We usually stop by at our land every weekend or every other weekend just to see what has changed. For the first couple of weeks there was not much to be seen, but lately houses are randomly and quickly showing up. It’s really crazy. Where there was no house one weekend, two weeks later a family is moving in. Last weekend, we saw our neighbors are starting now too. Everything is changing really fast and it’s such fun to watch.
Here are a couple of impressions for you:
The other day we took the kids for a walk around the new subdivision – our new neighborhood.
We take them there quite a bit – every other week, if not every week – so they can get to know the area where we are going to live and it won’t seem like such a strange, unknown place. Only this time we went at night to check out what it would look like then, and the kids had an absolute blast. It was pretty strange cause there were a couple of houses built already, but since no one at all has moved in yet, no lights were on in any of the houses. Pretty creepy. Almost like a ghost town. The only lights were the new streetlights and some of the lights from houses bordering our subdivision. The kids loved it though – the darker it got, the more fun they had.
Here are some impressions:
So we obviously kind of knew that our loan would get approved. We’ve had them check before we even looked into buying land, yet it was still great to see it in black and white. Today the letter from Ing-Diba (our bank) came in – Home loan approved! YAY. And it’s a very good deal. We are only paying a little over 1% interest over the next 10 years. This was very great news!
So now that the money is officially taken care of, all we have to do is wait on the architect to show us his ideas for our house and then off to the city for a building permit we go!
Today at 5 pm we met with the architect for the very first time. We’ve had two scheduled appointments with him already, but sadly he couldn’t show up for the first one (his daughter had to go to the hospital) and he had a different appointment interfering with the second one we had.
Third time’s the charm though and so on the 9th he did show up along with our salesman. Both of them had looked at the land before they came to us and were pretty pleased with the what we bought.
After some paperwork was done the architect wanted to start by showing us the base house we bought and asked which wall we would like to chance etc. I told him that he can just delete the entire base house and start from scratch on a new peace of paper since we really do want to change just about everything. He was really thrilled at the idea (I guess he doesn’t get to be all that creative usually considering most people probably just buy the house the way it is without changing much). We could tell he had a lot of fun with it.
So he asked us for our wishes and I gave him a two page list of what was important to us (3 kids rooms, a kids bathroom, a master bedroom and bathroom as well as a walk in closet all upstairs, the stairs in the living room instead of in the hallway, etc. etc. ). He was very happy with all of our choices, told us it will be a really cool house and he already has some great ideas for it.
All in all the talk took well over 5 hours but was a lot of fun. It was also very reassuring to hear from a guy who knows what he’s doing that all our wishes are actually possible. He actually wanted to start drawing right away, but considering it was a Monday after 10 pm the sales guy mentioned they still had to drive home for an hour and wouldn’t it be better to do this at home and then send us an email.
So now we just have to wait for an email from the architect and see if we like his first try on our house. If not we can ask him to change whatever we do not agree with. How fun!
We also had to send out the actual cost overview to our bank and are now hoping they will approve of it like they said they would when we bough the land. Once that is taken care of and we agree on a house with the architect we will have to take his blueprints to the city and wait for them to give us a building permit. And then people, THEN the building finally begins! YAY!