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

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.

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.

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…