Month: April 2019

Faith, Family

Do You Want a Girl?

Sam

I’m a boy mom. I have three boys. They are all sooooo different, but when God was deciding what kids to bless me with He gave me three with…… well you know.

So, yeah, I get the question a lot on if I want a girl or will try for a girl.

And because I love and hate when people ask me this, if it’s OK with you I’d like to waste a couple minutes of your day talking about this question.

Do I want a girl? Or maybe a more accurate question would be: do I mourn the fact that I probably won’t have a mother/daughter relationship?

Um… yeah. For sure.

It goes without saying that I love my kids, and there isn’t a single one of them I would change or trade. I might change how one talks back to me and gives me attitude, but I wouldn’t change who God made them. I also LOVE having boys. And as much as I love those kids it doesn’t negate the fact that I probably won’t get to watch my husband take a daughter to a dance, or see how amazing my boys would be to a sister, or buy all the bows my heart desires. Or really anything cliché you might do with a girl vs. boy.

I have to talk myself out of wanting a girl sometimes. I have to list all the amazing reasons why having all boys is great. #1: At Disney we didn’t wait in line to meet a single Princess (again I know this is stereotypical, but it helps me cope). #2: I am the only girl in the house right now and I take advantage of it. #3: Hand me down clothes…. Haha…… just kidding….. if you know me I still buy an obscene amount of clothes for my youngest boy.

But anyways to be honest I think this…… wanting something you don’t have…… is something we all deal with.

Maybe you have all girls and you want a boy, or you don’t have kids but you want them. Maybe it isn’t about kids at all. Maybe you wish you had a different job. A different house. Different friends. A different spouse? I could probably make up a Dr. Seuss rhyme with all the things a person might want……

I fall into this “wanting more” category far too often. I am wired to look for the next best thing. When I was in high school and college I lived like this daily. It was pure survival mode for me. I needed to do well in high school so I could go to a good college, then I needed to do well there so I could get a good job. From there I needed to get married and have kids. Buy a house, search for a better job. Have another kid. Get a better house.

It was, and still is, an exhausting cycle I let myself get caught up in.

Maybe you get caught up in a similar cycle of wanting something you don’t have?

Or worse yet, maybe what you want, isn’t something as superficial as me wanting a girl, or a better house, or “fill in the blank”. Maybe what you want is that you aren’t in pain anymore from an illness, or your child isn’t sick anymore. Maybe you don’t want a better house, maybe you are just struggling to keep the house you have.

I am not that great at this, but I do know of a way to help break whatever cycle you might be in right now.

Paul writes to us in Philippians 4:12 and tells us:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

When I read this I always think to myself, “Yeah, OK, I love God. He satisfies me. I don’t need anything else.” BAM let’s do this! Then reality hits and reading these words doesn’t really tell me HOW to lean on God to give me strength in times of plenty and in times of want………..

So, if I haven’t lost you yet, let’s go back and look at the entire book of Philippians (and as a typical Sam disclaimer I am not a preacher, nor did I go to Bible college so if this is incorrect I apologize)…..

Paul is addressing some grumblings between a few Christians. And this is some of the advice he gives:

  1. Thanksgiving and Prayer- Paul first thanks them and tells them what he prays about for them.
  2. Background- Paul then acknowledges the situation.
  3. Keep on living a life worthy of the gospel- He instructs them that no matter what, you should keep doing the right thing.
  4. Act like Jesus- Paul then encourages them to approach the situation with Love.
  5. Don’t grumble- because obviously. No really, Paul describes this as a gift. If you don’t grumble you will be blameless and pure. Sign me up for that!
  6. Count on others- Paul then tells them he will send a friend to help encourage them.
  7. But not all others- He warns them to be weary of the evildoers.
  8. Keep your eyes on the prize- eternal life, not things of this world.

Then we get to Chapter 4 “The Closing Appeal” and the verse I shared above about being content no matter what.

I like this list. Paul is my man when it comes to lists! I’m not saying this is an easy list to keep in mind whenever I am feeling like I need to move on to the next big thing, or when I am going through a tough time with something……… but I do think that Paul’s letter to Phillipi can be used for us today.

  1. The first thing you should do is be thankful for “insert something here” and then go to God in prayer. First things first- give it to God.
  2. Acknowledge the thing you want or the tough circumstance you are in. It is healthy and right to admit those things. You just can’t stay there.
  3. Keep on keeping on. My friends and I try to make light of this step and say “Fake it til’ you make it”. But really this is survival 101. Keep praying, reading your Bible, going to Church, and doing what is right. Even if you feel distant from God, you feel your prayers are going unanswered, or you really don’t feel like being the better person……. you should still do it. Other’s are watching to see how you handle this situation- what a testimony to God to keep glorifying Him through your work!
  4. Be humble and approach the whole thing with love. That’s what Jesus would do.
  5. Try and not complain about the situation. Again, you will be rewarded for this!
  6. Know who your friends are and lean on them. Not just any friends, but the ones who are going to keep encouraging you and pointing you back to God.
  7. And finally, remember that every heartache we are going through is something that is breaking God’s heart too. Every desire we have here on Earth is nothing compared to the prize that awaits us in Heaven.

Friends, I can tell you with my whole heart that not having a girl breaks me sometimes. I know….. it is a dumb thing to get upset over, but it is something I desire from time to time. And when those feelings of longing come on, I go back over these steps and remind myself that God can fill that longing in my heart. He can satisfy me when I have plenty… or when I am in need.

Farmhouse

Construction Loan and Draws

Sam

So I really suggest building a house without the use of a loan at all. That isn’t what Kyle and I did (and it may be unrealistic for most of America) but it would have reduced 90% of my stress. Plus you could then build whatever house you wanted, whenever you wanted!

For example: let’s say you want to build a two bedroom house with a basement and put two bedrooms in the basement (so now you are essentially a 4 bedroom house)…. well the bank is not going to loan you that much on that house (so you’ll need to fork over a lot of cash) because the resale value on the house (and what the auditors site will report in our county at least) is that the house is only a two bedroom house.

Ok. maybe that example isn’t applicable. How about this one……… you buy your land out right and decide to do some of the land clearing yourself and add a half driveway so that you aren’t parking your truck on a busy road. Well, when you go and get your loan the bank considers the driveway a land improvement and there now could exist a lien on your property and the bank is going to be real skeptical about loaning you money. (A lien might exist if you hire a dump truck to bring you a ton or two of gravel- you pay the driver of the truck, but he never pays the gravel company…. the gravel company can now put a lien on your land until they get paid by the driver.)

The second example did happen to us. Not the lien, thank goodness, but rather the bank was not happy we put a half driveway in.

I know that some of us are not in a position to pay for a $300K-$400K house in cash so a loan is inevitable. So, there are some basic recommendations and knowledge I’d love to share with you on the whole loan/drawing money process. Plus some suggestions on how to choose a mortgage company. However, like all my posts, my disclaimer is that this is different with each bank and builder…… so the following is just how it worked for us:

1) I would suggest a 100 times over to pick a mortgage company that your builder has worked with before. We did not do this. This will come in handy when you go to do draws. It will come in handy with inspections for draws. And it will come in handy to avoid things like my example above.

    • Our mortgage contact was wonderful, but the construction department was where it would have been easier to work with someone who was familiar with our builder. So if you know someone in the mortgage business- maybe use them (if the rates are favorable) for after the construction loan is done (if that is even allowed??).

2) To be qualified for our loan we had to provide all the typical W2’s, Tax Returns, Bank Statements, etc. plus the following:

    • House plans.
    • Our cost sheet. Our bank had some questions on our cost sheet (ex: the house plans show an extensive porch so they wanted to know which line item the porch was included in since it was not a separate item.)
    • Then they had us turn in a cost sheet breakdown that they typically use (so basically just copying the information from my sheet to theirs) and having our builder sign it.
    • A Builder’s Contract. Our builder didn’t have one of these nor our bank.
    • Letter of Explanation, receipts, and lien waivers for the half drive way.

3) The bank will require you to put (in cash or property) 10% to 20% of the total amount your house appraises at. So some math:

    • The cost sheet of my house to build (without consideration of any of the savings I plan/did have) was $382K.
    • Our land was purchased at $36,500 and appraised at $42,500.
    • Our house (based off comps in our area and our cost sheet) appraised at $425K.
    • The “comps in our area” is very important. Let’s say we had one of the more expensive houses in our area to build, but the housing market didn’t support that, the bank won’t lend you money on it because if you foreclose they won’t be able to sell it because it is too expensive of a house). So that would mean you either need to downgrade your house to meet comps in the area or put more cash into it yourself.
    • So the amount of cash or property we needed to bring to the table at closing was $42,500 (for 10%) and $85,000 (for 20%).
    • So our land that was already purchased covered 10% down. So that was our “down payment”.
    • We decided to only do 10% at that time. The reason we did this was because 1) we planned to not really owe $382K by some of the savings we did so the 20% down when we go to convert the loan to a 15 or 30 year will be less than $85,000 and 2) we wanted to save some of our cash to be able to float while building.

4) You will also need to pay closing costs. Ours was about $5K.

5) Once you secure the loan your builder can start work and you can start to make draws. Our contract was written that 5 draws would occur after completion of certain steps. (i.e. foundation was poured was one draw, “dried in”- with windows and doors was another draw)

6) Your builder is ready for the first draw. Now what? I suggest praying and also keeping in the back of your mind it is going to take some back and forth.

    • You’ll need an affidavit….. probably. Our bank required it, but I think if we would have went with a bank our builder is familiar with we would have forgone this step and just turned in invoices.
    • We used Kim’s affidavit. (513) 528-7250 She helped walk us through getting the invoices our bank required, changing language so that our builder would sign it, and turned it all around quickly for us. We had to pay her for each affidavit but this was worth it to us.
    • On one draw you can request several checks: so we would often have one for our builder, our electrician, our heating/air subcontract, flooring, cabinets, etc.
    • You can also have yourself as someone whose getting paid back. Since Kyle did a lot of plumbing and electric work himself we did this often for the materials we bought.
    • The bank will come out and inspect to make sure that the portion needed to be completed for the draw was actually completed. So if you take out a draw for foundation work and there was no concrete poured- they aren’t going to give you money. Fairly positive that would be some sort of money laundering thing too…….

7) After you turn in for your first draw, you’ll start paying on interest for the amount you drew. So our payments started out low, $200, and then reached upwards to $2,000.

      • On a side note; construction loans are usually only good for 6 months. If your build goes longer than this (like ours did, thanks Ohio weather) you’ll need to do an extension. It shouldn’t cost any money, just a signature.

8) Once you’ve had your last draw and get your occupancy permit you’ll then want to convert your loan from a construction loan to a conventional loan. In full disclosure we aren’t here yet- so I’ll come back and update if the conversion part turns into a nightmare.

Ok I think that is all the knowledge I have. Honestly, it might not even be that great of a help because if I have blocked anything from my memory for this build it is in regards to the loan process.

So to recap: pay for your house in cash and do not take out a loan.

Farmhouse

Have It Your Way: Choosing House Plans

Sam

I feel most of you reading the “farmhouse” portion of this blog have a Pinterest board full of future house plans. Heck, I am almost finished with my house and I still haven’t came around to deleting off some of the plans I wanted in the beginning. So, I want to devote this post to all the things you might consider when you are choosing plans.

You should know what your builder can and can’t do when it comes to plans.

Many of the builders we asked for prices from gave us “pre-drawn” plans that you could modify. But to take the plans we loved on the internet and make them come to life- was either super expensive to do through them or was actually just something they flat out wouldn’t do. For these types of builders who were building “custom” houses, a better description would be “pre-selected” customization you could do to their plans. One reason we choose the builder we choose was because he truly took our exact plans and made them a reality.

On a side note:  a few questions I have been asked is if

  1. you have to buy the plans before you get quotes?
  2. if you can get quotes on multiple house plans?

The Answer:

1) No, you don’t have to buy the plans before you get a quote- just keep in mind it might be a little more high level with allowances than a detailed quote

and

2) Yes, you can bring two plans to a builder and determine if there would be a big cost difference between them- but unless you are drastically changing the structure or square foot amount they will probably be close to the same price.

What modifications should you choose?

In full disclosure I can’t tell you what would be best for your family and lifestyle. For example: you might decide you need a place to put a dog washing station in your house because your dream is to adopt 13 ½ dogs……. But Kyle and I decided that since we have three boys we basically have our hands full in the “animal” department as it is- so dog care won’t be on our list of modifications.

Instead, I’d like to walk you through our modifications and why we choose them. I am hoping that you can see a trend of the types of things to think about when you start to choose your own modifications.

  • Dining room conversion: we replaced the dining room with a bedroom, then added an attached bathroom with a shower. Our reasoning behind this was because 1) we have 3 kids and 2) we didn’t have the money for a dining room, breakfast area, and 4 bedrooms- so we had to work with the space we had (2,500 sq ft). And that is my point with this modification: just because in the original plans it shows a dining room and half bath- really think how you want to use the space in that room. Maybe it makes more sense to convert the dinning room into an office on one side and a pantry on the other?
  • Made the breakfast area larger: since we converted the dining room into a bedroom, we needed to make sure the breakfast area was large enough to fit our farmhouse table that Kyle built to fit 52 of our closest friends. Although, I am exaggerating a bit, we did need to make this bigger. In general, we found that we really had to pay attention to room sizes and make sure that our furniture was going to fit. This includes outside spaces too! The attached garage in our plan was only 21×21 and wouldn’t fit Kyle’s truck, so we made it larger.
  • Moved the laundry room and connected it to the master closet: a lot of our modifications had to do with future proofing our home as best we could. We selected a home with the master bath and laundry on the first floor so that we wouldn’t have to do stairs as much. We widen the doorways and halls to fit wheel chairs through them…. just in case. We added a full bath vs. a half bath to the converted bedroom in case an elderly parent needed to move in with us down the road. We wanted to build a home that fit our needs now, and hopefully fit our needs in the future too.
  • The original sketch of the outside of the house vs. what we did: Our plans had a huge wrap around porch with a railing, extra windows in the garage, vertical siding, and a half moon shaped window in the peak of the house. Don’t steer clear of plans just because of the exterior. You can change roof pitches, do stone work, add porches and dormers, and drastically change the exterior into more your style. I mean…. Joanna Gains does it all the time on her show- and she’s using pre-existing structures- you get to start from scratch on your new build.
  • Deleting structured posts, adding pocket doors, and planning where to put mechanics: Another great thing about building a house is that you can figure out ways to make it as open as want. So if you want your basement to have only a few posts in it you can put a heavy duty steel beam to support the weight of the upper floor. Or if you want a super open living room you can buy bigger trusses, thus eliminating a support beam. The same thing with pocket doors or where your air condition will be. You can choose to not put plumbing/electric/ducts in a wall so that you can add a pocket door. And you can plan where you want your heating/cooling inside unit at the beginning to make it the most out of the way. That has been one of the nicest parts of building for us. Instead of walking into houses we wanted to buy saying- we’d like to take this wall down and then realizing it would be way too expensive to do that- we get to start from scratch.

You know what plans you want… now what???

There are so many ways you can purchase plans. Like I said before some people might choose a builder who already has existing plans and they modify them for you, some have CAD programs and will draw them up, you can hire an architect to draft them, you can buy them off the internet (this is what we did), and in rare cases (like where my builder’s from) you can submit a rough sketch drawn on the back of a napkin…… I’m only sort of kidding. In most cases though you are going to need blueprints done by a professional that have basement plans (how tall are the walls, where are the windows, outside doors, where do the footers need to be poured, etc.), a first floor and second floor plans (detailed with square footage, built-ins, where center beams are, etc.), a roof plan, all the sides of the house elevation plans, building section plans (r-values, flashing, vents, etc.), and then an electrical plan.

I have a few basic things I want to tell you about this.

  • Some counties will require an engineer stamp on your plans. In full disclosure I don’t know how they determine that- I think it is if your house structure is out of a normal range of support (i.e. you have an open concept without any supporting posts that is so huge that there is questions on whether it is structurally sound). I also think they may require an engineer stamp if you do rafters vs. trusses. Rafters are built on site by your builder and trusses are common roof dimensions that are built off site and are engineer approved when they are built. In our specific county with our specific plan we did not have to have an engineer’s stamp. My brother who also built in our county did………
  • The electrical plan we bought online was not detailed enough for our county. We needed carbon dioxide and fire detectors outside of each room, where the original plans had can lights and fans were not where we planned to put them, etc. So we had our electrician look over everything and add to it where needed.
  • Like I said before, we bought our plans off the internet and we had them modified. We could have had them modified by anyone we choose- but we decided to go through the preferred vendor of where we bought the plan. I think this was a mistake on our end as it took 10 weeks to get the modifications done. If I had to do it over I would have taken the plans we found online and asked someone familiar with our county to draw them up. My only hesitation to do that in the first place was the cost of online plans seemed to be a lot cheaper, but I didn’t actually get quotes- which I regret.

 

Hopefully this was helpful and answers some of your questions about the house plans, modifications, and next steps. If you have any other questions or I didn’t explain something well enough, please comment below or send me a message. In the meantime- keep finding amazing plans that fit your lifestyle!