SylvanTrails New Home

Theoretically, we’ll be moved well before Christmas…probably even before Thanksgiving!  Woohoo!  (eek!)

We are going with our friend.  He’s given us a tentative quote (will give us a final quote hopefully next week), that is within our budget…just barely, but within it.  But, that includes *everything*, the house, the driveway, any work on the well and septic, sealing the crawlspace, all the permits, etc.

Our friend is happy with the modular company he’s chosen.  Their prices are reasonable, and they can do some of the custom stuff we want, like the built-in 6′ tub, the water heaters we want, they’ll do the insulation the way we need it for the sealed crawlspace.  And, when all is said and done, we’re going to have a LOT of insulation…because the house will already come with EnergyStar rated insulation, then we add the CraneBoard siding that has it’s own insulation.

We are in all probability not going to get the little strip of land next to our property to put the driveway on…the neighbors have sold the whole lot to someone else, and they close about the same time we move in.  Ah, well…that’s the bad news…the good news is that the new neighbors will be putting a horse farm in.  Woohoo!  Pretty horses to oggle without having to clean up after them!  LOL!

We also contemplated looking at getting the property behind us…but it’s worth more than we can even think of affording right now.  Ah, well…

We’re still playing a bit with exactly where to put the house.  Hubby and FIL had one idea, but there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle-room there, and when hubby realized that they were orienting the house completely wrong, he’s thinking that, if it stays where it is, we won’t be able to put in a back deck.  We need to decide if that is important or not…and if it isn’t, then we will contemplate removing the door in the living-room, because we won’t need it.  If a deck is important, then we may need to contemplate putting the house elsewhere…like, maybe, right behind the current house or something… dunno, yet.

Still a half-a-gazillion things to figure out with this…like, do we get cable installed or not, which phone company do we use (do we have a choice?), if we move the house, do we just use the driveway that is there, or go ahead and put a new one in?  etc…all sorts of questions, including ones we haven’t even thought of to have answers for, yet.

But, it is coming along, and we do have a rough time-frame for moving…yikes!  It is becoming a reality!

I do that, I get busy with something else and get sidetracked.

Let’s see, we met with the one modular dealer, gave him our floor plans, gave him some input on colors and carpeting and other stuff and waited for them to come back with factory floor-plans and a quote.

Got their floor-plans back and said “what the heck?”.   They messed up parts of it…important parts.  Things like the doorway from the kitchen being aligned with the doorway to the pantry, the boys’ rooms being mostly the same size…things like that.  There were easily a half-dozen issues.  Hubby got on the phone with the dealer and discussed issues and they went back to the drawing board….and sent us something a bit more acceptable.

We’ve still got some compromises…like, they would be putting in the plumbing for the tub in the master bath, but we would get the tub put in ourselves, because they don’t do 6′ tubs.  Other minor issues, but things we can live with.

So, while we were waiting for all of that to get worked out, we send our floor-plans to a friend from church, who is a builder/contractor.  He looks into his contacts and finds a modular dealer he’s happy with and gets some information from them.  He gets some additional information from us, goes back to them, and gets an initial quote…that is currently fairly close to the modular dealer above.

I think we are really hoping things work out with our friend.  If the modular company he’s working with can come up with something comparable, it sounds like they can do more customizing…like, maybe we can get the 6′ tub and the tankless water heaters we want put in to begin with, instead of having to put them in ourselves.  Also, he’s a local guy, a friend from church…AND, he can do it all…get all of the permits, get the driveway done, the clearing done, etc.  So, instead of one of us having to take on all of the work of finding the different contractors we need part-time, we’ll have it all wrapped up in one nice package.

We met with him tonight and he had a bunch of questions…including stuff that we didn’t have the answers to at this point.  He’s also ready to come out and look at the property and to show us another property he’s working on that has a sealed crawl-space, so we can get an idea of what that looks like and what is involved with that (energy savings, among other things).  Hopefully he can get us a new quote in the next few days so we’ll know what things are really going to cost and where we need to go from here.

On Friday, we went and talked to the bank to see how much mortgage we could afford, to try to get an idea of what the properties are worth, and to try to get an idea of just how complicated this property transfer is going to be.

When all is said and done, the bank said we could work the trade out however we wanted to, as long as the mortgages on the properties are paid off. We were able to get an idea of what our property is worth, but FIL’s was a bit more complicated (nothing comparable has sold around it recently), and we discovered that with our credit rating, we could afford as much house as we wanted to afford.

Oh, we never did get the information from the realtor about what our house was worth.  Ah, well, we got the info from the bank, so all is good.

So, hubby has set up an appointment with the modular dealer we are going with and we are meeting with them this coming Friday to see what we need to do to work on getting a final work-up of for the house and get the ball rolling on getting the house built. Yay! EEP!

The next few months are going to be crazy, hectic, fun, as we get the properties arranged, the new mortgage(s) in place, the lot set up for the house, the house put in, and us moved into the house. Lots of work ahead.

But, it will be worth it in the end to have our dream house, built closer to everything, and built to our specifications.

Oh, and this weekend is also our anniversary, so hubby and I are going to do… something… we still aren’t sure exactly what. But, we’ll be heading off to do that after we meet with the modular dealer.

We have finally received enough estimates to have a good idea of what the house is going to cost to build. Now we are waiting to hear from a realtor about what both of the properties are currently worth. Once we get that information we can have a better idea of how much loans are going to be and whether we can afford it this year or if we are going to have to wait.

Oh, and hubby had some more fun with the floor plans, trying to make the kitchen more “efficient”, and possibly adding a built in front porch. They didn’t work as well and I think we’re mostly back to the flipped floor plan, with maybe some minor tweaks.

We are slowly starting to discuss interior decoration. I am bringing it up now because, since we are getting a brand new house, we can get the fixtures and stuff to “go” with the decoration, instead of working the decoration to “go” with the interior. Hubby’s comment was that, if we like the decoration as it is now, why change…so, I think we are mostly going with what we have in our current house, with some minor modifications.

Well, we’re in a holding pattern right now.  We sent out estimate requests to several builders, modular and otherwise.  We also actually went and visited another modular company, and they are working up a quote for our floor plan.

The new company had some interesting things to say about some of the other companies…they seemed knowledgable about different aspects of the modular industry.  But, how much of what they had to say about the other companies was real and how much was them trying to make the sale to us…we’ll see.  In their favor, their company *does* install tankless water heaters.

Their modulars do present a small problem.  Because of the way they are built, they can only go 68′ long.  Our floor plan calls for 74′ modules.  They do make up for the 68′ by going to 16′ wide modules…but, playing around with the floor plan…it gets pretty wonky.  We’ll see what happens.

So, while we are waiting to figure out which company to go with, we’re doing “normal” stuff, cleaning house, playing with the kids, working on hobbies, etc.  And trying to NOT go crazy waiting.  I don’t know about anyone else in my family, but I want to know when/how/if this is going to happen…and SOOON!

Just in case anyone is interested, here is a picture of our current house:

————-

To help us get an idea of what we really want in a house and, almost as importantly, what we don’t want, my FIL suggests we go and tour a modular home dealership that works very similar to CarMax. You go, you get a book full of floor plans for the houses that they have all over this property…and there is somewhere between 20 and 30 houses…and you walk around and through any of the houses you want…all of them if you really want to. We probably seriously looked through a good 6-8 and glanced at another 4 or more…and let me tell you, that gets mighty tiring. By the end of the day, you are not sure what you’ve seen and what you haven’t.

Hubby had the brilliant idea of taking pictures of the stuff we liked. Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures of the numbers on the houses to be able to reference back to the floor plans when we were done…doh!

By the end of the day, we had a much better idea of what we liked and what we disliked. For example, while the idea of a Butler’s Pantry was cool, it seemed to set the tone for the whole house and made it feel much more formal than a house without one would have felt. We also figured out we would prefer two smaller, his-and-hers, walk-in closets to one large one. We decided that a separate door for the toilet in the bathroom was just dorky.

So, below are some of the things we realized we did like:

Attic:

We must have an attic. And, not just ANY attic, but one with the roof having at least a 10/12 pitch, if not a 12/12 pitch. It also has to have dormer windows and the door to the attic should be downstairs.

This is what the dormer windows look like from the outside and the inside, how much sheer space you have in an attic with a 12/12 pitch roof, and the upstairs end of the stairwell with the door downstairs (yes, that’s me).

Master Bathroom:

We really like the idea of the Glass Tile Windows in the Master Bathroom as a cool way to get light in, but also maintain privacy:

Main Living Area:

The main living area–living room, dining room, kitchen–should be open and should also be oriented in such a way that you can see the TV from the kitchen. Yeah, sounds corny, I know, but we’ve made the decision to only have 1 TV in the house and I remember living in an apartment where the TV was in the other room…if you were cooking in the kitchen, you never knew what was going on elsewhere.

Here’s an example of the open floorplan idea we like:

We also found this cabinet style in the kitchen to be cool:

You could have fun display stuff on top of the cabinets and the different levels mark them off nicely. We also like the island idea with the legs and glass cabinet…just…cool.

This was a possibility if we needed to break up the area for support:

It provides the support, but also maintains a decent amount of the open feel we want.

We also wanted:

–The boys’ rooms to NOT be off the main living area, and to be close to the same size (including closets).

–The mudroom/washroom at the same end of the house as the boys’ rooms.

–A pantry.

–I wanted a craft room.

–A coat closet (our current house doesn’t have one!).

——–

Over the course of the next few days, we went through the floor plans from the dealer we visited. We also looked at the floor plans from their website and from a couple other modular websites. I think I probably looked at close to 100 floor plans, getting rid of the ones that obviously wouldn’t work and keeping the ones that might. By the time I was done, there was a stack of about 20. Then, hubby went through and narrowed that stack to 4, two from each of the major contenders in our modular construction challenge. One of the floor plans from one company turned out to be nearly an exact copy of a floor plan from the other company, just flipped. That floor plan actually stayed a top contender for a long time…until we got pricing back from both companies and realized it was just enough out of our price-range for us to not feel comfortable trying to afford it.

The other two floor plans were close to what we wanted, but needed more customization than the top contender did. So, hubby sat down and worked on it and came up with a (mostly) workable idea over the course of a couple of days.

I’ll get to that next time…

Hubby started a new job in January. With his old job, we were driving into work as a family, I’d drop him off at his office, my two boys at my mother’s (she takes care of them while we work), and then go to work myself. In all, it would take me about 50 minutes to get to work, my hubby’s commute was about 25…and we’d get to spend the time hanging out as a family, discussing whatever needed to be discussed.

Now, we’re driving separate cars, BOTH of our commutes are in the 30-40 minute time-frame, and, in general, it’s not as much fun. Also, in general, currently we are at least 10 minutes, usually 20 or more, from everything…shopping, church, family, tae kwon do, life.

Our current house is a nice house. It is just under 2000 sq.ft., an open floor plan ranch, with nice, big rooms for everyone. It is smack dab in the middle of 4 1/2 acres of land and is, in general, a pretty nice house. It does have a couple of drawbacks…the closet space leaves more to be desired than you would think from looking at it and there is no attic. None. Zilch, zip, nada…not even any way to access the area between the ceiling and the roof. But, all in all, it is a NICE house and I originally didn’t want to move.

However, with the new job, we realize just how far from everything we want to do we are. Now, for some people, that may not be a problem. But, for us, it is. I LIKE coming home at a decent hour and fixing home-cooked dinners. I like coming home and relaxing…heck, I like coming home at a decent hour, period. So, I told my husband that, if we needed to move, it would have to be into a very special house.

Originally, I had the thought of moving to a particular neighborhood, one that would put me within biking distance of my work and my mother’s house and my husband a lot closer to his work than he his now. But, after thinking on it for a while, we realized that we wouldn’t like living in town because we are used to the quiet of the country where we live. So, we kind of put the moving idea on the back burner, until….