On second thoughts and troubled times
Posted on | October 14, 2008 |
We’ve been doing a great deal of thinking lately about our house project. It all started when we had family over for my son’s first birthday party a few weeks ago. We were showing the plans to my brother in law and talking about the functional aspects of the house. Dan pointed out that if we wanted the house to be as true to the values we professed to espouse, having a huge third floor glass-bedroom really goes against the grain.
Sad to say, but he’s right. Forcing our girls to share a room so that my wife and I could keep that beautiful top floor to ourselves seems downright wrong. Which started us down an interesting path. Once we began to discuss this, we also began to talk about whether or not we could even afford to build the three story house at all. Monica has told us a few times that building the house for much less than $200/square foot is going to be difficult. At that price, we’d be looking at close to half a million dollars for this house including the land. Make no mistake, there is no way we can afford a house in that price range. With the world markets and the expected downturn in the economy, as a small business owner I’m not willing to take the risk of shouldering such a mortgage, even if the bank told me I could afford it (I don’t think they would, but anyway).
So, we started talking alternatives that would allow us to have a modern, energy efficient home at a more reasonable cost. It seemed that we had lost sight of our original objectives and started going down the “dream house” path, somewhere we never meant to be.
Second Floor plan from the last design
We had a long conference call with Monica on Friday night and talked about filling in the open space loft area above the main floor great room. This would be become a large room for the girls to share and take our house design down to a more standard two story house at about 1,800 square feet. We might add a little area for entry into the house and turn the first floor mudroom into an away/play room. This would pretty much give us a perfect house for our needs, with the sole exception of storage, but there are creative ways to handle that as well. Plus, I think we’d build a shed right away to store my plethora of bikes and all that stuff. We’re aiming to build this house for somewhere a little north of $150/sq ft which puts us right at $300k.
So now, we’re waiting for a redesign from Monica that takes this stuff into account. I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it, and now that we’ve pulled back, I think we’re in much better shape to proceed with discussions with builders.
Look for a few posts coming up shortly on our home show experience and a visit we made to a passive solar farm house construction site outside of Windsor, NS.
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November 18th, 2008 @ 1:14 pm
[...] after our little freak out about the state of the housing market and the second thoughts we were having, we asked Monica to [...]