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.