Choosing a Bank

You would think that choosing a bank to lend  you a tremendous amount of money, that you're going to spend a huge portion of your life working to pay back, would be easy right?  I guess I never thought it would be that hard to choose the right bank for our loans.  Our situation is a little different from most though, and in today's economic troubles, it has been harder than ever to borrow the money we need to build.  The first issue we ran into was our lot size.  No bank around here wants to use a 11 acre piece of land in their deed of trust, and the Gates County Planning Department has other thoughts on what it does to split out anything less than an acre.....  So around and around we went.  We didn't want to split out an acre of land, because that meant if we ever decided to split off another acre or more to possibly give Josie one day, that it would turn our farm lot into a subdivision!  That is NOT what we wanted!!!  So, we decided to keep the farm lot in tact, borrow against the whole 11 acres, and find a bank that would let us do it...   That was the hard part.  Luckily my old college roommate and her husband were also going through the process of building on about 10 acres of land, and were far enough ahead of us to share some information on the banks they researched.  She told me that they went through 80 different banks before they found one that would let them build without subdividing the lot.  That was Ag Carolina out of Elizabeth City, so I called them.  "Oh yes, we would be happy to work with you and 11 acres", everything would be great, except (don't you just love that word?!?), except your builder has to be a certified general contractor with grade A license.  WHAT?  Now that just threw a monkey wrench in things, because we already knew we wanted Jeff to build the house, and I knew he wasn't a licensed contractor!  So we went in search again, until I came across Mr. Ellis Wills, and Farmers Bank Mortgage in Suffolk.  Mr. Wills has been nothing but helpful from the start, and I am very pleased with our choice of banks - so far...