House Construction

I heard from our builder today. Miles has been coordinating much of this, since I've been involved with the city subdivision process. I guess we have a few more things to wrap up with the design and then our builder will submit for a building permit next week, hopefully.

I'll set up a meeting with the builder and the designer on Monday.

Outstanding items:

• Kitchen design
• Builder city license
• Finish getting our house ready to sell - getting granite countertops in the kitchen installed on Monday 10/27 and new carpet upstairs on 11/3.

It's starting to feel like we will actually be building a house this winter.

Amazing

I just heard from the city - they have agreed to our proposed timing of the plat signatures. I think we're actually going to get this done!

Frustrating

We now have our mylars printed and are going through the signature process. We have run into a little glitch because our current lienholder's local office has closed. They won't be available to sign the drawing prior to the attorney. The attorney won't sign until after we re-finance and release the lien. The city wants to sign last and the mortgage company needs the plat recorded the day we close on the new loan.

I've asked the city if they will sign before the attorney so that we can complete this process without having to go through a 3-month lien release process and put our whole project on hold until we get that done.

I sent the request last Thursday and have heard nothing from the city. I haven't been able to sleep at night I'm so stressed about how we will get this done. The city is not known for being very flexible.

Also, the water district signed the drawings and then when I was at the rural electric association to get them to sign, realized that the water district missed 3 pages. Now I haven't heard from them yet either.

The logistics are too complicated. I wonder why the city doesn't go digital. Pretty amazing that we're still passing mylars around...

Just Six to Eight Weeks

If anyone in the last few weeks has asked me when they think we will break ground on the new house, my answer is, 6 to 8 weeks. I think that's been my standard answer for the last 6 weeks. Hopefully we'll make some real progress in the next week so that I can revise my answer to something a little more concrete.

Right now we're waiting on several things:

1. The city to finish making final comments (again) so that the engineer can make final edits and print mylars.
2. Once the mylars are printed, we will get signatures and record the new plat drawing and utility plans.
3. We need to complete the development agreement. This needs to be complete before they can issue a building permit.
4. We need to make the final decisions on a few things, like plumbing, before our GC can apply for a building permit. Luckily we can apply for the building permit anytime and can do that congruent to the finalization of the plat drawings.

Six to eight weeks...

Molasses

It is so frustrating waiting for others to get things done and having no power over getting it done. The engineer has had the feedback from the city on some very minor changes to our drawings since September 12. As of this week, I still haven't heard from them, so I started pushing on them. They finally submitted the final plans to the city for review on Tuesday, September 30. And I found a few errors still! I asked them to make the changes and they will wait until they hear from the city so they can make all the changes at once.

Now we are waiting for the city engineer to respond. I've sent her an e-mail and left her a voice mail. I am getting anxious now because we have to coordinate all this with the refinancing of the investment property. I am still a little fuzzy on the timing and how everything will work. The city departments need to sign the drawings, the water district needs to sign and then our attorney needs to sign the plat. He won't sign the plat unless he gets notification from the title company that the lien has been released, which will happen when we refinance. So, everything has to happen at the same time!

I hope the city engineer gets back to me soon. I'm hoping we can coordinate this meeting with the attorney, the title company and mortgage company and then get the plat recorded all at the same time next week. Only hiccup is that all the people in the city and the water district, oh, and the rural electric company need to be around for signatures prior...

It's a miracle that we've gotten this far. But, we need to keep persevering. We're hoping to submit our application for a building permit next week as well, which can go in parallel to the finalization of the plat and utility plans.

Oh, and one more thing. We have to finalize the development agreement and get a letter of credit signed for the city for the future design and construction of the road improvements.