Stamps Like Champs: Home Base

I promised you a blog about our land, well, here it is. Sorry it is long, but it was quite an ordeal with lots of ups and downs.

Once we decided on the Somerset from Bob Ward, it was time to find land on which to build the house! We let Beth know to stop emailing house listings, but instead to start emailing land listings in the same areas. The same night we asked her to do that, I started searching on my own on all different real estate sites to find exactly two lots that met our criteria in our price range. I was devastated - only two options and they weren't even that great. Steve and I had a big talk that resulted in us expanding our search into more of a country-setting than what I'm used to. Additionally, we were still building our house on paper, so we didn't quite know what our max budget for land was going to be yet, so we were sort of operating on unknowns at this point. With our expanded search, we probably had about 15 different lots to see and we looked at them all. We had some front runners, but none of them felt like "home."

After building our house on paper some more and knowing we were close to being done adding to it, we bumped up our budget on land a bit to see what that would get us. There were two lots right next door to each other in an area that was our first choice to live that were at the very top of our budget. When I say very top, I mean absolutely no wiggle room - we would have to stop adding to the house and choose only Level 1 options for the finishes in the house. Still, we decided to drive out there to see if either lot would be worth sacrificing some of the finishing touches of the house...and they were.

We initially fell in love with the lot we didn't buy. It was going to be called the "House on the Hill." This lot was a cornfield throughout the summer and some of the fall, so we could never walk the property to get the lay of the land. But from the road, it looked like a beautiful setting with the house sitting perfectly on top of a great sledding hill. The lot to its left was always our "backup" if someone bought the "House on the Hill" lot before us. Nothing was wrong with the backup lot, but we just liked the look of the hill better. We were also not very bright, and never walked the backup lot to get a feel for what it was really like. We were only going off what we could see which was a bunch of grass.

After looking at the lots, we asked Beth to send us the plats so we could see if we like where the house would go in relation to the septic field and what that would mean for our yard. Based on the plat, we were okay with how everything would look with "House on the Hill." With the backup lot, it appeared that there would be no backyard, which meant a garden in an odd place and no party barn. :-( But, both lots are in an ideal location and what's the first rule of real estate? Location, location, location!

We asked Clark and JoAnna to go out to the lots and give us an estimate of what the site costs would be. Site costs include things like laying a driveway, drilling a well, installing septic, and anything pre-construction. The base price of the house includes a certain amount towards this site work. We thought we were golden since the lot was only a cornfield. We were so wrong and felt like we were kicked in the gut when they told us it would be about $38,000 over the built-in cost for the site work. I was heartbroken. There were tears. This meant $38,000 had to come out of the house or we had to bring that much extra to settlement, or some combination of those two options and none of those sounded appealing. It felt like the dream was gone and we were back to square one of finding another lot or even going back to buying a house already built.

We took a break from house stuff for a few days to get over the shock of the site costs and regroup on our lot search. One day, Steve and I were talking about what our next steps would be. Knowing that we looked at every available lot out there in our price range, I really didn't know what next steps would be. I told Steve that if he could make "House on the Hill" work, I'd let him buy a pickup truck (for some reason he's always wanted one and I'm vehemently opposed to owning one). Steve crunched some numbers that night and found that if we took a few things out of the house, brought a few thousand extra dollars to settlement and financed a little more (we were approved for more financing than we are intending to use), we could almost get to where we need to be. The kicker was we also needed to ask Clark & JoAnna to come down on the house cost a few thousand.

We hadn't negotiated anything with Bob Ward until this point, so we figured we had a good shot of them helping us out a bit. A total of two weeks went by where we didn't have an answer yet. I don't mean to make it sound like they ignored us for two weeks; they were still in contact with us and responding to our follow ups, but they were "working on something that would work for us." One day we get an email - the email that really set everything in motion. They agreed to significantly reduce the site costs for us AND Clark negotiated with the selling agent of the lot to accept $20,000 less than asking on (drumroll please)...the backup lot. They would only accept full price on the lot we were in love with. We could still make a full price offer work, but we'd still have to sacrifice some things we really wanted to keep in the house. But, we aren't stupid - we'll take a look at the lot that is now $20,000 cheaper!

On a beautiful early October day, we met Beth, JoAnna, and Clark at the backup lot. They walked us out to the lot and staked out where the house would go. As soon as they did that it hit me that this was where we were meant to be. The house sits far enough back on the lot to make it feel really private and it still has enough of a backyard to fit our huge garden. The downside is that there likely isn't enough room for a party barn, but there's probably room for a party pavilion in the future! Compromises people...it's all about compromises! :-)

On October 6, Steve and I were driving up to New York for one of our parks and beer in small glasses trips when the offer was officially extended to the sellers. We knew they were going to meet with their agent about the offer on Monday. Perfect, that gave us the weekend to enjoy ourselves at parks! We thought wrong - we stressed the entire time on our long-weekend trip. We had a great trip, but we wish we could do it over again without that stress hanging over us.

Monday came and went with no answer. Tuesday came and went with no answer. Wednesday came and went with no answer. Thursday we asked Beth what the hold-up was. We thought this deal was already agreed to between Clark and the selling agent (and sellers), so we had no idea why it wasn't a done deal yet. To make a long story short, we had added something to the offer that wasn't pre-negotiated, but should have been assumed by the sellers. They were going to agree to put in the 486-foot common driveway (that we will share with two other lots); we added that they need to do the BGE run (electric) from the road through the length of the common drive. This caught them off guard so they were trying to determine the price for that.

A total of two weeks goes by before Beth calls us to let us know the sellers were okay with the BGE run and were going to be sending over a counter-offer the next day that primarily included changes to dates of our feasibility study, when the well will be drilled, etc. It was all minor stuff that we were 100% okay with. The next day, Steve calls me on my way home from work and tells me the sellers still hadn't signed the offer and they added an addendum to it that stated they were to obtain quotes for the common driveway, but if they couldn't find any less than $25k, they could walk away from the contract. To say I was blinded by rage is a bit of an understatement. The addendum was written exactly in that way. This is a legally binding contract and it was written in a way that gave us no protection whatsoever. They didn't have to prove to us that they even obtained a quote - instead they could just walk away. Whether that was their intention or not, I may never know. But it gave us the impression they didn't want to sell this land. We were already prepared to walk away in that initial 2 week time frame of not hearing anything and this just made us more willing to do so.

Everyone who knows me knows that I work for the best place ever and we get our birthday off every year as a gift from the company. My birthday day off is usually spent buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, begging Steve to let me decorate the house for Christmas, starting Christmas cards, watching Christmas movies, preparing the menu and ideas for Christmas Eve, and anything and everything to do with Christmas. I love that day. This year, my birthday day off had nothing to do with Christmas. Instead I called every paving company in the area and had them provide quotes for the common driveway. Every single one of them came back under $25,000 which calmed me down significantly - the dream was still alive! We turned the offer back around to them the next day with the addendum redacted and all the quotes attached and we also gave them 48 hours to respond or we were walking away. This gave the sellers until close of business on Friday, October 27.

I leave work at 4:00 each day and that Friday at 4:00 was heartbreaking. I knew technically the sellers still had an hour to go, but if they hadn't signed or counter-offered sooner, what difference was an hour going to make? While I was driving home, Beth called Steve to let him know that the sellers were not feeling well, so they were going to meet the next morning. We extended our deadline to Monday then (thinking we wouldn't hear anything over the weekend). We even went out looking at different lots that Saturday to get some backup lots ready. Later that Saturday evening, Steve went out to the grocery store and I was lot shopping on the internet when an email from Beth popped up saying the SIGNED contract was attached! I immediately burst into happy tears and called Steve to drop everything in the store and to come home to review the contract!

So after all that, we come to the title of the blog post. Every homestead needs a name, right? Steve always refers to our house and our future house as the "base of operations for our trips." And let me show you a picture of the boundary lines of our land - looks kind of familiar right? Like a home plate on a baseball field. So that is how our house has officially become "Home Base." I guess I owe Steve a pickup truck now, although I'm hoping our blog readers convince Steve to let me off on a technicality - we didn't buy "House on the Hill!"

Home Base!

Click on the picture to make it bigger.
Perspective on our land - this is looking towards the house from the common driveway. The green lines mark our property. The black part is our driveway. Obviously none of this is to scale. ;-)

Today we officially made Home Base ours. It came down to the wire with the well test results - we had a verbal "everything is okay" around 1:00 and then we had the official results report while we were at settlement! As soon as settlement was over, we met my parents out at the lot where we "broke ground" and enjoyed some bubbly! Now the fun begins!