This post has been a long time coming.  Earlier this year (around April or so) we started working with a designer to create a home for us.  During that process Bryan started researching what makes a “good” home, and we decided that the house that the designer was creating for us wasn’t actually what we wanted, so we went back to square one.

Bryan came across The Bungalow Company.  We really liked the look of their houses, so we decided to figure out which of their floorplans would work the best for our needs/wants.  We settled upon The Columbia.  It has the enclosed breezeway connecting the garage to the house — a feature that Bryan really wanted.  It also has a large living room, a walk-in pantry, space for my arts & craft room, and two walk-in closets in the master bedroom — features that I really wanted.  It was also really important to me that all of the bedrooms be on the same floor — another box that this floorplan checked off.  We both really wanted a large front porch and a covered patio — check and check!  There were a few things that we didn’t like about this floorplan, and we worked with a designer from The Bungalow Company to make those changes.  We got rid of the Jack and Jill bathroom between the two kids bedrooms on the second floor.  We also made some changes to the entrance of the master bedroom and the layout of the master bathroom.  We moved the laundry room upstairs (seemed to make more sense since the bedrooms are all upstairs).  We also had them flip the house, so that the garage will be on the left, and the living room will be on the right.

Now that we had our plans finalized we went to work finding a builder, which is easier said than done when you live in the middle of nowhere.  We settled on one builder, and felt confident that he was a good fit.  He spent all summer putting together a cost estimate for us…and it came back prohibitively higher than our budget.  We were really frustrated at this point because he knew what our budget was.  We were disappointed that he wasted our time rather than telling us early on that it just wasn’t going to work.  When we approached him about the cost estimate he was unwilling to work with us to get the cost down, and told us to take it or leave, so we left.

One of the things that didn’t seem to work with our previous builder was our desire to use hardie plank on the exterior of our home, so we started looking at new homes being built in Amarillo to see if any of the builders were using it.  That’s how we came across HOME by Lyons.  Chris worked really hard to make sure that our cost estimate was as accurate as possible.  The process took a little longer than he expected, but we anticipated that given that our home is so different from the majority of homes being built these days.  The quote from Lyons came back within our budget, so it was time to tackle the construction loan process.  That process was confusing, and I’m glad that Bryan took an interest in learning about it (I had no desire to do so).  We closed on our construction loan last week.

Cheers to building our bungalow!

We took this photo at our lot the day we bought.