A Gated Mess - 01/24
A year end Panoplia update from ACTs, discussions with our financial advisor, more land loan applications and the sale of our home.
ACTs year end update
We began January with an exciting year end update from ACTs announcing road improvements, parcel selections, and a January 29th or sooner closing for Panoplia.
Home Financing, Sale and Parcel selection
We spoke to our realtor and got a valuation for the sale of our current home; our plan was to sell our home purchase our land and immediately move to construction. The home market was in a good place for selling and our house had appreciated. We found a mortgage broker that we liked and even where looking into a HELOC -in case we could not sell our house quick enough to close. We had pre-qualified with a couple of mortgage lenders for our loan and were basically looking for the best rate. At this point we were trying to see if we could go directly to a land and construction loan and get started. We were working with ACTs and their construction partner to see if that was a possibility. We found that no one was really prepared to go directly to construction, including us. There is preliminary work that needs to be done to start a construction project (and that banks require). The details we needed for closing were just not available, so we were constrained to just buying the land.
By mid January we had prepped our house for sale (a lot of work) and were nearly ready to list. Due to the pressure to close by the end of January, we were working hard to get our home sold. We had a plan to move in with our daughter and son-in-law once we sold and live there during the build. (As I’m writing this blog post it’s Sat. Aug 30th 2025 and we just received our building permit. We are so thankful and praise God that we have our permit now and can begin our build! But, the astute reader will recognize that its a year and a half since the month this post is describing! Stay tuned for the rest of the journey to see all the ups and downs.).
By the end of January we had loan preapproval and I had begun researching different solar providers seeking information and quotes. We then received an email that we were up next for selecting our parcel. We had an extended family discussion on which one to pick and decided on parcel 79 (which turned out to be a really good choice).
On Jan 31st
- We chose our parcel, and learned that we where obviously not closing on Jan 29th, more on that later.
- We locked down our financing, we thought.
- We set up a ‘success call’ with ACTs real estate folks to discuss our financing.
- We got an acceptance email with a contract for the sale of our house!
…Crazy…
Home Design
We were convinced that we wanted a Barndominium style home. Looking at different design websites and contacting steel building vendors was fun and informative. We found a style that we liked best was the modern farmhouse. A single story three bedroom open concept with porches on the front and back was the basic idea. I had begun to research the solar capacity we would need and reaching out to companies for cost estimates. Below is an example of that the type of houses we were looking at.
The modern farmhouse design that we eventually decided to build was similar but our choice of construction materials and methods changed; more on that in a future post.
End.