Groundbreaking Ceremony (and weenie roast)

Here's our big news for April: we bought land!! 1.4 acres to call our own. Searching for land has been such a crazy process. First of all, when we'd go look at a piece it was really hard for me to envision how a house would look on the lot--how would the houses sit, which direction, how close to any neighbors, etc... then the other hard question we had to ask ourselves was: do we like it enough to live here forever? That's a pretty heavy question. We had to think about things like future development (could a subdivision someday be built behind our property?) How busy would traffic get, how far away are we from town/schools and is that going to work for our family? All of these were really important because we are only building a house once and plan on living in it FOREVER.

We actually found this piece of land last summer but the guy selling it told Blake that he was going to sell it to his friend. Blake gave him our number and said we were very interested and to call him if the sale fell through. All through the winter Blake would call the seller and remind him that we were still interested. Finally, this spring we got a call that the original sale didn't work out and it was ours!

view from the road:

 future home of the M. family right here!

Last Sunday after church we drove out to have a weenie roast and have a groundbreaking ceremony/ dig a fire pit.We plan on enjoying our fire pit on our land a lot this summer--baby G. hates the outdoors right now so this is as much camping as we'll do I think.

view from the back of the property looking toward the road:

land selfies ;)

I was afraid the kids would be bored with nothing to do. They LOVED just running around and using their imaginations while playing with sticks.

To top it off, we even saw some deer on our property line.

You can't have a fire without s'mores

I have a feeling we'll be spending lots of summer evenings here

So a lot of people have been asking us the big question "when are you going to build?" So I'll just go ahead and answer it now. We have no plans to build right now. Since this is home will be our dream/forever home we want to do it right. 1) we want to wait until our kids are a little older (maybe 3-5 years from now) so we don't have to be so worried about them drawing on the walls or ramming trucks into our nice kitchen cabinets. Our current house is for all of that! 2) we set a goal to get our land paid off before we build so we can then sell our house and then use the money from the sale to pay for our new house and, if all the planets align, move into our new home mortgage free. 3) we just don't feel the push to move right now. We love our house and our neighborhood.  We live in a great ward and our kids have lots of great friends here. I really will feel very sad when it's time for us to leave. So, for now, we'll just be content with dreaming about floor plans and all the possibilities that the land has to offer. Although I will say that yesterday when I went into our laundry room and saw that our water heater was leaking all over the floor that resulted in an all day/into the night replacement project building sooner seemed pretty tempting!