About Our Project

Our real estate journey over the past 5 years has been quite successful. We've been able to flip 2 properties that we called our home. Our last house was one we thought we would never leave. After a long and painful 9-month process of buying a short sale, we vowed it would be our "forever" home. We called this perfect little house home for 2.5 years and remodeled almost every room in it. One day, however, we felt like we should move. We truly feel like the Lord had a plan and this was the next step we needed to take for our family.

Things worked out perfectly once we decided to sell. We never even had to list our house on the market and found a great family in our church who wanted to buy it. The process took about 3 months from start to finish, all the while we were still toying with the idea of building our next house. We knew this was going to be the hardest project we would ever take on, but we were open to the challenge.

We were fortunate enough to be able to move into Patrick's parents' basement while we figured out what our plan was. Over the last 2 months we have done hours of research to see if this is something we were capable of doing. Hiring a builder to build the house was far out of our budget but with an incredibly talented husband and a strong support system, we realized we could build this house ourselves.

One thing we also felt the need to do was to pray often for the answers we were seeking. We wanted to make sure 100%, that this was the right move for our family and that we weren't getting ourselves in over our heads. With many subtle reassurances, we feel like we are heading in the right direction and have decided to move forward with building our dream home.

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The Land

Today we closed on the land! We are now proud owners of a giant pile of dirt! This was super exciting for us even though the land is still several weeks away from being ready to build on. The land is located in Lehi by the rodeo grounds and is in a new culdasac development. We were so fortunate to find this piece of land and were able to get it at a great price. Lately we have been doing a lot of leg work for the city and also trying to get all of our sub contractors lined up. We're finding it very hard to get a hold of excavation and foundation companies and are a little worried that they will be booking out until mid-summer. We also found out that our construction loan will only be for a term of 6 months. We can extend it if necessary, but it will cost us more. So for now we have our goal set up to move in at Christmas time. It's ambitious, but we have a lot of determination to get this house finished as fast as possible. Everything is still a waiting game right now but

...And On The 82nd Day They Rested

It's been a LONG road the last few months. We FINALLY finished framing!! By the time all the random odds and ends were tied up it took us 82 days. But boy, did we learn a lot in those 82 days. Patrick continues to amaze me with his talents and how much he knows. Pretty sure he’ll be an expert when we are all finished…not that he’ll ever want to build another house again. :) We are currently working on our 4-way and are hoping to get that passed off next week. We hired out HVAC and some of the plumbing, the rest Patrick is diligently working on every night until he can’t see straight. We had the pleasure of having my dad come out a few weeks ago and he was such a huge help. He helped us get all the tedious framing details finished up and windows installed. I think most of all Patrick enjoyed having the company at the house all the time. I’ve been trying to spend time with the kids so I really haven’t helped much at the house in a few months. We made the big decision to h

That's One Big Hole

Today we got our excavation hole dug. Not gonna lie, I've been a nervous wreck, but there's no turning back now! We had to make a few last-minute changes, one of which was changing the basement walls to be 9 feet instead of 8. Our lot is so low that they needed to be able to dig down more rather than bring in a ton of extra dirt/rock. We will still have to bring in a lot of fill dirt to build up the land but thats a lot easier than trying to bring in seismic rock to build up the foundation. We're also hoping to change the way the walkout basement works since it most likely wont need as many steps as the original plan called for. We learned a few more things this week that we had no clue about (ummm...damp-proofing?!) Footings are planned for late next week and the foundation the week after that. Once those two things are done we'll be able to let out a huge sigh of relief. These two big steps had a lot of unknowns for us and were a little out of our realm. Luckily,

House of Hooley

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