Changing plans . . . but we do own the land!

So it's been a while since I updated this. Simply put, it was an eventful month in the house planning front. We had begun some work on the land (driveway, clearing) and were waiting for the final paperwork from the bank. Then everything came to a screeching halt when the appraisal came in much lower than expected. It could be a long story, but I will just say that after exploring our options, we decided to put a halt to building the house. It was a tough choice but it just didn't make sense to continue building right now.

So we halted all work, and worked with Bob to end the contract. Bob was disappointed (obviously) but worked fairly with us. We paid for the work that had been done and rolled those costs into the price of the land. We closed on the land on Monday (12/21) so we are now proud owners of 40 acres in northern MN! The work that had been done was: most of the driveway work, clearing for the house location, a plan for the septic, and some composite garage door jams. Yes, I bought myself some composite garage door jams for Christmas. Ho Ho Ho!

A few weeks back when this thing was starting to unravel, we drove out to the land to check out the work. I took some additional pictures (below).

We are trying to take a little break for the holidays, but we are examining our different options at this point. We still think we will get this house up and completed sometime in 2010. Stay tuned!

Here I am standing a little bit into the property after the driveway turns. I'm looking west toward where the house will sit:


Here I'm in about the same location, just turned around facing east toward the driveway entrance. You can see how the driveway emerges into the land, and runs to the left (north) of the tree toward my location:


So now I am still facing east toward the tree and driveway entrance, but I've backed up all the way to the edge of the clearing. That's Andy standing in the middle of the cleared land. We are going to have a lot of exploring in the woods to do in the years to come!


This is a view from where the driveway turns into the land looking north toward the public road (about 1300 ft away!). Yeah, we're gonna need to get a bobcat I think.


Geez these winter pictures are just so inviting to me. I can't wait to look at this out my windows every day.