Breaking ground

Today we broke ground on our new house in Kansas. It's something that I've always wanted to do, but never quite like this. I always imagined that (when the kids were grown and gone), my husband Patrick and I would design our dream house and fill it with all new non-scratched and non-stained furniture. Something very Modern, very simple, very not-what-this-will-be. What we're building is a two-level Ranch in a developer planned community. I also thought we'd be hiring an architect, but that will have to wait. But, we have a good builder and I'm optimistic that we can create something wonderful from nothing. Overall, I'm happy that we're doing this.

First, some background. After living in the gorgeous Green Mountains of Vermont for four and a half years, Patrick was offered a terrific job in Kansas. Not exactly a place that was high on my list of places to live, but still, we're always up for adventure. He moved out and I stayed behind to sell the house. Months passed and finally that offer came. Great! Now came the hard work of finding a new home. I flew out in early May for a week of househunting, but only found one house that I loved. Patrick hated it. We spent our time in our last two homes fixing them up and then promptly sold them once all the work was done. It was exhausting and hard to walk away from them once we put so much of ourselves into them. Plus, we gave up many, many weekends to fixing up houses when we could've been having fun. I promised him that we wouldn't do that again. So, of course, the only home that I fell in love with was built in 1977 and needed a good bit of updating. There were other minor issues, but that was the killer. I like the character of old homes, plus it had four bedrooms on one level, and a pool in the back! Oh, well.

As the week was nearing its end, we realized that we weren't going to find the house we wanted in the school district we wanted for the price we wanted. We quickly (probably too quickly) decided that building a new home was a good option and met with a local builder. In about two days we hammered out all of the details of the house that we possibly could and came up with a price that we could live with--if you could forget that the basement wouldn't be finished. Then, I found a mold clause in the contract that stated that the builder wouldn't be responsible for mold, even if they were at fault. And that was the end of that.

Our experience with that homebuilder left us a little gun shy, but we decided to test the waters again with a builder that Patrick's boss recommended. At this point in time, I was back in VT waiting for closing and packing up the house. We had a few phone calls and lots of emails back and forth, but I didn't meet our builder until I actually arrived in Wichita the weekend of July 4th. Since that time, we've tweaked the exterior design, but otherwise things have been very smooth.

We've started purchasing appliances for the house and, finally, today we broke ground. We should have concrete poured for the foundation this week and maybe even basement walls by the end of the week. Our builder tells us that we'll be in by Christmas. Here's hoping.