It’s been about a year from my last post. It’s been quite the hectic year between raising our son, selling our home, and building our new home.

Declan is now almost 16 months old. He’s now walking around (okay running most of the time) getting into lots of trouble. He really is a pretty happy guy most of the time and is developing well. His length continues to be in the >97th percentile. He says lots of words, and even has started putting 2 words together. He’s also started daycare part time so my wife has been able to increase her work hours from 2 days per week up to 4 days.

We de-cluttered and listed our home, put the airplane project in storage :(, and sold our home on the first weekend it was on the market in Mid-May. There were a bunch of delays actually closing with a couple of home sale contingencies,  which worked out in our favor seeing we had no place to live otherwise. Eventually though, we closed on September 17th and now have that chapter of our lives behind us.

As I write this, we are still in between houses. The new house is done and we are just waiting on the “Cleared to Close” indication from the mortgage underwriters. It’s been very frustrating to have a house ready to move into and we can’t close for a number of reasons. The first was there is a law that says you have to be given the Closing Disclosure at least 3 days prior to closing, the other is that due to all the delays, our file with the mortgage company had expired and it seems they had to re-review everything again, taking some additional time.

We should be closing this week (week of Nov 4th) either on Tuesday or Wednesday. After re-reading some of my blog, and hanging out at the airport yesterday and talking about RV building, I remember just how much I miss actively building. I’ll be very much looking forward to getting settled in our new home and get building underway again.

Our son, Declan, was born on July 13th.. He’s now 3.5 months old and doing well. Jeanine and I are adjusting well to parenthood.

 

Since then it’s been pretty difficult to find time to work on the plane. So there’s really no update on my plane progress. This was part of the reasoning for going the Quickbuild route. I’m way further along than I would be otherwise.

I’ve recently have felt like I could have spent some time here or there on the plane, but have been a bit distracted by house projects and getting it ready….

Ready for what you say???

Jeanine and I have always talked about moving to a new house. Specifically, we don’t like our lot. It’s more of a side-to-side lot, with no back yard and near a busy main street with little privacy. If it were just us, we’d probably just stay where we are. We like our neighborhood and neighbors, but with the addition of Declan, we’ve started thinking about it more again. We really weren’t thinking of looking seriously until spring at the earliest, but we found some new construction in our town about 5 minutes away from where we currently are. The timing of such works out that it wouldn’t be done until spring anyways. That’ll give us time to finish a couple of outstanding projects and literally “clean house” prior to putting  it on the market in the early spring.  Some of those projects are done or in process. We’ve been working with an architect to come up with a design, which is now finalized. We’re waiting on the builder to provide the final pricing based on the plans and get final financing commitment prior to breaking ground sometime in late November or early December. The new house will have a 3 car garage; 34’x24′ in size, of which 2 bays will be my new airplane factory. That’ll provide much more space than the single bay I’m working in now, and should allow me to keep the plane at home until much later in the process.

So very exciting (any busy) times ahead, so plane building will take a back seat for the next few months so that we can work on getting this house ready, planning finishings etc… for the new house, as well as care for an infant. 🙂 In the end it’ll be a welcomed delay to be in our forever home. After that, the airplane build can commence.

Here are a couple of profiles from the plans…