HOUSE UPDATE - Staking It Out

We are making LOTS of progress on our future home!  Over the summer we finally finished up the plans.  We made lots of compromises to keep ourselves within our budget, but the things we've cut out are things we can hopefully add on or do in the future.  Since our builder was still working on a couple of projects, we knew that he wouldn't be able to start until around Thanksgiving.  So in the meantime, we worked with an architect to see what our house would look like in 3-D.  (There were several changes made to the roof lines, etc. and we wanted to make sure we knew exactly what certain parts of the exterior were going to look like once they were built.)  It has also helped us pick out specific materials and colors, etc.  

Now that it's NOVEMBER we are getting everything finalized.  On Saturday we met our builder out at our lot to stake it out and pick exactly where we want our house to go!!!  It was a BEAUTIFUL morning and I just started taking pictures because, as my mom would say, IT WAS GLORIOUS!  It was also just such an exciting, surreal moment.  When we bought our lot over five years ago, we DREAMED of the day when all of this would finally happen.  We have driven out there so many times (and I'm sure we will only drive out there a gazillion more as we start building!).  I just can't wait to get started!!  I can't wait for our girls to get to go fishing with Daddy out at the pond, for us to be able to host parties and get-togethers, and to drink coffee out on the back deck while looking at the beautiful trees and pond!!

The road to the subdivision...

My camera just did NOT do it justice...the trees were just GORGEOUS!  Ryan kept joking "man, it looks like a Bob Ross painting!"

The subdivision is called "Touchdown Estates", and our future street is "Super Bowl Drive."  (The streets are all football themed...Quarterback Ridge, Heisman Drive., Linebacker Run, etc.)  For our football fanatic family, it is just PERFECT!  Everyone is invited to our Super Bowl party in 2015!!!  HA!

And there's the lot in all it's fall glory!  HA!

Ryan and Stuart (our builder) started getting out the tape measures and we started deciding where the house should go.  Yikes...that's not a big decision or anything!  We have just been praying like crazy that God would help us in every single decision we make.

We think we picked the perfect spot!  Now we are finalizing all the tiny details of the plan with both our builder and architect.  We are going to close on our construction loan in about a week, and the plan is to break ground the Monday before Thanksgiving!  Our builder is hoping to get it "under roof" long before rainy spring weather, and then hopefully we will be in it by summer or early fall.  YAY!  We are so excited, and I'm sure I'll drive you all crazy with my many house updates!  =)