Now, we're talking about building...

We went out with the realtor last night and she said that she was going to take us over to the newer construction site as the house on Gayleh was no longer available. That was a foster family and he was going to be taking a new job somewhere else. Well, they have a chance to adopt 3 of the kids they have so they decided to stay and they need the house so they took it off the market. The same builder of that house is building not far from here, so we drove over there and looked at the house models. They have a 33oo sf house for the same price we bought our house in Hanover Park for and it's absolutely beautiful. They also have a 2900 sf house that looks very similar to that one for slightly less. We also looked at the next smaller house at 2400 sf house and that one was a lot lower and they already have a model of this one available for purchase. These were all 2 story homes like we wanted. I have 2 lenders working on quotes for us and we're going to go back out on Saturday and look at what we would want as far as upgrades go and see where we're at with the price we have in mind and see which house is doable. I'm wanting the first house and Andy is wanting the 2nd, but I told Andy that with the small difference in price, I'd rather pay the little more for the added room. But, honestly either of them would be fine. We also looked in a different subdivision at a one story 4 bedroom that was 2200 sf and that was really nice too and that was also new construction. We can't say we don't have options down here. That one also had 2 different living areas like the 2 stories that we saw...so one of them would be the play room for the kids. But, I need to talk to our landlords and see if they would let us take a 6-month lease or a month-by-month lease as if we do build a house they said it could be up to 6 months as they'll only build so many at a time because they don't want to rush the quality of the homes.

One thing our landlord told us too was to think about how long we wanted to stay in the house as you practically have to give the house away if they're still doing home construction in the area when you want to sell as people would rather buy a new home for the price than buy one that has already been lived in. I laughed because she showed us a house in one area that they were still building in and that was what was in the back of my head "well, the price is good but for what they want, we could just build ourselves a brand new home." But, honestly this is why we're being so picky about what we want as we don't plan on moving again. We just want to get settled and stay put. This is all a little exciting though and we plan on going out again on Saturday morning to see what the upgrades look like and what we would want to get an idea of pricing. I'm going to call the landlords tomorrow as well and talk to them about the lease and then we'll know more about where we stand too. I'm hoping though that since he's also a builder that he'd be understanding.

Lord, please guide us in making this decision. We definitely want space for the kids to meet our house requirements for foster care and we want a house that we can grow into and be happy to stay in.