A Long and Overdue Update

It’s been a few years and (what seems like) a lifetime ago.  I have been meaning to dust off the ol’ blog for quite some time and with our latest adventure I wanted to be able to find a place to document everything. 

We’ve had quite a change of pace these past 5 years.  We now have 4 children: Amara (7), Lily (5) Gabriel (3) and Everett (18mo), a thriving business, a paid for home and a new season of life upon us.  We have been incredibly fortunate and blessed to have the opportunity to build our dream home in a lakefront neighborhood we have been wanting to live in since we got married.                                                                                                         

Ta-Daahh!  The lot is 2 acres and has nice flat areas and has great views of the surrounding forest.  Turns out there are about 20 miles worth a trails around the forested area – score!

    

A little over 10 years ago David had customers who lived in the development and was so enamored with the area he drove me through it  and, I too, was smitten.   Of course, being sensible I never thought there would be any likelihood of us being able to ever live here.  After all, we were a single income family with a profession that doesn't usually afford this sort of luxury.  Since then I’ve dreamed of living on a lake and David had always dreamed of building sailboats.  

In March 2015 we made our final house payment after 7 years of throwing every extra penny we could towards paying it off.  While we loved our little house (and loved not having a mortgage even more) it was starting to feel a bit tight with 3 children and a fourth on the way.   We weren’t too excited to leave our cute little house in favor of moving just for the sake of needing a bigger home.  Our plan was to make do and enjoy our financial freedom while storing money until we had enough to put towards much bigger and maybe nicer “dream” home.  Well, baby number 4 (Everett) arrived and while it was fine at the beginning once he started getting mobile things started feeling really tight.  I found myself on Zillow more and more “just checking” to see what was there, how our house compared to others in value, sending David the occasional home I would find…etc. 

This spring we decided to freshen up the house with new paint and décor.  While still in the middle of this I was doing my now daily skimming of Zillow and saw this house listed:  

It was waaaay out of our range, but so lovely that I sent it David anyway not really expecting much.

He wrote back:

We both agreed it was a pipe dream.

A week later David’s mother had come down for a visit and we were telling her about the house we had found.  She encouraged us to just take a look at it anyway.  We called the realtor and set up a showing and found a realtor to represent us.  It was beautiful – and nearly everything we could ever want.  Although it was out of the price range of what we thought we were going to pursue, we felt confident we could handle the payments and even have the ability to pay it off early as we did our other house.  We knew we wanted to put an offer on it and after another showing with the owners present we put in an offer for what we saw as a fair offer for the market.  They did not agree.  We had put all out cards on the table with that offer, so we did not counter.  Defeated, but not discouraged we knew it was truly time to move on from our current house.  (Truthfully, I had a total meltdown about facing another summer with 4 small children in our home.  The previous year had a record high summer and our house basically turns into an oven.  I had tiny children including a newborn that I had to take care of that it really took a toll.  I was so afraid of facing a repeat! #firstworldproblems)
We looked for other houses and land for sale in the same area and surrounding Oregon City/West Linn, but nothing seemed to work.  Then we decided to revisit a lot that was directly across from the house we had put the offer on.  A property we had quickly looked at but dismissed.

After walking the lot we really felt at home and got very excited!  We thought this might actually be an option after all.

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Then come to find out it was already pending a sale. :(  Well, long story short it was actually a contractor purchasing the land and willing to sell the land to us and build our dream home within the budget we had!  Bonus:  He builds homes with the Street of Dreams and he used his same design team from that to work on our house.   

So, not only do we get to be on our dream location we get to have a home tailor made for us by the top people in the field.  #firstworldscore

  

Obviously, this was a greatly condensed version of what our journey was to even get to this point.  There were many more ups, downs, backwards and forth and discussions and prayer that I could not fit into one blog post.  We are incredibly humbled to be receiving this and our main hope is to be able to use this land and home for the glory of the Lord.  Praise to Him!

We signed the contract with our builder 3 months ago.  At post time design plans have been finalized (more on that next time), permits are submitted and we should be meeting with our contractor in the next week to walk the lot and verify the exact placement of our home.  Once that is confirmed he will start excavating and getting the land ready for the foundation to be poured.  Then the real work begins.  Eek!