Time for an update. Summer’s end is nearing…well, not that close, but close enough. Especially when one considers all that needs to happen when building a road and at least starting a house before the winter rains show up.

In that respect, here’s where we are at. As you probably know, the plans, estimates, etc are all done. In other words, all the planning is basically planned. The next hurdle is financing. Funny thing–banks are picky about lending money. Hmmm.

Obviously, I’m not going into too much detail here. But, suffice it to say that a proposed home has to appraise at a certain value over and above what it costs to build that home. That way the bank can loan you a percentage of the final value of the home, and with that loan, you can actually build it. A little bit chicken-egg, I guess. Have to have one to do other, but to do other, need the one. Whoa, that’s confusing… that make sense to anyone?

One other wrinkle. To get financing, the site must have a well and septic approval (since we’re rural). In short, do you have water, and do you have a proper place to get rid of that water? For our site, since it’s effectively a new site with no access… in order to find out if we have well and septic approval, there must be equipment to test. This equipment isn’t exactly an M-1A1 Abrams tank. So, to get said equipment to said home site, there must be a driveway. In our case, the driveway is about 450′. That’s 450′ of treed property, so part of that process is removing all those sticks in the ground.

So…to get well & septic — in order to get financing — we have to build driveway (aka road, for all intents and purposes). Building a 450′ road isn’t exactly pocket change kind money. Catch-22, chicken-egg, whatever ya wanna call it. That’s been part of the reason things have dragged out a bit.

To make a long story less long (too late, I know)… we have word from the escavator (for road and homesite) that they will start September 1st. That’s 2 weeks from this posting. In summary… YAY! Now the real work begins, and I’ll try to keep things here up with whatever changes occur. We are now at the point to jump in with both feet and cross the point of no return and [insert cliche of choice here].

On a related, but side note, we finally bought a digital camera. So, along with posts about the property, I’ll try to tell the story in pictures too.