// January 1st, 2006 // No Comments » // Life
Last summer we had decided we’d sell our house in the next year and either buy a home near a lake we like across town or have our builder friends build us a house, and that if the latter fell through, we’d do the former. We’ll that’s exactly what has happened.
The early budgets were sufficiently low enough to merit proceeding so we went ahead and bought a lot and began developing our plans. As the process unfolded, the house ended up being much bigger than we had intended (the architect didn’t follow our guidelines regarding maximum size). After showing the larger house to our builder he said while it’d be close, they might be able to get it built and fall under our absolute drop-dead top-end limit. As the bids came back, it became clear that we couldn’t build the house, as designed, on budget and would have to have the architect redesign it to be a smaller house.
We spent the last part of the holidays reflecting on where we started and where we’ve come in the process. We realized we’d made a lot of incremental concessions in our lifestyle and future plans to be able to afford this house, such as putting our youngest in preschool a year earlier and regaining a second income, among other things. It also occurred to us that our construction budget had grown by almost $40,000 from the figure that precipitated our purchasing the lot. We were on course to be house-poor.
So, we’ve decided that it’s no longer in our best interest to build the house after all, and that we’ll proceed with our original plans to find a house within walking distance to the lake.
This gives us some peace in that we’ll avoid the headaches of building and the sizeable mortgage payment we’d have. As we’ve already sold our house it’s easy for us to move on to the next thing. The main point of concern is finding a house that meets our rather narrow criteria. We don’t want to live in a standard-lot-size neighborhood. We want an irregular lot and lots of trees, near the lake. Those kinds of places, which are also in our price range, don’t stay on the market long so we’ll have to really be on top of the search process. But I’m confident we’ll find something we like in the next six months.
Wish us luck!
