The Winter of 2011/2012 was unusually busy for business, and the summer is always crazy, so after returning from our honeymoon, we only had limited time to talk about the house.  We did settle on what we thought was a good floor plan, and had drawn up the house as a basic but spacious house with a full basement.  We still figured there was plenty of time to figure out the details because we decided we would break ground on the project in May of 2013.

In August of 2012, we were sitting outside around a campfire, and we started talking about how interest rates had hit record all time lows every week for many weeks in a row.  We looked at each other and said something like “lets try to build our house this fall”.  Keep in mind it was already August, so the clock was ticking fast before Winter would be back, so house planning suddenly became our highest priority.

We finalized a lot of the big items and started getting bids for construction of the house, while also starting the process of getting pre-approved for a loan.  We got the pre-approval, and bids started rolling it.  We were still missing bids on a few of the big items, and we had blown way past what we planned on spending and way past what our approved loan amount.  We knew we were going to have to make some drastic changes to our plans in order to bring the price back within our budget, and we were rapidly running out of time to do so.

We started tweaking some of the finishes and cutting back on some of the things we WANTED but knew we didn’t really NEED, but in the end, we were getting less and less excited about our house and ultimately decided that trying to rush into building (despite the low interest rates) wasn’t worth it if we weren’t going to end up with the house we wanted.  By the beginning of October, we knew that it was definitely too late to still build in 2012, so we pulled the plug and decided we’d take our time and make sure we were doing this right.

Lets see how 2013 goes!