One Step Forward.....

We could barely contain our excitement yesterday when our builder arrived to start digging the footers for the house. It's getting real!! He and an employee worked hard all day and right before Serena finished work for the day a concrete truck rolled up. We have some footers for our house. :-)

Doing some digging! 

Pouring the concrete

They had to do some fast work before the concrete set up

Footers all done

View from what will be our backyard. 

The block should hopefully be laid in the next week or so and we'll have our foundation. 

Remember where we said it was getting real now?? Yeah, well remember we are still in the midst of a pandemic. The prices of lumber are up 300% over this time last year and no signs of going down. We have a budget set for the house and we're getting close to that mark. We had almost made up our minds to hold off a month or so and see if the prices dropped then we found out that the prices of the windows and doors are going to be increasing in the very near future. So, we wait for lumber prices to MAYBE drop and we have to pay more for windows and doors. Do we continue right now or try to wait? 

As someone told us we're basically playing the lottery. It's not a great position to be in but we have to move forward while we hope and pray for the best. Our hope is that the interest rates will continue to stay low so in the end that may help us a bit. 

We're on a roller coaster ride at the moment and not much we can do but hang on.

Getting Started

 Yesterday we celebrated 11 years of marriage and what a nice 'present' to have the builder arrive to start some excavating! :-) 

We needed to get some things smoothed up, evened out and further marked out before anything else can begin. 

This was exciting for us to see, it seems we've been waiting so long to actually see some progress. According to the builder at times things will go fast and others things will go slower. We're ready for it all. 

View from our current house. 

Getting some dirt moving.

 

Donald and Pepper standing where the front porch will be.

View from where our front porch will be. 

View of our new driveway, looking toward Serena's homeplace. 

Current view from Conner Road. 

Finding a Builder

 We chose a modular home that we wanted for our very own however there is way more involved that just choosing that house. There's a lot of work to be done before it can even be ordered. There are cabinets, carpets, vinyl siding, windows and lots of other stuff to pick out so pricing can be set. 

As it turned out there was one builder that worked with the modular company we chose. Countryside Custom Homes, Inc right here in Floyd VA. (http://www.cchomesfloyd.com/ or search Countryside Custom Homes on Facebook). Matthew Thomas is the owner and we were pleased to begin working with he and his wife Jessica on reviewing our options and making our decisions.

As you probably remember we had a long wait for paperwork to be done, signed, etc. and lots can change, especially during a pandemic. Some folks may already be aware that due to the pandemic lumber prices are skyrocketing. While we were waiting for everything to be completed the price from the manufacturer increased once, twice and finally three times. We were now looking at $14,000 extra for this house plus the wait for the manufacturer to start building was 18 weeks. 

What do we do now? We discussed our options, talked with Matthew and decided we could do this within our budget and timeframe by stick building. 

So here we are. Again, due to some delays with everything we were pushed back a bit but we are hoping that we'll be in our new digs by late fall. Patience when it comes to this is not easy but we'll get there. 

Looking forward to seeing some excavation beginning soon so we can start on the foundation. It won't happen overnight but it will happen and as so many have told us 'It will be so worth it in the end'. 

Here is the spot where our house will be looking toward my parents house. 

Matthew Thomas discussing and laying out the corners of the house. 

The House Plans revealed

 Many of you have now seen the basic exterior of the house we chose. Now we need to take a look inside. 

We've always liked the open concept floor plan and this one fit the bill. This is the original floorplan. 

We liked the idea of a study as Serena is now working from home. The porch was a nice feature that we've always wanted. The shower in the Master bathroom is awesome and well, check out that walk in closet. 

It wasn't quite perfect though so we did some talking and below is what we landed on. 

We've switched everything so now our bedroom will be on the left and the laundry room will be on the right. We've still got our porch, the study and again, that closet. 

Below is how the front of the house will look. It's different from what we originally posted it doesn't have the gables on the front but it suits us. We're excited we finally made our decision on the house and the layout. We think we promised to talk about the builder in this post but realized everyone may like to see how the interior layout is and how it will actually look from the front. 

Choosing a home

We wanted to share our whole experience and the biggest part was choosing a home we really loved. We visited dealerships of doublewide and modular homes from VA to NC to TN. If you haven't seen some of these houses prepare to be 'wowed'. 

All of the homes we saw could be built as either doublewide, modular or off frame modular. What does all of that mean you may ask. Here is what we learned:

Doublewide (HUD) is a manufactured home built entirely indoors, with a metal frame supporting the house. That is how it is transported and put together onsite. The specifications are somewhat less stringent than a stick built house. 

Modular (on frame) is just like the doublewide the metal frame remains underneath the house for transport and set up. The specifications are the same as a stick built house. 

Modular (off frame) is also built on a metal frame for transport but once on site it is lifted with a crane and set up on a permanent foundation. The specifications again are the same as a stick built house. 

Here were some of our favorites. 

                                                            The Country Aire 

    

                                                        The Archdale

                                                                

                                                    The South Hampton

                                                             

They were all so unique and pretty but we only needed one. After months of looking   chose.............The South Hampton. Ours won't look exactly like this but the layout seemed to work for what we wanted. Watch floorplans coming in another post.  

If you're interested in the floorplans or just to see how lovely these homes are you can do a Google search for the name I've given and put the word home after that name. 

Now we needed to find a builder.  

 

Working with a Lender

 Warning- This is a long post. ;-) 

As you can imagine one of the most important aspects of buying or building a house is finding and working with a lender. 

We picked a lender and began our process in June of 2020. Something very important to remember is to ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. Our experience was that we assumed they would tell us what we needed to do and they assumed we would know what we needed to do. WRONG! 

Communication is key, do not be afraid to ask questions. We suggest you tell them you want to be pre-qualified. We did that but were told oh, that won't be a problem. We didn't have a problem qualifying but it came later in the process and had we done it up front everything would have been much quicker. 

When we heard lumber prices were going to go up due to COVID we pushed to get this process moving, we picked a house and chose a builder but more on that later. 

An appraiser was sent out in October, remember we began discussions in June, to look at the location. So we were five months in and we were just getting appraisals to determine how much they would loan us. We waited and waited and finally in December we found out how much they would loan us. 

The lender will only loan 80% of what the appraisal comes in at and we were coming up short of what we wanted to borrow. This meant we needed collateral. Option was to use our current house and land. The house is a doublewide and therefore at one time had a title. For those who are not aware doublewides are titled just like cars. They will remain under title until you tell surrender the title to the DMV.

We contacted the DMV via phone as things were still shut down and it was the holiday season in December 2020.  They advised there was still a mortgage company listed on the title and we had to provide proof it was paid off. 

The doublewide had been paid off for 20 plus years and I found paperwork from the lender stamped as paid in full with the date and even a letter on a company letterhead showing we paid in full. Now it's really getting fun...NOT. 

We provided what we had via email to the DMV and after many phone calls, emails and several weeks of waiting they advised we did not have enough proof to show it was paid off. The mortgage company was no longer in business..............great, just great. 

We had to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission of VA advising them of the company name and asking them to provide information that there was no company by that name doing business in VA. I had to write an affidavit and have it notarized to provide to the DMV.  We also had to send an envelope to the former address of the company to get return mail that they were no longer at that address. More time has passed and now we finally have what we need but wait there's more.......

Serena bought the house with her first husband and he was still listed on the title. We needed him to sign some papers to get the title in her name only so we could then surrender it. Thankfully he was kind enough to take care of that for us and finally we had everything we needed. 

Finally, we have a loan, we signed paperwork for the construction loan on February 4th 2021. 

As you can see this was a very long and drawn out process for us. There were actually times we started to wonder if it was worth it but we continued on and now we're moving even closer to this house being a reality. 

Next up the house we chose. 

Clearing the land

 

We picked the spot for our house but we've got a single wide trailer already residing there. The trailer is a 1974 model and has definitely seen it's better days. The floors are getting rotten, the underpinning is coming off more and more with each windstorm and it's just time to dispose of it. 

We had some options we could find someone to tear it down by hand, we could have it torn down with machinery or figure out another option. We decided to price having it torn down by machinery. Wow, sticker shock! The main cost was in the dump fees so we asked around and finally decided burning it down was the best option. We contacted the fire department and our neighbors and on Friday night in October up it went. It was kind of hard to see it destroyed but it had to be done and it went very quickly, within an hour of starting it was complete. 

Now we just had to pick up the pieces and move a few rocks. 

Next up working with a lender......

Location, location, location

This was actually the easy part. We love the area we live in, it's God's country. Some people think we're too far away from everywhere but in reality we're in a perfect spot. We're in the middle of everything. Within about 18 miles of Floyd, approximately 20 minutes to Roanoke, Christiansburg and Rocky Mount. It all depends on which way we fall off the mountain. 

The land we live on started out as part of about 75 acres that belonged to Serena's grandparents. Over the years it was sold off or passed onto family. Currently we own about seven acres of that property. We'll be building the house beside the house Serena grew up in. 

Here is a picture Donald took with his drone a few years ago.

                                                                

The picture shows Serena's parents garage, house and a singlewide trailer formerly owned by Serena's grandmother. We wouldn't want to get rid of their house and the singlewide was slowly falling into disrepair so we decided we'd get rid of it and put our house on that spot. But what to do with a singlewide trailer that had seen it's better days? Stay tuned.........