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...