I'm a little shell-shocked right now...we got a preliminary loan approval this morning. It was really bizarre and surreal and I'm not sure yet that I'm not going to wake up. Yikes. We won't be going ANYWHERE for the next thirty years. I just can't believe it.

We have a couple of things that have to be finalized. First, because of the dollar amount, they have to get two other loan officers to approve the loan. The underwriter approved the loan, and had it been $5,000 less, that would have been the final approval. Ah, well. One more day, it sounds like, and we'll be on our way. This is such an astronomically big deal to me. I just can't, can't, can't believe it.

I'm bigtime nervous. The loan approval was much too easy. We were expecting a very big deal and a lot of bleeding, but it was very painless. I think God led us to this exact place. First of all, it turns out that I went to school from Kindergarten through graduation with the underwriter's brother-in-law. No way. We rode the school bus together every day (give or take a few, of course) for 13 years. Amazing. Secondly, the underwriter lives an hour away, even though he works right in our town. His water pump was struck by lightning a couple of years ago and he called Bo's company to come out. They were out the next day, pulled the pump and he was a happy customer. He had called Bo a couple of years ago to look into costs for drilling a well. Bo pulled out his laptop, punched in the guy's name, and up came the estimate. Was that ever impressive! Here's a guy asking for a loan to build his own house, and the biggest question is "How organized can you be?" And he whips out his laptop and BOOM, he proves to this loan underwriter how organized he can be! There was NO WAY he could have been prepared for that!

Amazing.

We're in the process of designing our new kitchen and preparing to build the new house. We hope to begin digging in about four weeks. The bank has approved our loan, and now we just have to get the final plans for finish work before they will let us begin. It will be time consuming, I'm sure, but it will be a lot of fun, too!

We received a loan approval for our house, so Habitat for the ***** is just around the corner! I'm in the process of choosing my kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom layout, etc. I'm excited and nervous! Hopefully we'll be into our completed home by April 2004. We should be able to move in before winter, but it won't be completely finished. We're in the process of trying to determine whether we should put in a wood floor on the first floor or put in linoleum in the kitchen and dining room and carpet in the family room and living room.

We've decided to go with our original plan. We had chosen a different plan through a builder, but what we discovered is that after we made some of the necessary modifications for the things we really wanted, it ended up being the same price as the one we designed, so we're staying with our original plan. Our bank is allowing Bo to be the general contractor, which should save us money. It's what we've always wanted to do, so I hope it works out well for us.