Big Happenings on Mustang Island

On this past Saturday, we met with our builder, Nick Lorette, and rebooted the process begun last year to design and build a house on our lot. It left us both with a very giddy, giggly, OMG feeling all evening. He's even going to directly speak with the neighborhood architectural control committee to clarify some of the funky building restrictions. Given we'll be the first to build in the neighborhood, he's hoping he can push one of the restrictions to be a bit more logical.  We enjoyed showing him our design changes to his initial draft floorplan done sometime around August or September last year. Not only did he agree our ideas of moving rooms around and their layout were just right, but he thrilled us with his ideas of doing multiple bump outs all about to give the shape more charm. What fun this is. Afterward, we kept changing our votes on which part of that meeting was our favorite part of the day.   Once he settles with the ACC, he'll draw and present us with a new floorplan to react to. We'll take it to the existing house the original floorplan is based on, and will spend the afternoon comparing and contrasting the details for a revised, further personalized version. After a conversation and tweaking with Nick about our changes, it'll be ready for the architect, who will likely need to do tweaks before we're ready to roll.  How long will this take? Weeks. Could it be months long? Possibly.  Disclaimer: Ray will undoubtedly respond with a different version of his impressions of the meeting and timeline.

In other news, we enjoyed our weekend ritual of driving into our neighborhood, slowly inching past our lot, and then down the street to the end of the culdesac, a trek we'll one day routinely take up and back to the beach. We didn't get out and walk the property this time, but we did the drive-by version of checking out the lowering of the ponds' water levels, and imagining the changes in store for the hump of sand where our house will be.

Below are a few of the birds we saw on our drive-by. Yes, of course they're out of focus. There was a limit to how well Ray could drive and take photos of less than friendly birds who wanted to keep moving just out of range. There were at least another half-dozen types that simply left the area. The killdeer and egret are obvious, but help me ID the last two on the right: a meadowlark and savannah sparrow?  The latter are small and wren-like, and number in the dozens every time we visit.

This is going to be a full week at work, so I can't predict when I'll show you my new native and adapted plants I'm gathering for our future landscaping. Later.