Ready to Break Ground!
- Published on
Things have been moving along! We’ve still been busy making selections and lining things up to get the ball rolling on breaking ground. The good news is, we can see the finish line. (Or…the starting line? 😆).
In order to be ready to break ground, we needed a few crucial things. First, we needed to submit for HOA approval with the neighborhood. We technically are under a POA (property owner’s association), but it’s all the same, right?? We had a whole application to fill out about the details of the home, and we had to submit that with our prints and land survey. Turn-around time on something like this varies by neighborhood–if you even have an HOA to submit to–but ours said it could take up to 30 days. We ended up being lucky, and we were able to get a quick turnaround. It took maybe a week and a half to hear back with our approval. We weren’t given any changes, just a green flag, which is great! It’s important to mention that we were conscious of all the requirements while designing the floor plan and exterior finishes of the home. We sent the covenants to our architect so he could help us stay on track. We also kept in contact with the developers of the neighborhood to make sure the style we wanted to achieve would be allowed.
The next thing we needed to do was pull some permits. We are going to be in an unincorporated area, so we are dealing with the county for building rather than the town. We did have to pull a sewer permit with the town, but our building permit had to come from the county. So we pulled the sewer permit, then we were able to submit everything to the county and wait for approval on our building permit. That approval came in after about a week, so we are good to get things started!
Here's our permits displayed and ready for construction!
Still, there’s a couple things to do before actually digging. The lot has to be staked by the surveyor so the excavator knows where to dig. The curb where the driveway will be needs to be cut. Then some gravel needs to be laid down for a temporary driveway. The curb cutting is a specific necessity in the neighborhood we are building in. The curbs in the neighborhood are pretty tall, so the covenants require you to cut it down in front of your driveway. This is not something that gets done on every new build by any means. However, it is a nice thing to have done if it’s allowed and you want to do it, because then you don’t have any bumps driving into your driveway.
We also needed to have our lot cut. This is a maintenance thing we are required to do until building starts. The grass shot up out of nowhere within like a week! One of the developers offered to cut it for us since he has a large tractor. We figured it was more effective to pay him the small fee than have to get our tractor on a trailer and drag it out there and spend forever cutting. He had this done in no time.
Our lot was staked already, so we are just waiting on the curb cutting and gravel driveway before we can break ground. The excavator will be laying the gravel for the temp driveway and then he will start digging. We have been told that digging is expected to start sometime in the first few days of June!
This is all great news, because that puts us right on the track we wanted. From the beginning, we said we were hoping to dig sometime in June, and we made it! We’re excited to break ground and see things start coming to life with this build rather than just seeing everything on paper.
We’ll be back when there’s a hole in the ground 😬