I am so excited to tell you that we finally found the land we want to raise our family on! We bought the land and are currently building our home on it. I want to take you along with us on this journey and I hope you will enjoy being a part of it!
The journey to find land!
We started looking for land over 4 years ago; hunting for that perfect spot to raise our family and maybe eventually grow old in. God closed many doors but then opened an amazing one when we moved to the Pacific Northwest over a year ago. We tried looking for land here before moving and that was just too hard to do without living nearby. It would have been too expensive to be constantly scouting out land and many good parcels were selling after being listed for only a few days. We decided to take our time and not rush things; so we moved to the area first before continuing to look for land/a house on land.
Initially, we thought about renting a house after making the move but that is very expensive (especially short term) here and we didn’t want to be on a strict timeline to find land. We decided to buy a home instead and hopefully build up some equity to help us purchase our dream land/home later on. Every time we went out exploring we would keep an open mind about the location/think if maybe it was somewhere we would want to move.
Our many small trips out hiking/driving/just plain exploring were the best for us to figure out what exactly we liked, what areas we really liked to spend our free time/do activities in, and maybe just as importantly what areas we didn’t like. Plus we often found land that was for sale by owner/not listed on the computer… or sometimes we found a piece of land that looked really appealing online but when we started to explore the area we found out it smelled due to some kind of industrial operation a little ways away, had a surprising amount of traffic, neighbor’s were absolute hoarders/junk everywhere, etc.
We hired a realtor!
We decide to hire a realtor to make the process easier for us. Finding land within our budget, in a good location, and finding it before it sells was not an easy task. The real estate market has been so hot right now that land (and houses) often sell within one or two days of being listed. We also looked at existing homes on land but soon found out everything in our budget was a total fixer upper. If you have been following me for any length of time, you know I love to DIY but some of these places were at the top of our budget and still needed $30,000 or more QUICKLY to rehab them. We felt like we were compromising on almost everything and still having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to have a safe, comfortable house to raise our family in and that just wasn’t a good feeling.
A light of hope!
Months had passed when our realtor called and said, “I found you something amazing.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t super excited at first because we had been looking daily at all the listings online if we weren’t out driving around and we had not seen anything new that was either in our budget or what we wanted. The property wasn’t listed online yet but our realtor had found out about the property from another realtor and contacted the seller who was willing to let us take a look at it in person/hold it for us while we found a builder. We all hopped into the car and headed out to see this unlisted property.
WOW! We both looked at each other and knew this was the kind of land we were looking for. This couple acres has everything we hoped for besides it not being 100+ acres and having a river running through it… but then again it didn’t cost several million dollars either!
Building!
What a process this has been. Finding a floor plan that fit our needs and budget wasn’t an easy task. The house we are building is about 2200sqft which is just enough space for us. We wanted a school room and craft room because crafting and diys are my job. Not one floor plan hit everything I ever dreamed of but our budget didn’t allow for that anyways. We tweaked a few things to better suit our needs and sent off the plans for revising. Once revised, the plans were submitted for the building permit approval.
The permitting process hasn’t gone lickety split, especially with the coronavirus happening. The coronavirus has delayed just about everything at least a little bit so far.
The Waiting Game!
I’m so excited to share this journey with you all! Be sure you are subscribed to the blog to get email notifications for what’s next on our dream home build. I will be sharing daily on my Instagram and soon you’ll be seeing videos my YouTube channel showing more footage from this journey as well. Until the next update on breaking ground, have an amazing week!
