Counter offer from Land Owner!!!

Finally, after nearly a week of waiting, we got a counter offer from the land owner. And it hurts bad. He came down $12,000 from his original asking price of $170,000. We had offered him $118,000- something that may seem like a lowball offer, but remember there are banks that are not loaning money on land period right now- they consider land essentially worthless. We are going to counter offer at $138,000 with $5,000 in closing costs. We know that he had balked on two $135,000 offers a year ago back when the market was much stronger so perhaps seeing that $138,000 number will make him feel he needs to take the money while he can.

I hope that he can come down a good bit more, as we currently would have to spend over half our budget on the lot, something I'm not sure we're prepared to do. The realtor has said we can move into a verbal conversation at this point, rather than revising and countering via fax and email for the next few days. We'll see how he responds to the $138,000 number.

Photoshopped Lot + House pics

I photoshopped two Ross Chapin cottages onto our lot just to get an idea how it might look landscaped and all. I don't ever imagine I'll get grass that looks like this, and think it looks a little over-manicured for our tastes anyways, but you get the gist of what we're going for with the lot.

I love how it could look. We'll have to chop those pine trees down in the front- something I swore I'd never do (chop down a tree), but we've both been through enough hurricanes that we've seen the damage pine trees can cause (they also fall over fairly easily).

Is this our future house?

Or will it be more something like this?

Elevation not working.

We decided against the side door thing. The elevation sketches I did convinced us it was going to look too much like a Cape Cod turned on its end. I emailed the two designers on the house and told them that we were going to have to have a front door. It was a pain, but I'm glad I did the elevations- it convinced us that was the wrong direction to go.

Everytime we see a cottage, it has a nice front door with a little porch, and we can't imagine it any other way. I'm going to do some studies with the lot pictures I took to see how a cottage might look on the lot.

Lot Pictures

I drove out to the lot and took some pictures. It's looking pretty ragged but you can get an idea of what we (hopefully) will have to work with.

Home Sweet Lot.

My favorite view- the left side of the lot, with a medium sized Live Oak.

Looking towards the back of the lot. Barely a house in sight.

Looking towards the front right of the lot. Again- total woods.

Side elevation looking good

I think we finally figured out how to turn the house and get the entrance on the side without it feeling like you were staring at the nake side of the house. LeAnne suggested we put a kickout on the end to give it more weight, and it really seemed to help. We're still playing with colors and trim work (this version doesn't have my Argyle motif), but I'm liking the white Batten and Board version:

The plain version:

"Hired" designer today. Got surprise plans.

I was up in Durham working today so LeAnne dropped by the designer's office today and gave him a check for $1,000. He will deposit this immediately I'm assuming, unlike the $1,000 check we gave as earnest money for the lot. The builder's wife had come up with some ideas and got John to draw up some plans based on those ideas. LeAnne went to pay John and pick up the plans- they were rolled up Mike Brady style and were not really like what we were looking for.

I think everyone is kind of slow right now (imagine that) and happy to help out on something that's a little different than what they've been doing. But it was kind of weird to get these big plans that seems totally fleshed out and a major investment of time from a few people we hadn't even paid or had an official "let's get started" conversation with.

As a commercial artist, I'm used to iterating things a million times and having some of my precious work stomped on and thrown in the trash. LeAnne's not used to that concept and is reluctant to go into our Friday meeting and let them know the plan is not right for us. I'll help her out with that part.

Here's the floorplan as conceived by the builder's wife and John:
It's got some really nice things going on- and has a couple of the little details that I really want in my house, but it's not quite there. Here's the surprise front elevation:

Met with the Designer today

We finally met John Croom today and had a really good meeting with him. He is much cheaper than Scott Sullivan and is really sensitive to what we're hoping to do. He showed us a plan he's done with a builder across the hall from his office and mentioned they could probably come up with a fairly accurate building price for that plan. It's 1700 sq. ft. and probably too big for our budget but I'm definitely curious how much that house would run.

The builder (Hagood Homes) has built a couple of really nice looking coastal cottages in a tiny development called Southern Oaks. We really like these houses a lot (much too expensive for us, though).

Offer submitted on Masters Lane lot.

We have officially put in an offer on the Master's Lane lot. We can breathe a deep sigh of relief that we are now in the queue for purchasing the lot.

$1,000 dollars in earnest money (check only) and we have "spent" our first of what will be very few dollars on this project. The realtor has warned us the owner is difficult to get in touch with and slow to respond, but as long as the offer is in, we're fine. The asking price was $170,000- YIKES! I can't believe a piece of land can cost that much. We offered him $118,000. The realtor told us that the owner had gotten two other offers of $135,000 that he refused but that was a year ago and the markets were optimistic and looking up then. Wish us luck. We're really starting to fall in love with the property.

Architect Proposal = $$$$ :((((((

I'd heard that architects were expensive. I chose not to believe it. We met with an architect last week and discussed all of our wants and needs. We got a proposal of $14,000 today. YIKES!!! I've been playing with the demo of the $2500 Chief Architect (www.chiefarchitect.com) application and am thinking perhaps we can just design the house ourselves. We've gotten in touch with two draftsmen (designers as they like to be called) and are going to meet with them in the next few days.

One of them, Scott Sullivan, is kind of a big time guy and designs plans we've seen before on the Southern Living and Coastal Living websites. We figure he can't be as expensive as the architect. The other draftsmen is John Croom and we'll probably meet with him next week.

The search for a lot

In Wilmington, there are very few buildable lots. Most are fairly expensive (+$200,000), especially the closer you get to the beach. We are trying to build within a certain school district and between our parents houses, so that limits our lot choices a bunch. What we do have in our favor is we don't want a huge house, so out of an initial budget of $300,000 we can spend much more on a lot than the average person would be willing to.

Today we drove around and looked at about 14 lots that either met or nearly met our criteria. There were two or three that we could live with and one that LeAnne found while driving around that is absolutely perfect. At .56 acres, it's definitely big enough. It's listed at $170,000 and that is way up there obviously, but it's at the end of a Cul-de-sac, has no HOA and is bordered by two unbuildable common areas of two neighboring developments. It feels like we're living out in the boonies- something we've always aspired to, though after living in Santa Monica for awhile we still have some city living in us. This lot feels like the best of both worlds- we can't for the life of us figure out why no one has built on this lot yet. I'm going to have to revise our initial 1800 sq ft. house down to 1300 sq. ft and see if we could make it work with this lot.

House Hunting = :(

We spent the day looking at some open houses and are thoroughly depressed. Every house we look at is hideous. There was one house in our ideal neighborhood at a reasonable price (reasonable in Wilmington = $279,000) but it looked like something we would have made (which is not pretty). It had 4 different kinds of flooring, Pergo upstairs- probably laid down directly over the carpet, a really nice backyard, and 2 sailboats in the sideyard which the realtor said could convey (I've always dreamt of having a secret ship cabin getaway in my house). It would take so much to get this house happy and it had a formal dining room- the kinds with two openings that you can basically do nothing with other than stash some furniture in there or use it as a playroom that is always messy and on display for anyone who comes over.

We are hopeless today that we can find a house that will make us happy. Next Sunday, we will spend the afternoon looking at infill lots- something there are not a lot of around town.

Why Build a House

We are in the middle of the worst economic times in our lifetime. Many people ask me, why build a house now. There are plenty of houses available- they are priced lower than usual. Why in the world would you want to build a house now?

Because... I care about my house. It means something to me. It defines me in a way that clothes and cars can't. And nearly every house my wife and I have looked at over the past 2-3 months depress me in a way that clothes and cars can't. So, I will press on, and try to fight the good fight and figure out a way to build my family a house that I'm proud of and that will be a happy place to live.