|
|
 |
| |
|
- Early 2001
- Start looking for a house.
- Spring 2001
- Still looking, we're not happy with anything we're finding.
We've scaled up our price range significantly by this point,
without notable success.
- Late Spring 2001
- We decide to build a custom home. We also start looking for
land.
- Early Summer 2001
- We sign with Luxor
for their design services. We continue looking for land.
- Summer through early fall 2001
- We meet several times with Luxor
to discuss design. We're still looking for land.
- Early fall 2001
- We make an offer on a lot, but the restrictions, easements,
and general difficulty of working with it eventually convince us
to abandon the offer.
- Late Fall 2001
- We've seen several pieces of land that we liked, but none that
were just right. We've decided on a basic concept and many of
the details of the house we want to build, and feel we're
closing in on a design. We put the development of the plans on
hold temporarily until we find land, as the lot will, to a
certain extent, dictate the final design of the house.
- Early spring 2002
- We see a lot that we like. We make an offer that's accepted.
- Late spring 2002
- Settlement on the lot, and we pick back up with the house
design to finalize that.
- Early fall 2002
- We've pretty much finalized the design, so we sign the
construction contract with Luxor and seek financing. It turns
out that the lender we planned to use just flat-out doesn't loan
this kind of money (go figure, they're one of the largest banks
in the country), so we have to find an alternate source. At the
same time, we start the process of obtaining the required
permits.
- Late fall 2002
- We get the septic and well permit applications back in the
mail. They aren't approved, because the previous owner of the
land, who had agreed to transfer his septic permit, did so by
faxing a letter to the county. The county only accepts original
signed documents. We think "The US government accepts
faxes, so why not Chester County?" but know better than to
argue with city hall.
- Early 2003
- We finally have the letter transferring the septic permit.
(The previous owner didn't have much motivation to get this done
in a timely fashion, since it wasn't costing him anything to
delay. But it did get done.) All
the paperwork gets dropped off with Luxor for resubmission. In
the meantime, our construction plans have passed DEP
review. This is required because of some wetlands at the edge of
the property.
- Late winter 2003
- Hurray! We've got all the permits back except the building
permit. We expect that momentarily.
- March 15 2003
- We take some photos to document the land before ground is
broken, because we know the application for the building permit
is in the hands of the county.
- Early April 2003
- We have the building permit, or at least Luxor does. We expect
to break ground very soon.
| |
|
