Dutch Country Court.

Well,

ready or not here we go.

We officially got our 'sight disturbance' permit from the city of Midway yesterday which means we can get our lot ready to build.

We spent a few hours on Friday and several hours today 'prepping' our lot for the excavators to come next week.  Pictured above is a panorama I took with my iPhone of our lot {don't be fooled by the digger you see on the right, it's our neighbors, the are a few weeks ahead of us}.

We have owned this lot since 2007 so it has been in the plans for years to build.  At the beginning of last summer when we sold off our last piece of "investment" property we knew it was time to build. 

{actually Gregg has been wanting to build for years but I kept putting him off - so I told him I would entertain the idea once we sold all our investment properties (except the current house we are living in, which we will keep) so here we are}.

Mid summer last year we started working with an amazing architect in the Salt Lake area that we both really loved.  You can check him and his work our HERE.  He is so creative, talented and a good artist.  We had a rough idea of how we wanted the house to be laid out on the lot, we took that to Craig and over the course of a couple of months we came up with a completely custom home {that we are pretty excited about}.

 During the winter we worked through a lot of the details of the house and the building process.  Gregg worked especially hard, I was kind of a slacker.  I am great at working on my clients homes, but when it came/comes to my own, it was/is like pulling teeth.  I took the picture above and sent to Gregg one day because I knew he would be so excited that I had actually printed out our plans to scale and was working on furniture layouts.  

I was really bummed at our next meeting with our architect when he kept those plans - I still have not redone them :(

 This was another night right in the thick of Christmas that I had to quickly do a "conceptual" landscape plan for our HOA to approve.  I had considered selling my Prismacolor colored pencils and Chartpak markers from college several times - I guess it's a good thing I still have them.

We kind of have a little Sunday night tradition going on with my parents, they come over for dinner and then my dad and Greg talk about building and numbers {costs} while my mom and I sit at the dining table and work on our "idea" books.

Here is an artistic drawing by our architect of our house.  It won't look exactly like that, but it gives you a pretty good idea {he actually did it in color but our color decisions have changed so, so, SO many times that I decided to scan it in black and white - the color is to distracting}

Friday Gregg and his dad spent about three hours surveying and laying out the house on the lot.  Apparently all you have to know is the Pythagorean theorem.

Bodie and I helped a little bit, not with anything to technical though.

Next we put up our orange construction fence.  I can not believe how much fun Truman and Bodie have just playing out on our lot ... in the holes and dirt.  They were entertained for hours!

A hole mom.

There is something very rewarding about saving for, planning and working on this house {ask me again in a year how I feel about all that}.  I was really impressed with Bob and Gregg's mathematical skills.

Little Bodie helping out - Truman was with Grandma Quinn.

It looks amazing all staked out.

I know this probable does not mean much to anyone other then us but, we worked so hard in the designing stage to make sure we captured the Mt. Timpanogos views perfectly {that is Timp on the right}.  I had Gregg and one of the draftsmen completely irritated a few weeks ago when I was working on the landscape plans and felt like the house was not tilted just right - back to the drawing board we went.  I had the architects change it just a few degrees and I think it paid off.  

I parked our cars on the lot in the 'garage' {there is a third bay on the right side of the Subaru} just to see what it looks like.

One last look at that beautiful piece of dirt before it all changes.