Waiting on the Land Loan

Right now Ethan and I are waiting on the closing date for our land. The date is set for April 11th. The papers have all been signed with the realty company and the seller. Now we are just waiting for the land loan to go through.

I have always thought that when a closing date comes for a loan, you have reached the end of the process. Now when I think about closing dates, I think that things are not ending, but beginning.

When the land loan finally closes, we will be caught up in a whirlwind of things to do.
- Land will have to be taken out of CRP
- We will have to get the construction loan set up and closed to start any improvements to the land.
- We will have to have land released from our land lender to our construction lender to have financing for improvements. (The land lender doesn't consider a pole building loan worthy, but the construction lender doesn't lend for large amounts of land. This is what took HOURS of phone calls - trying to find two lenders that could make this work for us. The only two banks I found that would work for what we want to do have to have some land change hands between the two of them so the land under the building belongs to the right lender. )
- To finalize the construction loan, we will need signed contracts with all of the contractors. (Pole building, septic, water, graders, cement, gravel, etc.)
- We will also have to have a materials list put together for the appraisal of the finishing work that we are going to do to make the pole building a house. (Ummm . . . Yeah . . . I think I will need some help with this one! Menards has a computer program where you can design houses and rooms for remolding or building. I know it prints out plans - I'm hoping it also prints out a materials list.)

And that is just some of what we need to do to even be able to think about building on the property. That doesn't take into account what we will need to do to actually build, or to even consider what we will need to do to get the land going for livestock.

With Ethan working full time AND with him coaching soccer this spring, I have taken on much of the responsibility to keep this thing rolling. I continue to make phone calls, file information and bids, and pray for wisdom far greater than I could ever dig out of anywhere I know to dig.

We are trying to get as much lined up and done as possible as we can before the land closes so we won't have to wait even longer to get going with the building. One of the things that needs to be done is figuring out which section of land to release and have a legal description drawn up for the exchange between the lenders.

We could have paid a surveyor $1800 to do it for us. After some calling around, however, I found out that the courthouse could draw up the legal description for free if we could get the dimensions. So yesterday we went out to the land with a tape measure and started measuring from the road. We will repeat this a few more times to make sure the numbers match up, and then off to the courthouse we will go.

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