A Board Meeting and A Closing

While we were waiting for the date of the county board meeting to arrive, we notified our attorney that we indeed felt the variance would pass, based on the support of the hearing officer, so we hoped we could propose a closing date just after the official November 18th board meeting date. We had big plans for post closing to clear our driveway before the weather turns too cold and snowy to work (don't peek ahead at pictures below). We felt that if we waited for the Nov 18th date to then schedule the closing that our closing could possibly be pushed til after the holiday and given we have several days off for the long holiday weekend, we wanted to SURE we could close before the holiday.
After some coordination the closing date was set. And Nov 18th came and we headed to the County Board Meeting. We wanted to hear that YES vote first hand. And we did! It was actually pretty anti-climatic but none-the-less, another step to check off the list.
Today, Monday Nov 24th was our closing date.
It was nice to meet the seller and hear how the property had been in her family since 1976. Her father purchased it with the intent to build a home. Then life happened. Some years ago her sister was going to move back from CA and build a home on the lot and that also-obviously-did not happen. I got the feeling the seller was happy to know a nice family would be making it their forever home, or at least that's what I like to think. Realistically she was probably just happy to unload the damn thing!

Now normally at a closing it is exciting b/c you get the keys to your new home but again, an entirely different feel when you are now just the owners of a big piece of vacant land.
We were excited though, so we headed over to the property and for the first time took a chainsaw to some trees and starting to map our vision. The heavy work will be done in the coming days, but it felt really good to actually make some progress towards what will be our new homestead.
Here we are in the snow, our 5 acres of snow! And the last one shows our tree-lined (hopefully meandering) driveway.
So much for getting ahead of the coming winter weather.