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).