Friends its finally time! I thought today would be fitting to share our first Clarke Residence Update. Around this time last year, we put our house on the market in San Antonio and started the moving process. Our house in San Antonio sold in less than 24 hours, so we quickly packed up everything we owned and made plans to move into Kevin’s parents house until we found a place of our own. Thankfully Kevin’s parents have two houses, so we have been able to live in one this past year.
We technically moved back to the Houston area at the very end of June and started looking for a house. After about a month of house hunting, we started entertaining the idea of building our own with a custom builder. Kevin’s best friends dad is a builder in our area and we started talking with him about building. Honestly, Kevin and I have dreamed of designing our own home, but we weren’t planning on this for a few more years. But, after deciding to just look at lots and see, we found the perfect neighborhood for us. Then, after two more months, we narrowed it down from three lots to one based on the floor plan we were wanting.
We closed on our lot in October and then started working on our custom floor plan with our designer. I seriously looked through hundreds of thousands of floor plans before deciding on a “base”. Then, we worked on customizing it and it honestly looks entirely different from when we started. I was extremely nervous through this whole process, but once we saw the floor plan and elevation drawn out, I fell in LOVE. We finished our floor plans in November.
Then, we started working toward filling out our home application for our neighborhood. We will be living in a pretty strict neighborhood with large POA, so our application was 62 pages long. We had to have a soil report done by an engineer, then a foundation plan drawn up and a typography survey done. You name it, we needed it for this application. We even went and picked out our brick for our house, outdoor light fixtures and paint colors to turn in samples.
Finally, at the end of February we were ready to submit our application for approval. We waited a few days and then our POA requested a few changes, so we went back to our designer about our drainage plan for the lot. Then, we resubmitted at the beginning of March and were approved a few days later.
Once we were approved, we could finally start our budget and apply for our construction loan with our bank. More waiting, more applications. Then, on May 11th, we closed on our construction loan and we did a happy dance!!
I cannot tell you how happy we were to see some dirt turned on our site. We saw our property for the first time mid-july, now almost a year later, we are finally starting the “build”. Let the FUN begin!! I’ll take progress of building any day over all the paperwork of the last year!