The Journey Continues, Sort of

Now that we were Texas Hill Country property owners, we left no opportunity unseized to visit our lot. Our daughter Kelly attending Texas State and our son Tim living in San Marcos gave us ample opportunities to drop by our lot for a visit. Not to mention the vacations when we rented homes on the Guadeloupe River for a week. In fact we visited it so often, Kelly would give us a hard time, asking what exactly we were expecting to see that we hadn't seen the previous five hundred times we were out there. I guess it's hard to explain, but when you have the vision in mind, it's just hard to stay away.

We began to meet neighbors who had already started building their dream homes as well as builders who were anxious to get our business. Model homes started to spring up, and we got many opportunities to see the different builders' homes in various stages of construction. As we listened to the war stories from neighbors about their experiences, we realized how big a decision selecting a builder was going to be.

As it turned out, we did have a stroke of good fortune. One of the builders we talked to was Mahoney Custom Homes. When we mentioned that fact to Winnie's cousin Tom who has a fabulous home in Taylor Lake Village), he thought that name sounded familiar. He thought that his builder had been in partnership years before with a guy named Mahoney building custom homes in the Houston area. He talked to his builder and it was indeed the same Mahoney. Tom's builder spoke highly of him.

Armed with this information, we decided to take the discussion with the Mahoneys a step further. Sometime in 2006, we met them at their office in Startzville (they live in the area). Brian is the builder, and Laurie, his wife, is the home designer. Laurie does the up-front work with potential customers, and became our primary contact.

Laurie took us on a tour of homes they had built. We even got to tour a completed home they had initially built for themselves in Ensenada Shores, but ended up selling it to a retired General and his wife. Laurie was great at pointing out reasons for why space was used in a certain way and doors placed in certain locations and many other considerations made in the design of the house. We really liked what we saw.

The next step for us was to go and visit model homes back in Houston to get as many ideas as we could of what we liked and what we didn't. We visited model homes until we couldn't stand to look at them anymore. Then being the geek I am, I created a spreadsheet with all the features we had seen that we liked and those we didn't. We sent that, along with some other general information on square footage, rooms we wanted and a few other things to Laurie and let her go to work.

On our next visit, Laurie had prepared a hand-drawn floor plan of the house as well as a preliminary estimate to build it. She had paid very close attention to the details we had provided. We really liked the plan (except the price tag, of course), but were considering going ahead with building the house. We discussed sending the drawing off to the CAD guy to draw up, but we decided to think about it over the weekend and get back to Laurie the following week.

Well, after a lot of soul searching over the weekend, we decided we weren't ready in 2006 to start maintaining two households one hundred and seventy miles apart. We called Laurie the next week and let her know what we had decided. She was very gracious, and let us know they weren't going anywhere and to give her a call when we were ready.

The journey had pulled in at a rest stop.