Steele Haven

The construction loan is closed, and the building permit is posted! Both of those things have been such a long time coming, and so many hours have gone into them, that it seems like those things should both feel like huge accomplishments. And if this were a normal year and a normal build, they might […]

We have a closing date – sort of! Today we received the “clear to close” from underwriting, which technically only means we are able to set a closing date. This news came just after 5pm, which means the title company had already closed for the weekend. So we will get a closing date on Monday! […]

The logger has come and gone, and he has taken all the big trunks from the property. I marked out an area about 250′ square and told him to take anything he wanted from inside that square. The total cleared area comes to a little under 1.5 acres. He made pretty quick work of the […]

I’ve pulled 3 building permits on the house I live in now, it’s now about twice as big as it was when I bought it. For each of those permits I downloaded some free cad software off the internet and drew up my own plans. That’s how I began this project also, I’ve spent a […]

Thanks to a lot of support at home and help from friends, the builder’s license part of the project is finished. It feels really good to cross something big off the list! I’ve been studying my borrowed test prep material, and I actually found a few places online where people seem to have created their […]

To recap where we are at with out current plan for the house, we are planning to build a house big enough for our family, plus an apartment in the basement that we can rent out to teens aging out of foster care, and also have a couple of bedrooms available for independent living. So […]

You know that part of the roller coaster where you are strapped in, climbing the big hill, and almost to the top? You hear the clicking of the track pulling you up the hill, and you know you are just a moment away from the weight of the front cars pulling you down the other […]

From the start of this project, we’ve known that this would not be as simple as picking out a floorplan, hiring a builder, and just waiting for a house to be finished so we could move in. (Not that building a house is ever a stress free endeavor, just that there are varying levels of […]

This is how we rang in the new year, trying to sweat every detail and every square foot of our house drawing. We spent the evening printing layouts, marking them up, talking and revising. Nobody parties a New Years Eve like we do. I’ve been working on drawings for months now, trying to make changes […]

Like everything else, making decisions about the trees has been a process. I wrote last time about how we are planning on keeping more of the trees than we originally thought. We still want a large open area around the house, but we will keep a larger wooded area in the back of the property […]