And so it begins...

Today begins a few big things in our life.  It's the first official day of soccer practice.  (D is having split practices for a few days this week so he won't be home until like 7:30 for several days.  Stinky.  But it's just the way it is.)

And today, the builder started building our house.  We've known for awhile that we were building.  It's not something I ever in a million years thought I would do.  I am definitely someone who tries to embrace the phrase "Live simply so others can simply live."  (Although my shoe collection probably says differently.)  We've known for several years that we needed to move to a different town, a town that is more expensive to live in.  It's the town we work in, the town where D's soccer boys live, where we go to church.  We have definitely felt God saying we needed to be there to better minister to those in D's soccer world and for the sake of our own family's time management.  To make a long story short, our house has been on the market for almost 3 years.  We actually took it off the market a few months ago but it is really still for sale in our hearts.  (We're just trying to get a fresh start and will relist sometime in the spring.)  In that time, we had many opportunities to look at housing in the town we are moving to.  And with some prompting from my dad, we came to the conclusion that maybe we were looking at the wrong things.  In the end, what we finally decided was that building made the most sense over the long term.  For houses that met our needs in terms of size and simple desires like a garage, a decent size yard with space for a garden, etc. we were always running into houses that while liveable, over time, would require us to invest money  in order to make them what we wanted.  And that investment would eventually end up very close to the the cost of what it would cost us to build.  So here we are...building.

We are actually doing a manufactured house which means it is essentially a stick built house but it will be built in a factory and moved on site.  I've spent the last week knee deep in paint colors and Pinterest.   It's actually been a long drawn out process but we're hoping that we are now on the path to moving forward with it.  We don't have a completion date as we still have some financing details that have to be worked out before the entire house can be constructed.  But we have currently put enough money down for them to frame the exterior, get the exterior items like shingles and siding on, and perhaps even get the house wired.   And so today was the day, the day the company was planning to begin.