Hurry Up and Wait

So the bank finally responded with a counter to our offer just prior to Christmas. It's bizarre to me that they can take a month or more to do this and then demand a response within a week, especially right at Christmas. Makes me want to walk away just on principle. But whatever. Their offer was substantially higher than I'd be willing to go, but we did counter with something several thousand dollars above our initial offer. We told them it was our "final" offer, for whatever that's worth. The realtor thought that would be a good idea, so we don't have to continue to go back and forth as there is still a substantial gap between our two figures. So we'll see what happens. It's time for them to make a choice between letting it go into foreclosure or getting out from under it now. If they can't meet our price I will be disappointed, but ready to resume the search in earnest in the spring.

Still No Word

Liane has heard a couple of trickles of information through our realtor. It sounds like there may end up being some type of counter offer from the bank, but don't know for sure. Not sure I feel very encouraged by this news. I'm just not willing to pay much more for this house. Part of me almost wishes the offer will be unacceptably high, so we can just push it off the table and move on. I'm just not sure I will be happy there.

But lets not get the cart before the horse. We don't really know anything yet. And I'm in no particular hurry. Meanwhile the news I read has nothing good to say about the short term future of the real estate market.

Sometimes I wish we could just stay put.

So, as soon as I say that...

Liane decides she wants to get the train moving. The house to me, well....it's a nice enough house, but it has some fairly significant faults in my mind. She likes it, and likes the price. And I have to admit that if we get it for as low of a number as I think may be possible (considering it's a short sale) then it would be almost too good of a deal to pass up.

So....we put in an offer last night -- a pretty lowball one. It has to get past the owners first, who may or may not be in a situation where they have to pay the difference, which would greatly affect their reception of such a low offer. If it does get past them it has to go to the bank. The bank has a set process for how they determine the value. If our offer fits within those parameters then the deal is done. If not, they may counter, but are just as likely to just reject it.

We'll see. At this point we've started something that isn't going to be stopped until all of this comes to light. Yikes!

Holding

We're still debating whether we want to put an offer on that last house. Not much else has happened. Liane  is struggling with the various decisions so it's hard to move things off center. I've decided not to push it for a while.

The upside? This blog isn't going to be finished any time soon.

A Promising Contender

Nothing much has happened on the building front. We're still waiting for responses from the architectural committee about our desired orientation of the garage. They are very slow to respond.

Meanwhile we went and looked at a house today that has a very similar floor plan to what we want. It actually could work. It backs up to a pond (see photo), and I mean it's right up against it. That would be weird in a way -- there is only a few feet of grass between the back of the house and the water.

There are some other concerns as well. It only has a half basement, so there isn't nearly as much storage area as we'd like. The basement isn't walkout either. The master bedroom is kind of small, but workable. The kitchen is a bit smaller than we want, although it could work. So it's not perfect, but it really is very close overall, and it might be very affordable. Need to sleep on it and think about what to do.

Another Barrier

We got a big "NO" from the architectural committee on our proposed garage orientation. I can't help but wonder whether they really understood the intention or could visualize it properly. It really does seem like it would work well (reversed from the drawing) against the layout and topography of the lot relative to the rest of the street. We are going to pursue it with them further to see about that.

Perhaps we should have submitted a more finished looking drawing or an elevation or something.

But these things cost money to have done you know.

How Important is the Internet?

Have you thought about this recently? For most of the people I know it is an integral part of their lives. And our dependence on it is increasing every day.

So what would you do without it? What would you read or watch? How would you communicate? Can you imagine actually paying for a long distance call?

We've hit a SNAFU. I sort of saw this one coming, but held out hope that by the time it was properly investigated there'd be a solution. The property we're looking at is so far out in the boonies there is no broadband Internet available. The choices are basically dial up or something from a company called HughesNet. The good news is that HughesNet does qualify as broadband, so it can be done. The bad news is they are the only game in town if you want a fast connection, and they know it, so it is priced accordingly. To get speeds near what I've been used to it will cost us almost $200 per month, and they still have lots of limitations...like a 500 MB per day maximum. Yikes, can't even download a whole movie with that. And they have a pretty horrible reputation for outages and downtime...probably exacerbated by how much people are paying them. It's satellite based so a hard rain (gee, we never get those in Indiana, eh?) is going to cause problems, etc.

There are cheaper options, but the speeds get down well below what we've had for the last 10 years or so. We're still investigating whether there might be some other options, but it doesn't look good. Can we really take this step backwards in our connectivity? And can we really rationalize that kind of money to stay reasonably connected?

Sigh...

You'd think this day and age we'd be a little further along with this stuff.

Drove out to the boonies and looked at a few houses today. I found one listing and Liane found a couple that held a glimmer of promise, two of which had an open house. They didn't suck, but as usual they each had something about them that was a show stopper. One open house was on a lake. Generally I'm not a huge fan of houses on lakes because even though there are quite a few lakes around here the houses on them are priced at a premium. Today's wasn't so bad, but it would have required a lot of work to get it where we'd be comfortable. Ultimately being right on a lake is not a benefit to me. It can be nice for an afternoon here and there, but eventually the drone of the motors on the watercraft would get annoying. It sure is aesthetically pleasing looking out over a body of water like that though.

Ultimately it's hard to assess exactly where the value is. I know we will pay a premium for a custom house, but it will be how we want it (more or less), whereas with an existing house we will end up spending a substantial amount on upgrades and modifications to bring it close to where we want it. And then you still have a used house, with who knows what about to give out in the next year or three.

These trips through houses can be useful for ideas though. The other open house had a couple of simple features we liked. The first was a set of double doors leading to the main storage area in the basement. I like this. Small enough to be low impact for one person to get through, but big enough to get larger items out without a hassle.

The other was this idea of having lockers and shoe shelves in the garage. I don't think I would have gone with white here, or done as many, but the basic idea is worth pursuing. 

The Direction

As promised here is an image showing the current direction. Sorry it's so crappy, it's still in development and I honestly didn't feel like cleaning it all up before posting. This image shows how I draw on top of what the drafters give us in order to give them some direction for where to go. This seems to be working much better than trying to explain it to them. The overall orientation is actually backwards from what it will likely be, but you can still get the general idea. As you can see it is very scaled down from where we were before.

We've been playing with the orientation of the garage relative to the rest of the house. The covenants of the neighborhood where we want to build require a side facing garage, but that's difficult to do without either making the house a lot bigger or pushing it way back into the lot. And the way the lot is situated (and its topography) it actually makes just as much sense for it to be at an angle like shown (remember it will be reversed from this image). We are seeking approval for that. There are already one or two other houses in the addition that don't employ side facing garages so hopefully it's okay. I never wanted a garage that stuck out in front of the house so much, but...compromises must be made.

Feedback Welcome.

It worked

My drafting was a success. We finally got something back that resembles what we want. It's not perfect, but now we're down to tweaks rather than major stumbling blocks.

Two concerns at this point:

1. Square footage is creeping up again. We're up over 2700 on the main floor (from 2400), which doesn't sound like much but is tens of thousands of dollars. We're going to try to trim a few inches here and there to see if we can get it down some.
2. We haven't totally figured out how the garage is going to work. It's going to have to sit on the front of the house, which is something I was very much against going in, but one of the many compromises I've made to get something reasonable. It has to be side facing. That's in the covenants for the neighborhood. But...should the doors face in towards the rest of the house or away, off to the side? Many pros and cons for both here. I'll spare us all from the details of that decision for now. Suffice to say we're going to have to work through that soon.

Here's the part where I start whining

So....drafters. We speak, the words go out into the air to be received by the intended recipient for the sake of communication, but communication doesn't occur. We tell them what we want and instead they do...well, I guess they do what they want. I don't know. They must think they are doing what we want, right? I've always said the burden of communication is on the communicator, but the recipient has to do his or her part as well.  They seem to want to throw stuff at the wall (figuratively) and hope we'll like it. I'm afraid our vision is much too specific for that to work.

So, this week I am learning to become a drafter again. I'm working up my own version of what I think we want. And in fairness, it is difficult. The way we want things to work together is extremely difficult to do without increasing the square footage quite a bit. So we'll have to compromise too.

All of this to get to a design we can live with that will be in range of our budget. It is not easy, but damn, I wish people would just listen and understand, or at least communicate if they don't understand. Don't just take a shot at it, especially if you want to charge $50 per hour for the work.

What's been happening?

Wow, it has been quite a while since the last update. What has happened? Not enough. For starters we have both been traveling quite a bit, and there have been a variety of other minor distractions as well. Things are actually moving forward though. We've had more discussions with builders and have zeroed in pretty close on a plan that's way scaled down from where we were before.

I'll be posting more details soon.

We just drove by the lot again the other day and it's still for sale. I'm mildly surprised by this. Not sure why someone hasn't snatched it up. Hopefully we can get this thing off center and make an offer in the next month or so. At this point I am skeptical it can all be culled together in that amount of time. I mean...heck...we're coming up on the one year anniversary of this blog, and we had already been working on it before then.

Inching Forward...I think

Jerry, one of the builders we're considering going with (if we end up building) took us to see another house over the weekend. It was cool. I liked a lot of it, though there were some parts we'd definitely do differently. The couple who lives there don't have kids (like us) so a lot of it was more oriented to their lifestyle, which means it fit ours fairly well too. It was built on a really cool piece of land, which sloped down to make way for a walk out basement, but also sloped left to right, which allowed them to have the exit off the screened porch at ground level. Very cool. Nice great room. I still think we want more separation than this, but their does flow well and is very inviting. I think I want to use their staircase idea (assuming ours only goes down, not both ways as on the original drawings). I like the jog in the hallway to get around it. It's the little things sometimes.

Drawings Again

We've been back at it looking at floor plans and making modifications. We've seen two or three that are workable, with a few mods we might be able to get something reasonably close to what we want. More details to come soon.

More Inspiration

We met Jerry today to look at this other house he wanted us to see. It was beautiful and on a beautiful lot. Miles out of our price range for sure, but the idea was to see how some of the ideas we've had look when implemented.

In our design we had begun to mull over what the staircase should look like. We've already looked at many catalogs of railing styles, step features, etc. This house had one of the few I've seen that was implemented in a way that I'd be happy with. Having noted that, we're probably going to have to end up going with a much more basic stairway design to get to our price point.

There were many other cool features to this one. The outer wall of the master suite was circular, so you basically navigate around a circular walkway to get into it. Very cool, and very much like my original vision I had for our house. That vision never materialized in our plans, and now that we know we can't afford to do stuff like this it doesn't matter, but it sure is cool.

Finally, this house had the pocket doors between the great room and the kitchen area as we have been wanting from the very beginning. It was good to see them in action and confirm that it looks nice. Hard to say how effective it is for blocking noise though. I'm sure it helps a little.

Another feature of this one is that the walk out basement is below ground level. So there is a little courtyard there, and then some steps to get up to ground level. It looked nice and didn't feel weird at all. This means we probably don't have to settle for a daylight basement even if it is below ground level.

As nice as all this is we're still a ways from getting the coolness of these great houses distilled down into something affordable.

A Jaunt to See Something Close

One of the potential builders we are working with drove us an hour north of Fort Wayne today to see a house he did. This is the builder that came back with what I thought was the really high bid on our plans. There is no question he builds a quality house. He very clearly understands most of what we want to do, which is a bit unusual actually. Sometimes I feel like people are looking at us like we're nuts when we tell them what we want, or highlight the differences between what's important to us as compared to their typical clients. Jerry builds higher end homes and was very familiar with the features we want. In fact, he's already built homes with the majority of them. I like this. It keeps him from wasting our time or his.

So he drove us up to an area near Crooked Lake to see one he had built on spec. Given that we can't afford to build the monstrosity we've put into our plans he had some ideas how we could pull it back and bit and still end up with a nice place. But he felt it was important for us to see it in person rather than just looking at  the floor plan (he dropped the plans for it off a few days ago for us to check out).

So we went, and it is a very nice house. Not everything is the way we would want it, but it was close enough that we began to see and speculate on some other ways we could compromise our wish list and still end up with a place we'd be happy with. So even though we burned up the entire morning the trip was worth it.

The picture at the right is of the kitchen from the great room. Looks nice. This isn't really what we would do, but it did give us some different ideas about what we can do. For starters we began to think we may be able to shrink the size of the great room a bit. Maybe not even have a TV there, but just move all of that to the basement. Liane would watch TV in the hearth room anyway, so maybe we don't need all that in the great room. That could simplify things.

This house had a lot of other nice features. Good master suite, a second set of stairs to the basement from the garage, and a storage area that opens separately to the outside in the basement. In those ways it really resembled some of the cool features of our drawing. Price? Definitely on the upper extreme of what we want to afford, and the basement is unfinished. The guy builds a nice house, but he's clearly pretty proud of himself if the pricing is any measure of it.

We meet with him again tomorrow to go check out a couple of other places.

Can We Make it Work?

We went back to what I am referring to as the "Corn House" today. I call it that because it is bordered on two sides with corn fields. Our goal today was to meet Jim there so he could take a look at it and consult with us about modifying it to suit our tastes. It will not work as is. Like most of the houses we see the master closet is too small, and the shower isn't nice/big enough. There is a small office type room at the front of the house. If we break through that wall and basically demolish the current bathroom and closet there might be enough room to expand into that office space and make it like we want. If we can do this for a reasonable amount of money then I think we have a serious contender on our hands. Jim sketched the layout as it exists now (see photo) so we can go to work laying out what we would want.

We'll see.

Another Builder

We met with another builder today. We got in touch with these folks from information on one of the houses we looked at over the weekend we liked some of (1611 Waxwing Ct.). We took our plans over and used them to compare with the floor plan of the house he had done. We met with Jeff, the head man, and ran him through our wants and wishes.

He seemed like a competent guy, in a "get 'er done" sort of way. He's going to come up with some ideas and run them buy us. I'm interested to see what he does because of the builders we've talked to so far his pricing seems a bit more reasonable. We'll see. We should get a draft in about a week or so.

Searching Again

We're back at looking at houses. This is seriously un-fun. It's extremely hard to find any that have anything close to the combination of features we want. 

This one (left) has a really nice feel to it, even though it breaks several feature requests, such as....there is no brick on the outside, no walkout basement, not a big enough master suite/closet, no screened porch, and nothing interesting in the surroundings. It has a really nice pool and out building. Two things I don't normally care about. But when we walked through it we found we actually liked it quite a bit. The master suite could be made to work, though it would require major modifications ($$). The pool area is really nice. The out building is huge and nice as far as out buildings go. Obviously we would use the pool some, but the out building would be mostly wasted (although we did have the idea that I could have a basketball goal inside. Hmmm..). The price is not cheap, especially when you factor in the cost of reconstructing the master suite and adding a screened porch, but....it's closer than anything we've seen, and we could afford it.

Anyone want to go swimming?

Oh, and by the way...we walked in on another resident at home. Said he never got word that anyone was coming. This is getting to be a trend. All in all we walked through about eight houses today. Two or three of them work okay (including the one above).

The Wall

We've gotten one concrete bid back, and one guestimate. Both are really high --  on the upper end of what I considered worst case. Up until now our mindset has been that if they come back high we would figure out some ways to trim things down to pull it back in range. Given what we have I'm not sure that's going to be possible. We've inquired a bit about not finishing the basement and possibly moving the extra bedrooms upstairs (smaller footprint in terms of square footage), and while those things do help it's still not even in the ballpark of where we wanted to be. 

So what now? We may have to start over. I'd like to get one more bid, maybe from a less "high-end" builder. And we're certainly going to look at existing houses differently. But that's still a real problem. There is just not much available in the area where we want to be.

There really aren't any great options at the moment. We've hit a wall...

Still Here

Well, it's 2010 and we're stilling living in the old house. When we first embarked on this mission (well before the first blog entry) we thought we might move sometime in the fall of 2009. Ha, ha, the joke's on us. We haven't moved. We haven't bought a house. We haven't bought property. We haven't started building. We've spent the past however many months trying to come up with plans that we like so we can go get bids. I never could have imagined that step taking this long. Are we that picky? Are we poor communicators? Obviously we are. (I always say the burden of communication is generally on the communicator, not the communicatee.)

The floor plan is pretty much finalized. We're still settling on an elevation, which includes deciding on some of the exterior materials, at least in a general sense. How much brick, versus rock, siding, etc., and approximately where. We're very close to getting bids now. In fact, I'm saying that unless there is just something we hate let's pull the trigger and move to the next step. It's stupid to keep burning up hours trying to get it perfect when we don't even know if we can afford it.

Already the process has gone from exciting to a bit of a grind. I'm hoping my enthusiasm will be renewed after the next step.

Soon we will know if this has all been worth it, or if we have to significantly redo things, or even start over.