SylvanTrails New Home

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

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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!).

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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…

In addition to my family being local (I have mentioned that my mother keeps the kids while we work), my hubby’s dad is also local. He also owns several pieces of property in the area, including a couple of pieces that are convenient to our work and the things we like to do…and that are, conveniently enough, available to be developed.

Also, as we’ve discussed the vague possibility of moving, my FIL commented that he’d like to make an offer on our property if we decide to sell it.

So, hubby comes up with a brilliant idea…why don’t we talk to my FIL about getting our dream home built on one of the available properties and then we work out a trade…he gets our house and land, and we get his!

Hubby talks to his dad, and he is agreeable to working something out. Also, the two pieces of property that are available are on the same road, so we do some research and figure out which one suits our needs the best and, again, FIL is agreeable to that.

Next up…figuring out exactly what our dream home is…

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….