Picture #1

I will be taking pictures from this exact location over time as changes occur on the house so that we have a picture chronology of the house project. This is the 1st one.

Moving Forward at a Snails Pace

A few things have happened since my last post. I haven't had a chance to update in a while because my new job is keeping me busy. Anyway, here are updates and next steps.

On the city process front:

1. We talked to our attorney and he did some additional research on the city code regarding the signing of the plat drawing. He concluded that he could certify without our neighbor's signatures. Yea! But why didn't he do that to begin with? (The easiest thing, and cheapest, was to get our neighbors to sign since they all indicated last year that they would support this project.)
2. We validated a few things with the city and scheduled our public hearing. The public hearing took place on July 30, 2008.
3. The neighbor who refused to sign the plat drawing sent a detailed letter to the city protesting our project. They cited that we were in direct violation of existing Deed Restrictions and Covenants applying to the property. He also said that he would take whatever action is appropriate to make all parties involved in this unlawful breach to fully comply with the restrictions. OK, I could completely go off on this, but I think it would take up way too much time and energy. Suffice it to say that we have fully complied with the city and county requirements and went through the proper legal process to remove the restriction on our lot. The city said he could still sue us in civil court, but unless we've missed something (I doubt it), then I can't imagine what grounds he could do this.
4. During the city meeting, the City Planning Director brought the letter up to our attention and was very glad to see that we had the legal document from the county removing the restriction from our property.
5. The city gave us an unconditional approval to move forward with the sub-division of the lot.
6. Next steps with the city are the final staff review (scheduled September 10) and the development agreement.

On the house front:

1. In March this year we had a soils engineer come out and give us a soils report regarding the soils on the site where we plan to build the house. They found ground water at approximately 8 feet and found that we had low perk rate soils. This meant that we would have to have an 'engineered' septic system to accommodate for our clay soils.
2. When they did their soil sample, they also put a pvc pipe with holes in it so that we could see what the groundwater did while we irrigated in the spring.
3. Irrigation started in May and less than a week into it, we had water in our pipe up to one foot. We had many engineers tell us that it just wasn't possible to put a basement into ground with water at 1 foot.
4. We talked to many people about houses in Michigan and the East Coast where groundwater is high, but they still have basements. They put in pumps and treat the foundation so that water is mitigated.
5. We also observed that the water went back down to 8 feet less than a week after the irrigation stopped.
6. Miles finally found an engineer that was smart enough to point out that there is no way, if groundwater was at 8 feet, with low perk rate soil, that the groundwater level could rise and then fall that quickly. He suggested we dig a trench and take samples down to 8 feet to see if we could tell what was happening. His guess was that water was coming in over the top of the pipe and filling our hole.
7. Last week, Friday, August 22, we had our soils engineer come out with a back hoe and test the soils. He confirmed what the other engineer guessed and our groundwater situation is at 8 feet, not 1 foot. This is huge. Now we can build our basement down 5 feet (you need 3 feet before you get to groundwater), we can install sump pumps and a french drain and have our basement. This also means that our septic, instead of $30k will likely cost more like $7-10k.
8. So now we have our house designer completing the basement plans and getting the drawings ready for our structural engineer. We will also need to get a drainage plan together as well. We're hoping in the next few weeks we'll be able to submit our plans to the city to start the building permit process. I've heard people say that could take 3 weeks and some people say 3 months. But, at least we're moving on a few things.

Hopefully I'll be able to update with a little more frequency now. I've also started our picture chronology that will capture the building of the house from grass pasture to finished and landscaped house. Fun.

Another Bump in the Road

Hard to keep up with the posts, but we got some news today.

After talking to our attorney, we found out that the president of the BWA in fact cannot sign our plat as a representative of the water association. We would have to get each one of our neighbors (6 of them) to sign our plat drawing. In addition to this, we will need each one of them to sign a letter of intent saying that they will sign in order for the City Planner to schedule our public hearing.

A bummer, but not the end of the world. All of our neighbors agreed to sign a letter stating that they would allow us to remove the note from our original plat drawing in the county. This signature signifies much less. We are not proposing any changes to the ditch, meaning the water won't change, the flow won't change, etc. So, much less material than the plat note that was on the original drawing. The only difficult one would be the family that live in GA, but we've spoken to them before and they've been agreeable.

I sent a letter to them (because I don't know their phone number), giving them the details and asking them to sign our letter of intent. We got a note back from them yesterday simply stating that they do NOT intend to sign. No explanation, just 'no'.

I'm going through all sorts of emotions on this. Part of me wonders if they just don't understand and we should just call them. Part of me thinks that since they are trying to sell their property, that they just don't want to upset the apple cart, part of me thinks that they are pompous jerks and don't want someone else's plan mingling or possibly diminishing their opportunity to sell. I don't think it will, but they must perceive it that way, otherwise I don't see any reason why they wouldn't sign.

I am so bummed right now. This isn't going to stop us, but it will certainly slow us down and it will certainly end up costing us more money. I am so bummed that one person could do that to us! Our dream house! But, I don't think they can stop us. There must be some other recourse or path we can pursue.

So, since I'm still traveling, Miles will have to call our attorney on Monday and see what our plan B is going to be. What a drag.

Finally, Some Progress

We finally have some progress to report. This was a busy day on the project front. Wow.

After receiving the paperwork from our lien holder regarding how to release a lien, I was bummed. Not only would the process take 4-6 weeks, not including our time to get everything arranged, but also cost us $500 for the processing and who knows how much in appraisals, etc. So, I called the mortgage broker who will be doing our new loan and she advised me that the current lien holder only needed to sign to acknowledge that they owned a lien on the property. In addition to that, she advised that we talk to someone in the local office. I called our lien holder's local office and the VP there will be able to sign - yea!!!

Miles also FINALLY got ahold of the President of the BWA. He signed our letter of intent with no problems or questions whatsoever.

Monday I will call our attorney and just verify that the President can sign and that the lien holder simply needs to state that they hold a current lien on the property. After that, I'll take the LOI over to the city and we should be good to go to hearing.

We have a meeting with the city on Tuesday where they are reviewing with all the property owners all the development opportunities and challenges along Kechter, Timberline and Trilby Roads who all face similar challenges. I really need to set up a consulting business for this! It is an all day workshop with the city. I'll be interested to see who shows up.

Miles also met with our builder today to discuss exactly where we want to put the house and find out what options we have with the ground water being so high. We may be OK, but we have some research to do. The builder is waiting for the plans, so I called our designer to see what was up. Turns out, he was waiting for us to give him the go ahead. Everything looked great, so we're good to go. He'll finalize plans and get them to the builder.

We met with the kitchen designer this week too. He showed us 3D models of his design. We made some minor tweaks and I think we like what we're seeing. He's going to make our suggested changes. We also made some changes to bathroom cabinets as well.

We think we want to go to another cabinet maker to see what kind of design they'll come up with. We might do that a little later, but we needed to get something in the works so that our builder had an idea of cost.

On Bluestem news, we had the inspector, staging consultant and appraiser all come today. Pretty extensive comments from the staging consultant, but nothing different than what I was thinking anyway, so I think we're on the same page. We do have a lot of work to do, but we'll just take one room at a time. It will be at least 3-4 weeks before we can get the house on the market anyway, so we've got a little time. We will have lots of packing and throwing to go.

The inspector came up with very little to do, so that was good. We also think the appraiser may come in with a higher square footage than what was disclosed when we bought the house, so that should be good.

Progress is good! Now I won't be able to sleep tonight because I'm excited that we are making some progress. At least that's better than not being able to sleep because we've got a long drawn out process with our neighbors and with our lien holder. That was the best news of the day!