After a seeming stall-out in late April/early May, it appears that the house construction is on a more structured timeline now. That could be because we contacted our builder a few weeks ago and reminded them that our construction loan matures on June 29, 2016. It’s an 8-month loan. When we initially began considering this home build, our builder told us they could finish a house in 3 months, so we thought, “Okay, an 8-month loan should be plenty of time.” Wrong.
At this point, we are shooting for a mid-July completion. If we had asked for a completion timeline up front, we might have had better luck keeping them within the 8-month time frame.
Pro Tip #63 for people considering construction: Get a completion timeline from your builder up front. Then you can add a month or two on your own and have a decent idea of when it should be done.
In other news, we will be doing more of the purchases and installation ourselves in order to save money on the build. A couple weeks ago, we had yet another surprise from our mortgage broker, who made it sound like a simple and FREE process to extend the construction credit line to include the finished basement. Wrong. It’s over $800.00. That’s right, folks. In order to extend the construction line, we’d have to flush $800 down the toilet. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.
We would share another Pro Tip of getting everything in writing from your mortgage broker, but we did that. And we were still misled. After speaking with a financial counselor, our revised Pro Tip is to pay an attorney with expertise in real estate to review all documents for you before you sign them. Although to be perfectly honest, we’re not sure if that’s $400-500 well spent either.
In light of our evolving financial constraints, here are a few changes we are making to our construction plans:
1. The basement will not be as finished as originally planned. The drywall will be up, and there will be a bathtub and toilet in the bathroom, as well as a partially finished wetbar, but it may or may not be painted, and the floors will likely be unfinished, except for the bathroom because we already purchased that flooring.
2. We plan to do the interior painting of the main floor ourselves.
3. We have already purchased and will install the main floor flooring ourselves.
4. We are choosing less expensive options for flooring (can you say laminate?) and trim/moulding.
5. We will purchase and pay for the delivery of our appliances. Consumer Reports, we are scouring you for the least expensive options that are still reliable.
In March, Matt took a voluntary layoff from his job, which has caused us some anxiety. However, as we anticipate completing several projects on the build in the coming weeks, his free schedule (and the fact that Katie is not teaching this summer) are actually turning out to be blessings. Our flexible schedules will allow us to complete the work on our house (provided our builder communicates with us when this work should be done). In addition, Matt’s layoff has made us more conservative in our spending, which will lead to a smaller mortgage and smaller mortgage payments.
We are also taking steps to work with our own credit union for permanent financing (instead of our current mortgage broker on the construction loan)—and they seem willing to work with us based on Katie’s annual salary and our debt to income ratio. Our plan to get rid of all debt prior to and shortly after our wedding in March 2015 is paying off; we have Dave Ramsey to thank for that.
We are still not exactly sure how all of this will turn out for us financially, but we are optimistic that the end result will be worth it. Building on his family’s property was Matt’s dream, and we don’t regret taking that risk to try to make that dream come true.
Here are some photos of that dream in progress. The exterior brick was installed on Sunday:
We also dug a shallow trench in the back yard in order to eliminate pools of standing water (we have had LOTS of rain here). Eventually, once the septic lines are dug, we will address the low spots in the back yard.
And check out how high the Little Arkansas is right now. It’s almost right up to our gate in the back yard, and that sucker is MOVIN’!
