up empty lots in Country Place.  I went into the tax records and started calling owners of any undeveloped lots.  There weren't many.  I even called people who had large parcels, hoping they'd subdivide.  What I found were people who LOVED their neighborhood.  They spoke of hayrides in the fall.  Dinners among neighbors.  Everyone had a beautiful story to tell of wonderful neighbors in Country Place.  Even people who owned land, and had moved out of the state, weren't interested in selling, for that off-chance that they might go back to Country Place someday, and build a home.  But then, after countless calls, I reached an owner who had planned on building a home this year, but whose husband had just been transferred.  Her husband, like others, hadn't planned on selling in case they wanted to build at a later time, but she'd ask him.  She called me back with, "Well, it's your lucky day...he'll sell."

I'd like to say we got a discount.  After all, I can't stand to pay full price for anything.  It's almost against my religion.  But, in real estate, location is everything.  We paid what they had paid.  No negotiation.  I was just ecstatic.  The lot overlooked the large pond that the neighbors call "Lake 3."  We were in Country Place.  One of the first things we did, on one of our weekly dates, was stand in our lot so Greg could hear the sound of the wind in the pines.  

Our lot in Country Place as it looked in early spring

Dealing with Disappointment

I have found through building our home so far that the process is an exercise in how well one copes with disappointment.  The build starts with a dream, then a plan and finally...the reality.  Now maybe that isn't the lesson for everyone in building when your budget fits your taste.   But for this family, that has been the daily lesson.  What we want isn't what we can afford.  We started by finding our dream house.  Here it is.

We fell in love with this picture.  It is a photo of Randolph Place.  It was the inspiration of our whole project.  We looked at purchasing the plans, but after looking at the basic floor plan, 1) the master was upstairs (pretty much a deal breaker because of growing old and resale value) and 2) the dining area was too small.  We tried drawing plans to fit the shape.  My husband was sure he could draw it.  I was sure it wouldn't look right, since he is good at drawing damaged rooms, which he does for a living, and not necessarily designing spaces.  After much worry and sleepless nights, on my part, we departed from the Randolph Place idea.

Then we started scouring house plans.  My oldest daughter thought Ansley Park had the perfect floor plan.  Here's a link:  http://houseplans.southernliving.com/plans/SL592

I liked the floor plan, but thought the front was too plain.  So we looked at what seemed like a million plans.  Then I found Timothy Bryan through Southern Living builders.  I looked through his floor plans and really liked them.  I called him and he told us to select the floor plan we liked and he could change the face to what we wanted.  We found one that we really liked..... Ansley Park?  My oldest daughter smiled when I realized it was the exact plan she had liked in the beginning.   Here's a photo of Ansley Park:

Now to make the face match what we wanted for the exterior.  After one attempt and some drawing on my husband's part, I might add, Timothy Bryan did an excellent job, we think, of combining our ideas to create this front:

We had a plan!  We sat down with our builder, who is really awesome.  He was perfect for us.  He's very creative and prides himself on building homes for less than they appraise for.  With a family of 11, building on a budget was our top priority.  I started collecting bids from cabinet makers, granite installers, appliance dealers and sat down and created a long spreadsheet on excel detailing everything from light fixtures to countertops, bathtubs, faucets, sinks, etc.,    After sitting down and getting building cost estimates from our builder and combining them with my numbers, we found ourselves 100K over budget!  We were so discouraged and even considered scrapping our plans, but then we started cutting everything.  My cabinet budget went from 35K to 20K.  My 20K appliance budget that had been recommended to me by a local appliance dealer went down to 10K and the list goes on... Hardwood floors would be engineered instead.  More carpet and less wood.  One item at a time, we whittled our dreams into reality.  In the end, our banker said it was the most detailed budget he'd ever seen.  I tend towards being over cautious, I've been told.  So I've oversimplified all of this, because what I'm skipping is the emotion of all of it.  We had started with all of these pinterest pictures and high hopes and ended up nervous about all of the money it was going to cost and how we could make cheaper things look higher end than they were.  So this is where our build began, with disappointment, but also hope.  I still don't sleep well at night.  Always in the back of my mind, I wonder if we're crazy taking this on....or whether I'll have to sell blood plasma before it's all over. Only time will tell.