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.