Things are really starting to take shape and I can barely contain myself! We’re at the point now where I can see the big house before I even cross the street, thanks to the framing. Also: Should I be concerned about all the rain and snow that’s saturating the wood all the time here in London—er, western Pennsylvania? Because the precipitation has been out of control over here.
I’ll probably never stop talking about how much I like being across the street from the build site because I love-love-love stomping over there to see new progress. I know it won’t always be this obvious and that later it’ll look like nothing is being done because it’s all internal. But damn is it fun to watch all this progress.
Just the basement level.Main floor is framed. Screen room above the patio now has a floor.
All that digging and timber-clearing were cool and all, but this is what makes it feel real. Really real. Stuff-is-actually-being-built real. And with the foundation in, it’s way easier to visualize where things will be and get a better idea of room sizes, views, etc.
The bump-out on the left will be a covered patio and on the right will be a little sunroom type of deal in the basement.
At this point, the block has clearly been laid and the beginnings of our drainage system are in place. The walls were reinforced with rebar and concrete, and they moved some dirt into the basement/patio areas to prep it for getting a floor. Whenever that happens. They also tarred the outside of the foundation for extra waterproofing.
Openings for a people door on the left and a vehicle door on the right.
I’m still in various stages of cat-herding with the gas, electric, and water companies at the moment. I am legitimately floored by how much project management I’m having to do. lol I’m constantly calling and emailing people about things. Half the time I have to pass them along to the builder because I have no idea wtf is going on. They get all specific with me about BTU outputs and junction boxes and no. Just no. I have no idea, please talk to the professional about that.
Something neat I didn’t know about footers, likely because I’ve never built a house before, is that they can look really sloppy. If you know me, you know that I’m a bit of a neat freak and I don’t do well with chaos and disorganization and things that aren’t straight/even.
So imagine my (internal) anxiety-fueled meltdown when I realized that some of our footers are literally just trenches in the ground that have concrete poured into them.
So we just like, dump a bunch of concrete in there and hope for the best?
To be fair, some of them were nicely framed with straight, parallel boards and crisp 90-degree angles.
That’s better. Clean lines. Woosah.
But the back of the house looks like complete chaos.
To be clear: I know this is just going to serve as the base for the foundation block. No one but us will ever see this and its appearance is totally inconsequential. I was just not expecting something so… messy. lol
The funny thing about the uneven edges is that the concrete looks like a liquid even when it’s set.
Woo, we’re cooking now! The entire footprint is completely dug out to the point that they took the backhoe already.
Me, for scale. I *think* I’m standing under where the front door will be.
We got our house number already, which absolutely blows my mind because we literally just put the request in on Friday. So, by some miracle, that only took about half a business day to come back. Personally, I think the guy who came out to drop the GPS pins felt bad for us because I told him about all the hassles we’d gone through just to get the loan finalized. I wonder if he maybe pushed it through for us. And if he did? What a peach!
I attempted to make a lil rendering below with Microsoft Paint 3D. It’s… serviceable.
Is it to scale? Unlikely.
Does it accurately reflect our finishes? Nope.
Is it even in the right place? Maybe. I think. Look, all the dirt is the same color so it’s pretty hard at this distance to see where the foundation will go. lol
A graphic designer I am not.
Anyway, it’s a fair estimation of how things will look for those of us who sometimes have a hard time envisioning things realistically. And by “those of us” I mean me. When I try to imagine how it will look, the house is either monstrously large or comically small.
Also pictured above: We got the beginnings of our driveway added today in the form of at least two dump truckfuls of crushed stone. It’s mostly to prevent deep(er) ruts from the even bigger equipment that will be rolling in, but it’ll serve as a base for gravel later. Selfishly, I like that it makes it easier to walk up and down the hill without sliding around in the mud.
July 30, 2022: After the first round of timber cutting.
…then went here…
September 14, 2022: Two rounds of logging and some light excavation.
…and now we’re here…
September 23, 2022: All timber cleared with the footprint pinned out.
Today was a pretty big day. We got the whole footprint mapped out and had the county rep come and drop GPS pins for our new address. I didn’t realize this, but your new addy has to jive with the standards set and adhered to by the folks responsible for 911. Makes sense, right? You definitely want them to be able to find you when you choke on a hot dog alone in your house and your dogs won’t stop play-fighting long enough to notice.
Anyway, there’s some grid-formula-thing that says every 10.56-ish feet is a new address number. No, not a house/lot every 10.56-ish feet, but the numbers go up that often, which is why our next-door neighbors’ house is 40 units up from ours even though there are no lots in between us. The county rep came out today with a fancy-ass GPS/satellite phone-looking thing and dropped a few different location pins into it. Allegedly in a few business days, it’ll tell us where our new house will fall on the invisible address grid. Once we get the address, we start applying for permits and getting the ball rolling for utilities. Woo!
Poorly drawn lines are my own because it’s really hard to see the stakes and spray paint.
In the meantime, I’ve been stomping around inside the footprint trying to get my bearings and mentally arrange furniture. lol
I almost don’t want to talk about the loan process because it was a pretty bad time from start to finish. I was going to do a play-by-play to really hammer home how absolutely INSANE the whole thing was, but I don’t feel like re-traumatizing myself. How about the TL;DR version instead?
We applied for a construction loan (that will roll into a mortgage once construction is complete) in late March of 2022 and we were pre-approved on April 11, 2022. We were told it would take between 40 and 60 days to close. Being generous and assuming that means business days only, we should have closed somewhere between June 7th and July 6th.
Somehow our first potential closing date was July 22nd.
Then it was August 12th.
We didn’t actually close until September 2nd.
We hit every conceivable bump in the road between approval and closing. Every weird, unlikely thing that could happen, happened. We missed deadlines due to myriad reasons: the tax documents we needed were never sent to us, the person we needed was on vacation, the committee we needed only meets once a month, and the person we needed RETIRED. I can’t make this shit up, you guys. We also got slowed down because a lot of things would just start to get rolling on Fridays. Like clockwork. We’d finally get a document or signature and then we’d have to sit on it for two days.
Also, there are so, so, so many moving parts. Way more than buying a house outright. We had to split the property into two parcels so we didn’t own one parcel with two homes on it. We had to then get updated deeds and titles for the two newly split properties (that took FOREVER). We ended up having to pay off the original mortgage on the trailer with the new loan. We had to get separate construction insurance from our homeowner’s insurance.
There are also a lot of things that seemed to be circular. The most recent being we can’t get permits until we have a house number, but we can’t get a house number until we have the front door location. So the builder is clearing the trees and marking the front door, but can’t do anything else without permits.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering: The guy who can give us a house number is out of the office the week we need him. Super.
Uh, you may have noticed that I took all the old posts down. That’s because we don’t live there no mo’. We’re embarking on a brand-new, even-more-terrifying adventure: Building our dream home!
A few years ago I got a massive bee in my bonnet about getting out of the city. We started saving to move elsewhere, and I started referring to our house savings account as GUTFOOB: Get Us The Fuck Out Of Baltimore. After nearly nine years in the city—nine years that included both a car break-in AND a home break-in—I’d really had enough. It wasn’t Baltimore specifically, I’m just not a city gal. You can keep your amenities… being “close to the action” doesn’t do it for me. I need nature and the single tree in our backyard wasn’t cutting it. Plus, while we were only about six miles from downtown, it still took half an hour to get anywhere. (Ask me if I miss city traffic.)
In addition to being sick of city life, I scored a pretty sweet work-from-home gig. Mike was already working from home, so we were free to move anywhere we wanted. And the housing market was hot in favor of sellers, so we knew we’d make enough money on our sale to get a great head start on building. The timing really couldn’t have been better.
Mike and I have been talking about building our own house for what feels like eons. Every day in our old house inspired a new thought of, “I really wish this room were bigger,” or “I’d love to not have to walk up and down two flights of stairs to do laundry,” and “Wouldn’t it be great to have two sinks in the master bathroom?” But the thought of building a house felt so unattainable. How much will that cost? It sounds hella expensive. How does it even work? Where do we start? There are so many moving parts.
Having seen many friends and family members go through some significant home-building trauma, I started looking into the least melodramatic ways to make it happen. The first thing I set my mind to was living on the property while we build. That way, we weren’t on anyone’s timetable but our own. We’d never have to rent back our first house, live in a hotel, crash with family, or pay two mortgages at once. Unfortunately, that drastically limited our options in terms of available, affordable property.
Another thing limiting our options was location. Oh, and lot size. (Apparently I’m picky and like a challenge.) We wanted something between three and five acres within an hour of Penn State so we can go to more games and just visit more often. Property within an hour proved to be either whole-ass farms or postage-stamp lots in the ‘burbs, so we expanded our radius to an hour and a half. After months of scouring listings and monitoring Zillow alerts, we hit the jackpot…
…a mobile home that sits on 3.7 acres in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania!
As seen from across the street.
Bet you didn’t expect me to be this stoked to move into a trailer that was built in 1972, but here I am. Honestly, we were looking for anything small enough to be knocked down later if we needed to. The property setup is perfect. The lot is bisected by a road, with the mobile home sitting on 0.6 acres and the build site being on 3.1 wooded acres that BACK UP TO A CREEK. I have dreamed about a property like this my entire life. So two years in a trailer seems like a pretty small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Waterfront property. No big deal.
We ended up putting in an offer on the trailer the same day we toured it. From offer to closing, it took us about a month and a half. In that time, we were able to sell our Baltimore house and get settled into our new digs in mid-August of 2021. And that’s when the real fun began.
House of Hyperbole 