On the Road!

Okay, we're on the road at last. We're in Boston on an anniversary vacation and I'll try to make postings to the blog here as circumstances allow.

What's been happening in all that silent time for the last month or so:

Life's been very, very crunchy. There were vast quantities of work to do--nice to have the work and all, but it was busy (which is why they call it "work")--and there were just a few leetle hassles with life going on as well, much of it related to the house.

As I mentioned only a few posts ago, the contractor that we were dealing with for the new house was not the most cooperative guy in the world. We came to an agreement that we were going to go away, he gave us our money back, and we left. I'm still annoyed with him: when you say you're going to do a "custom home" and we're paying you vast quantities of money, it really ought to be a custom home done like we want it to be done and not like the builder wants it done. Oh, well. We subsequently heard a few things about him that supported the opinion that we'd come to about his operating style. It'll all work out, I'm quite sure.

Well, since then, we've been looking for a new house. We found a great place to have built in a new development by a different builder (who's got a great rep for being organized and efficient) and we were very impressed. When we saw the model home, the Babe said "If I'd seen this before the other house, I'd have never signed up for it." I agree--it's much more spacious, really attractive, and a lot closer to the house we wanted. We expressed strong interest in getting one of these done to the developer (who seems to be a nice guy). He said that there was the chance to have this one done in the development because one couple was swapping out from their lot to buy a corner lot across the street and up that was going to have the same house built on it because that couple was buying still another lot elsewhere in the development. Far out! So, meanwhile, we were looking at other houses just because it was going to be a year from now before we could move in and being in the house we're in now could be seriously frustrating.

We found a very nice house elsewhere. It's quite big enough, very spacious, incredibly pretty, with truly dazzling landscaping. It even has a lovely San-Francisco-ish pink stucco exterior. The master shower is an entire room unto itself done up in mottled tan marble. It's big enough to sleep four. The master closet is bigger than M's first studio apartment. We want it. We want it bad.

Unfortunately, it's out of our price range as it turns out. Oh, we got instant approval for the mortgage amount (which surprised the heck out of us, but there you are), but the actual payments are too much when weighted against other things, like our desire to travel, or to cover the kids' college educations, or to buy a new fuel pump for the Babe's car, which we had to do a couple weeks ago. If we bought it, we'd have a truly wonderful upscale house that would be a joy to live in, but we'd have no surplus cash to deal with the surprises of life... and with three kids and five cats, there can be a lot of surprises. It was kinda like, "well, can we come up with another $75,000 in hand?" The answer was a resounding "no, we can't." Bugger.

We hadn't completely given up on this, but we'd always figured that we'd be buying in to reserve a house with the new developer (keeping a second string for our bow). I phoned on Thursday to make the appointment for Friday (the 9th). Interesting things: the people who'd vacated the lot we were going to be buying were leaving the area and so we now had a choice of two lots with the house we liked on it, one of which was a corner lot. Not bad. And, oh, by the way, the house that they'd been going to buy on the corner lot (which was now open to us) had a fixed price of $40K lower than the price of the new house. Were we interested? Ohhhhhhh, yeahhhhhhh....

We went in on Friday to sign up. The long and short of it was even better: we could get the house we were planning on or we could get a whole new house plan that they'd just gotten back. We looked at it--actually, the Babe expressed strong interest; I was in love with the way the house looked and didn't want to have anything cause ripples.

We looked at the new house plan. Closely. And you know... it's a heckuva lot better. It's only ("only") 2531 square feet (versus 3300) but it got smaller by eliminating all the stuff that were weren't going to be using anyway: the formal dining room, the sitting room, some of the great room that was kinda oversized. Everything that we wanted--big master bedroom on the main floor, nice office area for me, sewing room--was still there.

So the upshot of all of this is that we bought the new house plan on the non-corner lot we'd been looking at, but for another $20K less than we'd gone in planning to spend. We'll be moving in August or September of next year, which'll give us time to get our current house fixed up to sell and everything boxed. And with housing prices rising the way they are, it's likely to be a close-to-straight-across deal for the sale.

The gods are smiling on us.

The shuttle's going to leave so I'm going to sign off and head out for a day of sightseeing. TTYS!

On the Road!