Home is where the heartburn is

I suppose it's about time to update you on our home building process. We are "in" the process, and it has given me some heartburn, but overall it's really fun and very exciting. There is so much to tell you about, but I'll start with the basics.

When we arrived in Austin, we took about 2 months to just settle in and recover from the (emotional and physical) stress of moving. During that time, we did our research and decided to use a national builder with an excellent reputation to build our home (David Weekley). They offer a wonderful compromise between "custom" and "standard" homes. By that I mean we selected a floorplan from their existing plans, and then began to customize it to our own preferences, in lieu of starting from absolute scratch. It is a perfect fit for us.

We decided on the "Sabrina" floor plan. It looks quite different now that we've added our own personal (tacky?) touch. The best part is we've added a 450 square foot bonus room to the second floor, which will become our new music room. We also added a full bath between the garage and backyard (aka the Pool Bath). More windows, some french doors, covered patios, etc... If you'd like to see our current plans, I'd be happy to email you. I'd post them here but we signed over the rights to our firstborn child to ensure absolute copyright protection. (I told them they could have Sammie, but that wasn't good enough).

We signed all the contracts a couple of weeks ago, and are now in the architectural stage. We had our first redraw appointment with the architect yesterday, and with one more revision, should be done on that end. We start our design selections and upgrades on Saturday (cabinets, flooring, countertops, all the fun stuff).

We've staked out where the front door will go on the lot (yay!). All of our bids for site prep, flatwork, etc are in. We meet with the septic guy on Friday, who we're also getting the first of two pool bids from.

So for now, it's lots of stomach-churning, alka-seltzer inducing budget crunching. Smack dab in the middle of the dichotomy between what we want and what we want to pay for.