Last week I posted about saying goodbye to our last home. I’m not going to lie, it’s been pretty emotional, with outbursts from Arabella (“It makes me sad when you call it our old house!”), a bit of sullenness from Kaden, and a few bouts of ugly crying from me. Moving is HARD, people! I’ve found that for me, the worst part was not leaving the actual house, but the people and relationships with our amazing neighbors (you know who you are!).

Between the chaos of the move and feeling all the feels, I’ve been making some pretty terrible eating choices too (I’m currently sitting at Barnes and Noble with a red velvet cupcake in front of me. For lunch.), which is just compounding my stress and exhaustion. Does anyone else do that? When you are at the end of your rope in one capacity, suddenly ALL of your ropes start figuratively unraveling? No, just me? Ok, great then.

Anyway, lest this seem like I’m having a major pity party in what is actually a super exciting time for our family, I actually popped on here to share that we closed on our construction loan last Friday and broke ground on the house on Tuesday of this week!

I’ve said for years that I wanted a big chunk of land (think 10+ acres) where I could keep horses. But the more we talked through what we want for our family right now, we realized that living close to school was top on the priority list, which made owning an acreage virtually impossible. Just below proximity to school was getting closer to Adam’s work. We also wanted to be in a neighborhood with other families and have a large backyard (the one at our last home was livable, but it was never going to be a yard the kids played baseball in).

When we discovered this 1.2 acre lot six minutes from our kids’ school, it checked all of our boxes and we completely fell in love. As a bonus, there is a farm right behind the creek, and I recently discovered that they actually board horses there… So although my goal of owning a large piece of land has shifted to make room for a plan that better fits our family’s needs, it looks like the lifelong dream of owning horses may come to fruition. And we’ll still be close enough where I can walk to the barn! Arabella is as excited about this possibility as I am!

Our lot isn’t super wide, but it is very deep. A creek at the back of the lot delineates where our land ends, and there is also a cute pond toward the back (not shown on the plat map). We might buy a paddle boat for the kids to float around and possibly fish in! The way the house will be placed, our future deck will look out toward the pond, creek, and trees, with very little view toward the houses on the left. I’ll share our floor plan next week, so you can see what I mean.

I love that our builder is so on top of things that diggers were scheduled to start right away. The kids were so excited when we drove by after school on Tuesday and there were two big diggers working on our land!

Excuse the cruddy picture quality. I was working with my iPhone, but I will take some better pictures with my “fancy cam” as the house progresses!

Have you ever built a house? Was the groundbreaking as exciting for you as it is for us? Also, don’t forget to check back in next week to check out the floor plans!