Our house...in the middle of our street.

So the wife and I finally went to our appointment at Hearthstone Homes today to put money down to reserve the lot of our dreams and get the process started on building our new house.

We've been looking forward to this for several weeks now. We called Hearthstone up a few weeks ago and asked which of the larger lots coming up for sale were flat lots.

Flat lots make mowing easy.

Flat lots mean you have no walk-out basement. Walk-out basements are virtually impossible to secure against either tornadoes or zombies, two of Nebraska's most menacing natural predators.

I will not have my family vulnerable to a possible zombie attack.

The Hearthstone saleswoman pointed out a few over the phone that sounded good. One lot especially perked our ears up, as it had no premium but was a flat corner lot almost twice as wide as most other lots.

We went out to the subdivision and walked around the lots that interested us - the one lot in particular. There's lots of mud out there. They just put in curbs a few days ago.

Our lot looked nicely situated. Almost twice as wide as a regular lot, and a little bit longer. It was on the corner of a cul-de-sac, which would be a great location normally, but worried me a bit because I'd have to mow a lot more grass than I really want.

The land looked a little too...sloped to be called a flat lot though.

She noticed this aspect of the lot first, as she slipped down the muddy slope of what would possibly be our backyard into what could only be called a crevasse. With the kind of determined effort normally only seen in a heroic epic and a handy length of rope, she was freed, wiped off, and we were on our way back home.

Despite this unwarranted attack by gravity, we still felt this might be the lot for us. The saleswoman had said it was a flat lot, after all. Perhaps when the construction dudes excavated our lot, they would put the dirt that was in our basement into our backyard - making it level.

We thought, as we were walking into our appointment, that we had a lot selected.

Heidi was very nice as she crushed our dreams like so much newspaper.

Not a flat lot, she said. It's a walk-out lot.

Drat.

But she had another option, if we were interested, she said.

Hmm?

Well, there was a truly, really, honest-to-god flat lot just a little bit away from that other spirit-damping lot. It was also a large lot, it was also just one house away from a great deal of green space filled with trees and assorted foliage.

It was also discounted $5000.

I asked her if I could plant an apple tree in the green space and possibly release some ferrets.

She said nobody would know.

DEAL!

So on Friday, we will go in and make the final selections for the options for our house. We will sign the purchase agreement on Saturday. Our house should be built by September 20th of 2007.