Did you miss me? Sorry, I know I have been MIA for quite a while. We are living with my in-laws temporarily until our new home is built and the computer is in the same room where the baby sleeps, which leaves less time for blogging.

I am seeing tons of people posting their goals for the New Year on social media and I thought it would be a good time to revisit the Building The Dream series since my #1 goal for 2013 is to GET OUR HOUSE BUILT!

We’re getting there, slowly but surely.

I had NO IDEA how involved the process of developing land from scratch would be. Running utilities, developing storm water plans,  and sub-diving our large lot for the possibility of future development has been complicated and time consuming, not to mention developing the plans for the actual house.  I am sooooo thankful that I married an professional engineer who can design and stamp our plans. Otherwise, we would already have spent an additional $15,000 + just on design fees. As it stands, we are only paying the required fees for each permit as they arise, but those costs are already in the thousands. It is taking forever, I tell you, but in the end it will be worth it.

Right now we (and by “we” I mean Eddie) are putting the final touches on our sub-division plan and addressing comments that the board made about our storm water plan. Once we have approvals on both of those things we can go to the bank for our final loan approval and then FINALLY get zoning & building permits. That could potentially take until mid-February, which will be over a year after we purchased the lot.

We are hoping to break ground in early spring and be in the house by late summer so that Nicholas can start first grade in the neighborhood school in September.

It is going to look a lot like this:

  source

In other related news, we had to quit homeschooling through no fault of our own. Because we are temporarily staying with family in another state, the cyber school we were using for Nicholas forced us to withdrawal because they don’t offer services in MD. I can’t go the traditional homeschooling route because then we would have to pay for all of his special services out of pocket. We had to file for a special kind of living arrangement called Shared Domicile with the housing office (basically, we are legally homeless) and we will be registering him for a local school here next week. Fingers crossed  for the little guy. I think he will enjoy it though. He is my social butterfly.

Our only other big news right now is that yesterday Miss Penelope turned one! I can’t believe how fast that year went. We had a brunch with family & friends to celebrate.

What about about you? What is our biggest goal for the new year?