Just Getting Started

It happened about 6 months ago, during a visit to one of our favorite Stillwater hot spots, PD Pappy's.  We were enjoying one of our favorite bands (Kurt Jorgensen Band) and I was having so much fun with our friends (Elaine, Shawn, Kelly, Al, Jim and Amy) that I said to Steve, "We should move to Stillwater".  It wasn't until months later that we actually started to run with the idea.  Our plan was to move before Tess hit middle school.  Since she is in fourth grade this year, that would give us two years to research and plan plus give us plenty of time to prep our house in Andover to sell.  We realized though that we might want to capitalize on the great interest rates and started seriously thinking about moving the summer of 2011.

Originally we planned to put the house on the market and try get an offer before we seriously started looking for a new home in Stillwater.  But we quickly realized that the Stillwater market had a lack of homes we liked in our price range.  We looked at some exhisting homes with the help of Adam Nyberg but weren't quite happy with what we saw.  There were homes that we could sink some money into to make "our own" and there we homes over our price range but nothing quite fit.

One Saturday afternoon, Tess, Ben and I went driving around to look at neighborhoods and decided to walk thru a model in the Emerald Falls development in Baytown TWP.  It was fun but I knew the house was out of our price range.  As we continued to pour through MLS listings online, Jim Abrams, a close friend kept encouraging Steve to build a home.  Jim and Amy had just moved into their new home built by McDonald Construction.  Ironically, McDonald Construction is the builder for the Emerald Falls development.  So we started to look into the lot prices and also start converstations with McDonald.  Surprisingly they confirmed that they could build a home in our price range in that development.  One plus to the development is that a bank owns the lots due to the past builder foreclosing on the land.  This allowed us to negotiate a great price on the land.

As of this week, we have bought the land :) YEAH!  And have worked through many details of the home with the builder.  This week we will sign the purchase agreement with the builder.

Here we go....Creating a Home!