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Right, this is the exposition. Early this year, my wife was visiting the newest park in the county, and noticed a large number of lots for sale in the area. So she took down some numbers from signs, made a few calls, and the next thing I know, I was getting a cell phone call at work from a very excited wife, telling me I had to see this property she had found.

I had no inclination to get excited about a property. We had previously considered a six acre lot in the city limits, the seller wouldn’t negotiate on the price, and the lending terms were just prohibitive. Typical banks wanted 25% to 35% down payment for a lot loan, and the interest rates were two to three percent above the mortgage rate. So the numbers just weren’t working out.

But my wife talked me into going to see this place anyhow. And we really liked it. And the seller was a cool guy, he lives on the only developed lot in the subdivision (basically a quarter-section that had been divided into 16 ten acre lots). And he was willing to finance me, with 10% down, 6% on a 30 year amortization schedule. That made a major difference.

The short story is, we bought the lot. Lot number 11 at Sunflower Estates. Ten acres of pasture in rural Johnson County. It’s still only a 20 minute drive to work for me. We became landowners in March, and we sold our house in April, and moved in with the wife’s parents, who graciously offered to let us. So I’m homeless now, or at least I’m not a homeowner. It makes taking calls from telephone siding salesmen a lot more fun, but I digress.

We knew what we wanted in a lot, and this lot has all of it. There’s so many nice things about it, I’m not sure I could list them all. But we only had a general idea of what we wanted out of a house. One thing I am very interested in is energy efficiency, and I have been impressed with insulated concrete forms (ICFs) for some time. I spent a good deal of time researching ICFs and decided I want to build my house using them.

So I needed to find a builder. We interviewed a few, mostly taking recommendations from the forms manufacturer as a starting list. After some time, we found a builder that suits our style and is trained on ICFs and is a really nice guy to boot. We took a fair amount of time with him and got some more of our questions answered, saw some finished and in-progress ICF houses, and met some of his customers.

So next we need to find an architect. We have some magazines filled with stock plans, and a couple of them look pretty much like what we want to build, just needing a few tune-ups, but the county will want to see a footing drawing, so I need to get those plans modified. So we are now looking for an architect.

As you can tell, We’re pretty early in the process. I will be posting pictures and drawings and sketches, and all kinds of links along with my ramblings as this progresses. I’ve got a lot of ideas, and even though I know they won’t all make it into the house, I’ll have this site to jot them down and discuss them.

Update (July 2003): The ICF plan didn’t work out. There was too much hidden cost, so we are proceeding with a conventional stick framed house using 2×6s. However,we are still building an “energy star” home, with Low-emissivity windows and very high valued insulation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 18th, 2002 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.