all our household goods home on the land

Apologies to all for not posting recently. We have been busy with Thanksgiving et al.

Thought you might want to see our storage system - the two very large containers we have down by the garden to store all our belongings - always more than we think! It was a labor of love to bring them all here but so worth it to have them close to us. Now we can get to our winter clothes and even Christmas decorations!

We are meeting with our builder and our mortgage person to finalize the contract today at 1:30 - our builder would have done the house on a handshake, which is literally how they do it here in the country (still!). But our lender wants everyone covered and so we will walk him through the more detailed document. I do not want to offend this nice man - he really is so plain spoken and honest. But this is a step we are required to take - and then we will close on the construction loan in about two days. So exciting! Big celebration when ground is finally broken!!

More later - vaya con
Dios!

Beautiful sunrise on a Friday morning

Final plans go to the mortgage company

We have had such a busy two weeks, I haven't had a moment to post!

Here's the latest:

We had the 40 cubic yard trash container, fully packed, picked up and carried away to the dump. What a joy to see all that trash off our land! And we made two more trips to the metal reclaim yard to dump metal. We also arranged with the county commissioner to use his dumpster at the county road works to dump all the composite shingles.

What a job but we feel so satisfied that what we envisioned we could do, actually was accomplished - :) There are still a few small piles of trash we need to finish off, but we feel very good about the appraisal - which should be this week.

We met a couple more times with "Bill the Builder", as we call him. We feel really good about the entire budget and with a little compromise, we were able to get the house we want. We think Bill is pretty excited about the final plan. This house will have a much more unique look than many of the houses he has done. Two weeks ago, we traveled about two hours away into Oklahoma to a company that makes stone facings. We sat down with pictures, and they were able to put together a "palette" of colors of stone that we think will look good. They will be making a sample palette and sending it to Bill so we can have it to match up wood stains and tile.

Last week, we also had two large 10 x 60 ft. containers put down by the circle and the garden shed and took four days and four trips with a UHaul to transfer all our household goods here on the property. I can't tell you how happy we are to have our things with us again - and we are saving money with this storage option versus the Dallas storage units. But it was hard work and this week we are relaxing!

We met with our mortgage agent and have submitted all the paperwork and will have an appraisal done sometime this week. She said we can expect to close on the construction loan in about three weeks which will be the first week in December. We should have a pad poured by Christmas and maybe even the framing. Wow!

More later - and I'll put in pictures of the storage containers -
Love to all!