Well its official, the countdown to the 2018 Johnston County Parade of Homes has started.  Since my last post back in May of last year, we were riding high on the aftermath of being awarded several prestigious awards including the coveted Best of the Best Award.

Although it’s almost a year later, time has really flown by this past year and we have been busier than ever.  We are thankful to be holding onto a steady housing market because we are definitely experiencing the “good ol’ days” once again.

Neil and I have lived through the good ol’ days before the housing market tanked back in 2008.  We were thankful back then to have positioned ourselves well enough to stay in business during that time.  We had many friends and colleagues that weren’t so fortunate.  Currently, we don’t have enough time in the day it seems.  We are extremely grateful for the past year and our current clients, however, it does bring me back to this year’s Parade of Homes dilemma.

We genuinely started thinking about our 2018 Parade Home entry back in October.  However, between our workload and then selling our “Parade” lot to a prospective client for a presale, time was not on our side.  So what did we end up doing. . .

Well, the only feasible option we had– turn our only current speculative home into our Parade Entry.   Is it the ideal solution, probably not, but under the circumstances, it’s the best option we had.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty excited about this home.  It’s a great plan, on a great lot, in a great subdivision.  It’s a beautiful home, if I do say so myself.  However, would I call it a “Parade” worthy house?  Yes and no.  Yes, I do feel it’s a Parade worthy house, yet it’s a different circumstance this year.  Last year I dedicated 7 months to making that home truly special.  From start to finish I knew that was going to be our Parade Entry and it encouraged every decision we made while building that home.  It’s also what made that process more stressful.  The good news, not until about a month ago when we officially made this our Parade entry did the stress truly begin.

I could write a book on all the “things that went wrong when building a Parade Home” filled with stories from the past 10 years of Parade entries.  I won’t bore you with those (or at least not today) but I can tell you as soon as you label a home a Parade Entry, things go increasingly haywire.  The past 30 days have proven to be no different.

The first big stress of the moment is simply the timing.  My current “To Do’s List before judging day” on April 5^th, seems to get longer and longer yet the days to get completed are getting fewer and fewer.   

Last year I took readers along while I made the design decisions throughout the process.  This time, I had already completed all my selections a few months ago , now I sit back and wait to see it all come together and hope it looks great and all of YOU love it.  For the next few blog posts I’m going to take you through my selection process and how I came to the design decisions that were made for this home.  I hope you will join me as we look closer at the building of lot 310 Portofino- this year’s 2018 Parade of Homes entry.

Parade Book Rendering