Population: 84,358 Elevation:205'
Lake Conroe is about 20 miles north of Houston in the forest country.
Like most RV parks, they cut down most of the trees. They did leave the trees around the edges of the park though. You can see those in this picture.
Now for the surprise news. We bought a house, or at least a lot with a house to be built by next year.
This is not our house, it is the artist rendering of what our house could look like. Our house will look a lot like this one with the bricks a little different, but the roof color is the same and the roof line is the same.
Here is what the inside of the house will look like.
Here is what we actually have
We have a bunch of trees, most of which will get cut down. We did walk through the backyard and tie ribbons around the trees we want to keep, like that tall one on the very right, back corner of the lot. We will have some big pine trees, some maples, and some that we don't know what they are. Some of the trees we marked will probably get cut down anyway because we don't exactly know where the house will go on the lot. Our front yard will be tiny and mostly driveway.
I blogged about looking at houses in Austin. We narrowed it down to one builder south of Austin, but you never buy the first thing you look at, so when we got to Columbus, we drove to southwest Houston and looked at a development there. We liked the houses, but the area was nothing special. For everyone who knows the Sacramento area, it looked like the North Natomas area. They bought up a bunch of rice and cornfields and turned them into miles and miles of brand new houses. There were no trees taller than 6' high. The agent told us about another development by the same builder north of Houston. It was too far to drive to look at from Columbus, so we moved the trailer to Conroe. This RV park is only 20 minutes from the other housing development.
We drove over to Bonterra at Woodforest and looked at the model homes. They had the same houses as the last place since it is the same builder. The difference was that they had different model homes. We originally wanted one house called Alpine, but when we got to this place, we switched houses to one called Ashen. Instead of old farm fields, this place was in a forest. Just driving around, we saw deer and a fox. It is a thousand times more scenic than the other development. Now, we had a house and we liked the area so we talked to the agent and started the process of buying a house. Not a fast process.
Our first meeting with the agent was just looking around the models and looking around the area. That took all afternoon. We had Brie with us and the agent is not really a dog person so the meeting was probably shorter than usual. We agreed to think about it and come back on Saturday. So we thought about it and went back on Saturday.
The Saturday meeting took another 3 or 4 hours. We had to go over everything. She showed us three lots to pick from. That's all they had left for the houses plan we wanted to build. We picked one on a cul-de-sac. It's wedge shaped with a little front yard and a large backyard. In the end, we gave her a deposit check and she sent us pages and pages of documents to read and sign and initial.
The houses they sell always start with just the basic plan and and then you add your upgrades. We extended the garage because the truck wouldn't fit in the default garage. We extended the master bedroom by about 3 feet. We extended the covered patio to wrap around the back of the house. We raised the ceiling to 10'. We added a gas fireplace. Lastly, we upgraded the front door to an 8' tall door. That's not all of the upgrades, just the ones the builder will do.
We have a meeting on Monday to meet with the electrical contractor to make electrical changes. Mostly they want to sell us home entertainment systems, home alarm systems, and home wifi systems. We just want a few things like more plugs in the garage, a plug in the floor of the living room and small things like that. We don't really need the place wired for home entertainment. I can do most of that wirelessly. The same with the internet, I can do that wirelessly. After we make our electrical decisions, we need to pay them 20% of the total.
The next big meeting is with the design center. That's were we go over the floors, the cabinets, the kitchen, the bathrooms, etc. That will be an all day meeting. If we want a short meeting, then we can let them give us one of their 5 pre-made packages. No decisions need to be made. We've seen those packages and we want to make our own decisions. After that, we need to pay them 20% of the design package total.
After that, we make the last deposit to get the total deposit to 10% of the base house price.
Once all this is done, we wait. It will take about a year to build the house.
I think that's enough for one blog. I do have more stuff to talk about, but that will give me something to do this weekend.
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