Friday, October 19, 2012

Inspiration: Doors

We really wanted double french doors with transoms, interior doors with nice detailing and exterior doors with grilles.

Here are our actual interior doors:


Inspiration for front door:


Inspiration for french doors:

Building Permit Submitted!

We submitted the building permit today and part of me cannot believe it is all real!

I already have homework: find out if the amount of trees we will be cutting will require a special permit.... which will cost additional money...yay.


Friday, October 12, 2012

More Soft Costs.

MOOARRR costs. I have to roar about it because I am a bit weary of them.

This month:

1. $650 for septic redesign. We had to redesign the septic because the way the old septic was it, it was making our house sit an an awkward angle on the lot.
2. $850 for plan engineering.
3. $2100 for the remaining plan drawings. We made some changes so it added additional cost.
4. $1500 earnest money to the builder.
5. $900 property taxes.
6. $580 for appraisal for the construction loan.

Blarg! I am ready for the build to begin and the costs to be paid out of pocket to slow a bit and the loan to take over.

My check book is tired.

Coming up we have:

$5000 for the building permit (this will be refunded by the loan).

So in case you did not know, building a house is expensive. :)

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Floorplan

Here is the floor plan. It took us 2 months of back and forth to get it right. Finally, someone on a home building forum I frequent really helped us nail all the right details.  Our criteria was:

1. Bedrooms in the front, kitchen/living/dining in the back.
2. Open kitchen/living/dining.
3. Large mudroom.
4. As many windows as possible.
5. Two windows in each bedroom for cross ventilation.
6. Bonus room on 2nd floor.

The total square footage is about 2400 which was bigger than we wanted but there was really no way to make it smaller. I know that most of the time we will be hanging out in the kitchen/living/dining area and we will have a large, flat backyard and that area has french doors to a patio out the back.

We also had our budget meeting and we came in at $308,000, so a bit over but the house is bigger than we thought it would be. Our builder bid everything out so while I know we might go over in some areas, I don't foresee too many surprises since we are building on a flat part of our land and the house itself is pretty simple.