Housing adventures
I must apologize for my recent lack of blogging, but I’ve been most busy attempting to become a home owner. This is a dream I’ve had for years now, but it was put on hold for a few years due to the most rediculous litigation surrounding my condo assocation. One day, the association realized they were in $9 million dollars in debt and this was a problem. Due to this unfortunate financial circumstance, my monthly home owners dues went from $117 to $330. Since the corporate charter said they could not increase the dues by more than 10% a year, they were immediately sued by all sorts of people. The prices of the condos in this complex plummeted and I was forced to stay unless I wanted to take a $20,000 loss. After a few years, the association eventually won all the lawsuits (really good lawyers?) and the prices are finally starting to get back up to the same level as other similar condos in the area.
I decided to resume my dream of owning a house, however I became very interested in building it myself. That way, I could get it just the way I wanted and use high quality materials. I wanted something small and nice which is hard to find. So I started looking into building a house – the first step is, of course, to find land.
Now, there’s a difference between a piece of land and a “lot”. Land is simply any piece of dirt someone is willing to sell you. This land might be on a slope, covered with brush, or be in some way totally unable to support any type of construction. Of course, you don’t know until you actually do a feasibility study, which could costs thousands. Lots would already be prepped and ready to build on. A lot is tough to find unless you want a microscopic little tenth of an acre parsel in the middle of some yuppyville housing community. Land around here goes for around $120,000 for anything decent. Figure another $80,000 for leveling, escavation, clearing, permits, environmental studies, bribing public officials, etc. So I figured I’d be looking at $200k before I could even start building anything. So I called about 6 real estate agents looking for someone who would help me buy land. None of them returned my phone calls. It seems about 60% of land deals fall through and no one wants to get in that business. In fact, the only people that build houses anymore are insanely rich people or major housing development corporations who build .1 acre lot yuppyville homes with the cheapest materials and give you a list of about 3 options to choose from. This is not my thing. So once you have the land, then what? Well, you can buy a manufactured home. This is by far the cheapest way to go. You get these homes from companies such as Hiline Homes (www.hilinehomes.com) and they show up one day on the back of a rather large truck. Those go for about $100k for a decent one, mind you they have incredibly undesirable floor plans. If you want something nicer, you can go with a cute little log home from someone like Lindal Cedar Homes (www.lindal.com). I love these! These things show up on another rather large truck in pieces and you hire someone to put them together for you. The cost is around $110/sf. So figure $200,000 for a good size home. However, this is just the outer “shell” of a house. The walls, ceilings, doors, little metal bracket thingies, etc. Once you’re done with that you’d have to hire a general contractor to fill in the innards which might cost you another $100k. Third option - if you really want something nice, you have to hire an architect to design you something from scratch and have it custom built. Custom built houses in this area go for around $300/sf. So figure a nice little 2,000sf home would run you $600,000 just for construction. Adding up these numbers makes building a house really push the budget of any average person. So I decided to give up on this and look for an existing house that I liked. One problem, I wanted a basement.
Why a basement? Well, where else are you gonna hide all the dead bodies? Actually, being a movie buff I really want to build a home theater. It’d be great to have a projector mounted on the ceiling, with a nice 100” screen, accoustic tile on the ceilings, carpetted walls all in a room you could get pitch black. Since it’s underground, you wouldn’t have to worry too much about noise. And also as a guitar player – well you get the point.
Here’s the problem with that idea. All the basements around here are daylight basements in Kirkland (not to knock on Kirkland, it’s a fine city but split entry houses are sooooo 70s.) A daylight basement really doesn’t adapt well to my dream of having a home theater where I can crank up “The Mummy” and not have to worry about neighboring mobs showing up on my porch wielding pitch forks. After looking at dozens of crappy houses, I decided to scrap the idea of having a basement (maybe someday) and start to look out east of Redmond. Out there, you can still get a good amount of land and a decent place without having to give up your first born son.
Eventually, I found a great house on a big lot that I absolutely loved. It has an awesome kitchen, great back yard for parties, plenty of space and a living room wired for home theater stuff. I’ll be moving in next weekend if all goes well, and fixing up my condo to put it on the market before the holiday season.
One thing about looking for homes is it really helps you figure out what you like and what you don’t like in a house. Walking through houses I absolutely hated was a great exercise and a most valuable experience. I started to get really good at narrowing down what kind of house I wanted and what features were the most important, and I eventually found out that having a basement was not as huge of a requirement as I previously thought and wasn’t worth sacrificing other characteristics I wanted. Having a big lot and a house that didn’t look like everything else on the street was far more important in the end. One thing I did was take pictures of every house I visited and started to compile notes on what I liked and what I didn’t like. In somewhat of a "binary search" fassion, I was able to narrow down exactly what I wanted in a house.
Hopefully when the dust settles, I’ll be able to blog more again. Stay tuned for my semi-left wing rant on housing prices (I didn’t want to make this entry too long). That’s it for now!
Mike
