We are so excited to share with our family and friends that we’re in the process of building our custom home. After renting for the first five years of marriage and traveling state to state – we’re no longer wandering weingarts but are now in the process of building the Weingart Homestead. It’s so wild to think we own a piece of dirt!
So with this big news we decided to rebrand/relaunch our blog. We like having a creative outlet and way to share this journey with others in hopes to help if you’re considering building a home and to just do life together. Our blog launch date is the same day of our lot closing! And no this isn’t an April fools joke, although hello – 4/1/2021 closing date. But wait there’s more.. would you believe us if we say that another couple we’re friends with will be closing on a lot, at the end of the month, in the same community, on the same street. We’re kind of in awe of how all of this is coming together.
Within the “our build” category of our site we will share pros/cons for building vs buying, how to be prepared for builder meetings, what to think about when selecting a builder, ways to save $ on your build and more! If you ever have questions or want us to highlight something specific let us know.
BACKGROUND:
Josh and I tend to spend our spare time stalking homes on Zillow and Realtor. Even before we knew what we were prequalified for. We have always loved to look at home designs and layouts and try our best to keep up to speed with the market. With the inventory being so low right now we currently are in a good position of renting to be able to act fast on property when we see something come up.
It wasn’t until really January of this year when we started a more serious search for our home and that’s when our realtor Misty Greenway really helped us. We cannot recommend her enough. Without a doubt we wouldn’t be in the community we are now without her help. She started helping us with our home search in the beginning of this year after we received our pre-qualification. We sent her a couple of houses and she started to get to know our interests and sent us some homes she thought matched well. We went to see 1 home and toured it and it was nice but it backed up to a main road and we decided against it. Then we started to slow our search. We honestly went through a process of thinking maybe it wasn’t our time to consider moving and that we just stay in the apartment for another year until after the market has a chance to settle.
Then February happened! The lowest of lows and highest of highs. Misty sent us a listing for a home that was under construction in the community with a move in date similar to when our lease was up. I thought it was going to be THE house. So on a Tuesday we go and walk through and it’s nice but there are some things that you can just feel were off with Josh. It was smaller than we hoped – but when I tend to like something I’ll be like oh I can make it work, whereas Josh is great at helping to keep us in alignment with our family goals + vision. So after we walked through, we said we’d let them know about it.. and my heart dropped. I could tell Josh wasn’t on the same page. Of all properties we saw this community had sidewalks, a great family feel, diverse homes and a neighborhood with people of many different ages. I loved it.
So you’d imagine that when we’re going through the drive thru at McDonalds just after, and our friends Joe and Emily call to see how it went.. Kristin listed off all of the pros, followed by Josh what are your thoughts??… dun dun dun. Josh outright said he hated it. (gasp – my eyes welled up so bad – ) I started crying right before they opened the window to hand us food. Oh dear.
Needless to say the next day or even that night I started to look up property in the community. I knew if we couldn’t have that particular house that maybe it was less about the house that I liked and more about where it was located. So we found a lot! Sent it over to Misty on Wednesday and we were back to the community to go walk it. We liked the lot but it was narrow and we thought we’d sleep on it to see if we could think up a few layouts for the home we could build there.
Thursday: A new lot comes to market! We go and check out this one and are immediately sold. When we got there, there already was one offer in on the lot, by the time we submitted our offer there were a combination of 3 other offers (written, verbal) that we were going against. So we put in a great offer slightly above asking to seal the deal with terms that it would expire the next day and it was accepted Friday morning! What a week. We could barely sleep Thursday night we were so excited and anxious to see if it would work. Our Realtor wrote a personalized letter explaining our situation and that this would be where we would build our forever home. She even name dropped Pepper and explained how he’d get a yard.
That weekend we did a lot of prep work for our builder meetings we set up the week after and I’ll share more about that process in a separate post.
Overall, It has already been quite the journey. As we type this post – we almost have our floor plans finalized! We’re on track to have the revisions for the downstairs/upstairs, exterior elevations and a 3D viewing by the end of this week/early next week.
So thanks for reading and keeping up with us. We feel like the hard work, choices and prayers that have been put in to this point are really starting to show with an overflowing of blessings. We cannot wait to have a place to host family and friends and to raise our future kids and have more fur babies running around in the yard.
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