We’re starting to consolidate all of our big, new-home ideas to see which ones are really going to work for us.  It's a lot of fun to wish for the moon but we all can't live in the Biltmore.  Time to start setting some reasonable parameters and implementing a little value engineering so we can get the biggest bang for our buck.

The best thing about giving yourself plenty of time to design and build your home is that you can go through your daily/weekly/seasonal routine and think about how you’d like things to be different in your next home.  For example, do you really use your fireplace?  Do you want to have one anyhow?  Should it be gas or wood-burning?

It’s also important to consider the future.  In our case, our children are grown but not quite gone and we hope to stay here well into retirement.  So, we want to be able to function on one floor in case that becomes necessary, but have space for our semi-residential kids (on another floor).  We also want to be ready for future energy-saving possibilities.  For example, solar panels are not yet feasible where we live (more on that in a future blog), but in the event they become so, we’re installing conduit to accommodate them later.  Of course, it’s always hard to predict the future.  In our current home, which we built 15 years ago, we made it cable-ready.  Well, cable never got way out here and we ended up with satellite, which required extensive rewiring, and greatly irritated my builder-husband.  Ah well, now we put conduit in all of the homes we build for just such possibilities.

If there are certain features you really want, can’t afford, and plan to add later, take them into consideration as you design your house and allow for the expansion.  In keeping with the arts-and-crafts style we are considering many built-ins. They can get pricey so we’re drawing them into the floor plan, but we may build them at a later date.  (We’re also considering using lumber from the trees we need to cut down.  They will take some time to cure but the timing moneywise might turn out just right; i.e, two years from now.)

Even if you think this is the last home you’ll ever live in, it’s smart to take into consideration how it will sell when the time comes.  It’s nice to have the freedom to do unique things with your custom home but if it’s too quirky it will be more difficult to sell and may bring in less than its expected value.

So what are our some of our must-haves?  We want a state-of-the-art kitchen, a first-floor master bedroom, plenty of views and light, and - #1 Most Important - a big porch (one of our favorite parts of our last two homes) facing the pond.  We want versatile living space (no dining room or formal living room). We want the ability to shut off heating and air conditioning to the girls’ rooms when they’re away at school.  And we each want our own office.   (Did I mention that already?!  Mine will have a desk looking out a window onto a garden and his will face a TV that can play the History Channel, news, and baseball 24/7.  I’m enjoying the second inning as I write this!)

Along with renovating the rental house, we took on the challenge of renovating the aforementioned pond, which was in very bad health when we purchased our property.  It didn’t look too bad in the winter but when the weather is warm it becomes thick with green, mucky algae.  All the fish actually died last summer because it was so poorly maintained.  (I know you’re wondering, once again, why we bought this property!)  I have a little 8’x8’ pond on our current property but things are different with a ¼ acre one.  Do I need a pump?  Should I aerate it?  How about a waterfall?  What kind of plants?  How do you plant them?

We found some great answers at ThePondGuy.com.  What we couldn’t find on their website or catalog, they helpfully explained to us over the phone.  Between them and our excavators, we received a good education in pond health.  We gradually drained the pond, and the summer heat and drought advanced the cause by drying out the muck.  Charlie and three buddies jury rigged a pump to drain the last 300 gallons using over 100 feet of rope from each bank so they didn’t have to walk in the muck.  (The excavators wouldn’t touch it until it was almost dry.)

It’s always exciting when the big equipment arrives on the scene.  Our excavators dredged out the muck and made the pond a little deeper so that we could eventually install geo-thermal heating and cooling in our future home and still have depth to swim, if desired (hard to imagine in its current state!)    They used the dredged pond dirt to build up the causeway, giving us enough width for a driveway to the home site.   We also added a pond liner because we suspected that the pond had been leaking.  Since the equipment was already on-site we went ahead and replaced the old broken-down bridge at the other end of the property and straightened out the road to the home site.

In order to add aeration and flow to the pond water (confounding the algae’s chances) we decided to put a waterfall on the bank opposite the home site.  We also left some shallow spots for future water lilies and marginal plants.  While the pond was empty, we took the opportunity to begin building a gazebo and we also put in a pond pump for the waterfall.  Now the rains can come.  I’ll be curious to see how long it will take to fill back up (and pray that it actually will!) 

I think that our on-site work will slow down for awhile.  Now we can go back to planning the actual house. Whew!

Well, Princess is now settled in her dorm and beginning her college adventure.  I’m glad you can’t see tear stains on a computer screen.  I’m also glad that I have a wise husband who encouraged me to immerse myself in building our next house in order to take my mind off this empty nest.

So I will immerse myself into one of my favorite forms of therapy - the pleasurable hobby of perusing home plans magazines and books for new home ideas.  It is one of the best parts of building a new home.  Charlie and I mark pages of books and tear out magazine photos and exchange books and debate different aspects and build on each others’ ideas and (fortunately!) create a vision that we both begin to fall in love with.  We’re thinking Arts and Crafts style so we’ve bought a couple of books with lots of great photos to help with our designs.  Bungalow Style: Creating Classic Interiors in Your Arts and Crafts Home by Treena Crochet provides an impressive overview of the history of the style.  Greene & Greene Masterworks by Bruce Smith and Alexander Vertikoff offers endless beautiful photos of the influential architects’ “ultimate bungalows”.

On a more practical note, we walked around our current home to determine what we wanted in the new home.  For example, we don’t want a dining room or a basement but we do want two offices and a large garage with a workshop area.  Perhaps we could combine a guest room with an all-purpose room.

We talked about what furniture we wanted to keep and how much storage we’d like to have.  Our future home grew by a few square feet from its original sketch once we took all of these things into account!

Today I put together a 3-ring binder of some of the pictures we’ve collected – several front elevations, lots of kitchen cabinet ideas, fireplaces, porches, stairways, trimwork - lots of pics of our favorite parts, building a binder of wishes and dreams.

I’m glad to have this engrossing project ahead of me.  The time is right for new beginnings.

June was a tough month.  Have I told you about our renters?  Well, they decided that they couldn’t keep up with the rent so they moved out rather suddenly.  They left behind them a pig sty.  When we bought the property we took a tour of the house, but they did a pretty good job of covering up a lot of flaws (like the pet odor smell).  We knew the property was old and poorly maintained but it was still daunting to face the work ahead.

After filling two stake-body truckloads with trash, we ordered a dumpster and proceeded to top it off with trash from the inside and outside of this house.   We’ve repainted and replaced the carpet, not to mention numerous other repairs and odor removal activities.  

Meanwhile, we briefly entertained the idea of moving into the rental ourselves since it was suddenly vacant, and putting our current home on the market, all in a month’s time with our youngest’s graduation in the mix.  We asked our realtor to come for a visit and give us an idea of what we needed to do with our current home.  She suggested a stager who would tell us to take down all of our family photos and generally de-personalize our home ~ all good advice that I’m willing to follow AFTER my baby flies the coop.  I had myself a little breakdown and told Charlie that I was not up for the challenge.  I hated to let him down and possibly miss an uptick in the home-sales market but I had not prepared myself to jump into all of this so suddenly.  He was fine with that decision.  As it turned out, we had our hands full getting our daughter through graduation festivities and preparing for the move to college, renovating the rental, holding down our regular home-building job, and beginning land development on the new lot!!!  (No grass growing under our feet!!)  

I had been looking forward to a slightly lazier summer writing my blog and enjoying my last days with my daughter.  But it’s all good.   The house is rented to better tenants and looks a thousand percent better.  It will bring us a much higher rent than we had been getting, not to mention paying customers!  I’m managing to squeeze in plenty of quality time with Princess and it’s so exciting to see the new road go in and the pond getting dredged.