We have officially been in McCall for 1 year now. We moved to McCall in last March right at the end of the winter season and right in the beginning of "mud season" as it is called here. The first day I was incredibly nervous, the second day I cried a lot. Lots of nerves and uncertainty hit, especially since I was 7 weeks away from having Manning. But, after about 7 days in McCall - I felt so much peace and knew that we were meant to be here. We've spent previous 6 months looking for a home to buy & continued looking for another 5. Making our house search in McCall almost a year and a half long since we were looking for 4 months before we moved up here.
When we originally decided to move up here we checked into building a home and we just weren't sure if we could swing it financially. So we kept looking and looking for a home to buy. Everything that we found just didn't work. I'm not sure if we were being overly picky since we had just built a home in Nampa, or if we didn't feel right about any of the homes for a reason.
Right around Christmas time we met with a builder who does most of his work in the valley, but had recently finished a build down the street from where we are living now. We met at Starbucks and broke down our wants and shared a few plan ideas with him. He got back to us with a quote that was significantly better than any builder up here had given us. So for the next few days we went over finances, broke down the costs of homes up here for reference, and went over our finances again and again. And prayed a lot. Like - a lot a lot. A comfortable home is really big on our priority list, but we don't want to only be able to afford our mortgage. McCall offers a lot of activities and we wanted to make sure we could give ourselves those opportunities, too.
We had a dream lot that we had been keeping our eye on for a few months and decided to pull the trigger.
We purchased the lot at the end of January and have been designing the house every since. We are a few weeks away from breaking ground. We are waiting for the final structural plans & snow up here to melt a little. We are closer to town (about 5-7 minutes out of McCall instead of our current 20 minutes.) and close to friends. Our lot is 2 acres so we are super excited about our kids being able to run and roam.
I feel a lot better about being closer to town because the 20 minutes drive in for any errands and then the 20 minute drive home with 2 kids; 1 of which naps two times a day was getting really exhausting and I found myself not going anywhere for that reason - which leads to a little cabin fever. Matt's a little bummed to not be living across from Lake Cascade any more, but I have a feeling that we will be able to make up for that in hikes, fishing & beach days in the future.
I can't believe that we get to build again. I never thought we would. It has been so fun to recreate the things that we absolutely loved about our last house (you'll definitely see some similarities) and add in new things that match the ambience of McCall and the mountains. The house has a different layout that the last & it has been really fun to add in some rustic elements and make sure that we emphasize the gorgeous view that we are going to have (yay for big windows.) I can't wait to share the process again & hopefully I don't bug the heck out of you with all the updates.
As always - thanks for following along & sharing in the excitement with us. We appreciate it more than you know!!
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