SylvanTrails New Home

We are now tenants in our old house…it now belongs to FIL. All of the property swaps have been done, the loan is in place, the house has been contracted and is being built at the factory, and the foundation is in place. I need to post pictures of the property before the foundation was put in and after, but I don’t have them on this computer, so it will have to wait.

The house gets delivered later this week, weather permitting, and then they do the finish work on it, and on the property. Things like putting the new septic tank in, the electricity to the new house, removing the water lines to the OLD house, etc. The scrub brush on the septic field needs to be gotten rid of and a low growing…something… needs to be put in. Hubby wants clover. We’ll see what happens.

We’re making progress on the packing. We rented a Pack Rat (a competitor to PODS) and we’re filling it up. Once it is full and we’re ready to move, we’ll get it picked up at our current house and moved to the new place and then unload it there.

Tentative move date is mid-March.

I’ve included a copy of the final floor plans, just so you can get an idea of the layout of the new house. Pretty spiffy and just what WE want.

Final Floor Plan–SylvanTrails

Hubby finds a trial version of SmartDraw and sets out to generate our dream floor-plan. He takes all of the elements we like and puts them into a house we can use.

This is what he finally came up with:

Final Floor Plan, Furnished

I put the one up with furniture roughly laid out, so you can get an idea of which room is which.  The one that is next to the Master Bedroom is the craft room.  We’ve also got a huge pantry right off the kitchen, and a huge coat closet in the front, right next to the front door.  The boys’ bathroom is a tad larger than most…hubby liked the idea of them having breathing room when they get to be adults.  Our plan is to have a couple of tank-less water-heaters, one at each end of the house.

That is what he came up with a couple of weeks ago.  It was a pretty good set-up.

I had one reservation with it, though.  The way  it is currently set-up, you have to cross right in front of the TV to get to the stairs to go upstairs.  With two rambunctious boys, I could just see one of them running by on their way up the stairs, and accidentally hitting the TV and knocking it down.  And, just the going in front of the TV any time you wanted to go upstairs…yeah, that could get old after a while.

So, I got to thinking, how could it be re-done so that it would work?  If you simply moved the stairs to the fron, it wouldn’t work because of how long the stairs have to be.  So, after thinking a little more, I suggested completely flipping the Master Suite.  So the Master Bedroom is next to the Dining Room, and the Craft Room/Office is right off the Living Room.  It means that the coat closet gets stuck under the stairs and shrunk and there aren’t any closets along the wall between the living room and the craft room (because of where the TV goes. However, the Craft Room is a bit bigger, since the space from the closets goes in there.

So, here is the Final Floor Plan, Flipped:

Final Floor Plan, Flipped

Because of the roof we want on the house, there will be plenty of space upstairs:

Second Floor

Ultimately,  the second floor will have an exercise area at one end and the other end will have the library and general storage.  There are plans for 3 dormer windows, so that more natural light can get in.  Hubby also has plans to put a winch out one of the windows, so you can haul stuff up that way, but I’m not sure how that is going to work…we’ll see.

Hubby has sent the un-flipped floor-plans to several builders.  We’ve got pricing from two, but are waiting to see if we can get some additional pricing, just to see what our options are.  Once we get that information and once we get an idea of the actual values of our properties, we can proceed from there.