SylvanTrails New Home

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!

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.

My grandmother died on Christmas Eve 2006. She was a big part of all of our lives. Even when things were difficult for my brother and me because of…life… she was there. She took us places on vacations. She gave me my love for reading and for Science Fiction. She provided the nest egg that helped us buy the house we are in now, purchased our bed, the dining room table, and the futon that my older son is now using for his bed. Her legacy has left us enough to help with the new house. She did a LOT for the whole family.

When she died, she was cremated. She had wanted to be donated to science, but because of how she died there was too much infection for them to be able to deal with it.

The original plan for her ashes was to purchase a spot at the columbarium at our church. However, here it is, a year and a half later and it hasn’t happened. My mother just isn’t ready to let her go that way. (She’s currently staying in our pastor’s office, holding long, interesting conversations with John Wesley. )

All of that is background to:

Hubby and I have been staying up *way* too late this week, no particular reasons, it’s just happening. The other night, as I’m up past midnight, finally in bed, and trying to get to sleep, I was kept up longer with a fit of inspiration.

There is a climbing rose that she liked (I can’t remember the name of it, but Mother has two of them in her front yard). There is another rose she liked, and I’ll talk to Mother to see about non-rose plants she liked. Anyway, it popped into my head…build her a specific section in the garden that I’m already mentally planning.

I don’t know exactly what it will look like. I know it will have the roses (and, therefore, a climbing trellis). I know that I would like to ask a friend who creates slate art work to do something for her. Beyond that…I don’t know. Maybe a fountain (if so, it will have to have dragons), maybe a reading bench, maybe a bird feeder…maybe a combination of the above.

I do know what I want the marker for the area to say. I want it to have her name, her birth and death dates, and to say “Thank you for everything”.

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….