I obviously have a lot of catch up on regarding this topic. We have been hesitant to announce this news mostly because it's terrifying! I think we expected at every juncture that something was going to fall apart and this new house of ours would just be a dream, not a reality.
Our hesitation is not unfounded. Let me start from the beginning and talk about what prompted this whole search. Clearly we are expanding our family, which seems like a perfectly good reason to start house hunting. It definitely is, however, it was more of a 5-year plan for us. We have room in our current house (it's 4 bedrooms, so we just lose a dedicated guestroom #firstworldproblems), but it's not just the number of rooms that we're unhappy with. We have always said that if we had designed our current house, we would have done a lot of things differently. It's not about more square feet - in fact, we specifically didn't want a lot more square feet. It's things like our bedrooms are enormous but the living areas leave much to be desired. Our kids don't play in their rooms and we literally only sleep in ours. I'd gladly give up square feet in bedrooms to have a bigger playroom. We also would love a bigger backyard that doesn't face west. File that under things I didn't know when we were house hunting 5 years ago. Our backyard gets BOILING and not just in the summer. In the cooler months, while more bearable, it's just super bright. No more east-west facing houses! Even if we built out a gorgeous covered patio, it would still be blazing hot (and we'd lose a lot of green space, which we need for these active boys).
We casually started looking with a Realtor friend of ours -- just seeing what was out in the market. There is a LOT. Since this was always a 3-5 year plan, we found ourselves really critiquing the houses coming up. Not to mention, we just remodeled our kitchen and were immediately turned off by kitchens favoring our our old style.
So, then we get this crazy idea to start looking outside of Frisco. I'll be the first to admit, this was not my most favorite idea. I love Frisco, but I also love being in the heart of activity. The idea of having to drive three kids 15-20 minutes to get anywhere was not sitting well with me. But, we found a builder in Prosper that was going to build us a completely custom (drawn from scratch) house on nearly an acre (!) for under our budget. What!? Too good to be true! If I could have my perfect house, then I'd be willing to move to Prosper! Turns out, it was too good to be true. After hours of designing a pretty fabulous floor plan, what was delivered to us was $50k over budget and short a bedroom. A major miscommunication and one that couldn't be fixed (without serious compromise).
I was so defeated. I did not want to look anymore. But, as luck would have it, we ended up in the neighborhood across the street (Fairways at Gentle Creek), randomly looking at a Darling Homes floorplan some of our friends have. While that floorplan wouldn't work for us, the sales rep showed us another plan that was pretty incredible. It met most of our major criteria plus we had options to customize it (e.g. adding in a custom studio space for Chris). This happened in March.
Over the next several months we jumped through all financial hoops (SCARY) to start building this house. We spent most of the month of June in the design center picking out everything from floors to the color of hinges we wanted on our doors. My Pinterest and Houzz accounts haven't seen this much activity ... ever!
In short, the house is 5 bedrooms, downstairs guest room (must!), huge open kitchen/family room, no dining room (something we loved about our would-be custom home. It's wasted space for us!), enormous playroom upstairs (must!) which opens into a media room (we decided not to close this off to maximize the openness), a slightly bigger backyard with much more usable space, and finally -- it faces north-south!
So, today July 27, we "officially" broke ground. We're looking at a Feb/March 2017 move-in date, so we have some time to get Vivian here and hopefully get a little settled before uprooting everything. Hoping to share some great updates along the way!
Here's our lot (technically on 7/22)
A view from the side. It's a corner lot with a little retaining wall
All of the kids on the lot!
The whole family, super excited! Did I mention it's on a golf course? Walt can't contain his excitement!
