Friday, November 30, 2012

County inspector meetings {Like jumping out of a plane?}

Phew, we had an interesting past couple of days with the house stuff. The kind of days that feel the way that Bryan looks in this photo (I was trying to find something that would work for emotional roller coaster, but hey, this works too...)

What have I gotten myself into?!?
On Wednesday we had the pre-construction meeting at our lot with the county inspector and our site work guy. Totally expected it to be a 'yep, you're good' kind of meeting - short & sweet, and one step closer.

But that's not how it went down. It started out with them not being able to find the property limit on one side, so the inspector couldn't be sure the tree clearing limits were flagged properly. Then the driveway turned into a huge issue. The land is higher than the road on that side, and they didn't think the incline would work. We thought we'd have to either a) regrade across the whole front of the lawn to make it slope down gradually and repave the public trail, or b) completely flip our driveway, garage, and house around and get everything re-approved. Flipping the house actually sounded like the preferable option, even though there were a number of reasons we weren't happy about it. The only good thing about the meeting was that everyone seemed like they genuinely wanted to help and would do everything they could to fast track any changes - but overall, it was a major bummer.
Oh nooooo!!!

We scheduled a second meeting today so we could discuss the options with our engineer there too. This time we had mentally prepared ourselves for a messy and disappointing meeting. And this time it went great. Our engineer helped to clear everything up, and everyone agreed our original plans were just fine. Hooray!!

Ok now this is awesome!!


Now we are basically good to go as soon as we get our building permit (which should be any day now). At least I think we are. I'm kind of afraid to jinx us since I am definitely learning that nothing is ever final in this process until it's actually done. I hope that once the house is built we end up feeling like we did in the photo below - feeling unbelievably exhilarated, knowing that we came out unscathed and that all our anxiety was unnecessary but totally worth it in the end.

And you know what? (So far at least) I'm secretly sort of enjoying all the build-up beforehand. All the waiting, all the hassles, even all the worry - it adds to the excitement and anticipation. You've got to take some risks in life, right?? ;)

Sidenote: If you're ever in Queenstown, Nzone skydiving is amazing.
Confession: I was way more freaked out about skydiving than Bryan beforehand. He actually didn't seem anxious at all.

What's the scariest thing you've ever done?? The house is ours, hands down!

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