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.