For a while now, Bryce and I have wanted to move. We love our community and we love our condo’s floor plan. But we felt like it was time to trade in our third story home (those stairs with four kids, not to mention groceries–it’s quite the production!) with shared walls and no yard for a house. The only problem was that we cannot currently sell our condo unless we want to lose a lot of money. We bought right before the housing bubble burst and it might be a while before our condo is worth what we paid for it. We tried finding renters, so that we could move out and rent a house, but had no luck.
Then, when Mark and Brenda were visiting Liam in the NICU, Mark encouraged me to check about building a new home with a local builder called Ivory Homes. When I did, I was delighted to find out that we would qualify to build a new home with them, even while we still owned our condo. On top of that, they have a 3-year lease guarantee program. This means that as soon as we close on our new home, Ivory brings in a management company to take over our condo. They will find renters, do maintenance work, etc. The best part is, Ivory will pay us a certain amount of rent even if the condo is vacant, for three years. Originally, we thought this would help us qualify for more house. After all, if this rent is guaranteed by contract, it makes sense that we could count it as income and that it would off-set our mortgage payments on our condo. Sadly, this isn’t the case. So, we are building the house that we can afford considering that, on paperwork, we will still be carrying the full weight of this mortgage, too. There are some other silly things–they won’t count the past two years of Bryce’s substantial freelance income from work he does on the side because of a tax form technicality–but, really, I don’t need a huge house. I’m just excited for our brand new house with a yard and a garage and an unfinished basement just waiting to add space and function to our home down the road! In truth, we have felt very grateful during this whole process. In the past couple of months, we’ve paid a large sum of hospital bills related to Liam’s NICU stay, paid off the van we bought in March, and paid our down payment on the new home. It’s been a miracle in our lives.
If you’re interested, here’s a link to a virtual tour of a house like ours. Except we’ve made some changes. Here’s our floor plan:
We’ve moved some things around, added 2 feet across the back of the house, and added some other fun stuff. Just ignore the skylight pictured here. That’s not actually happening.
Bryce made this mock-up to show how our “wall of windows” will look. We opted for a big window where the fireplace normally goes. Just pretend that the big window is looking out over an elementary school field. Our lot backs up to an elementary school.
One of the main reasons we’re building at this particular location is the community. We’ll be living in a community called Highbury at Lake Park and it is really lovely. Here’s the website for the community. Within a minute or two of our home, we’ll have a great Montessori school (I dream of maybe working there someday!), a brand new STEM elementary school (Science Technology Engineering Math), a charter school, a traditional public elementary school, a great rec center, a fishing pond, waterways to walk along, a golf course (in case we decide to take that up), and lots of walking paths. And Bryce’s commute will be shortened to less than 10 minutes! We’ll be a lot closer to Salt Lake and are excited to get into the city more often for shows and events.
Today, we had our pre-dig meeting with our superintendent and they start digging next week. I can’t believe it’s actually happening! I’ll post pictures of the progress along the way. Such an exciting time for our little family!
