Stress!

I haven't been sewing, I haven't been quilting, I have barely kept up my housework. What we HAVE been doing is searching the MLS online and driving around looking at houses and talking to a builder who specializes in just the kind of house we need -- we have to decide what to do. Stay here and put more money in this house to make it work better for us, even though we'll never recoup it? Build a new house? Wait a year and see if the new development we're looking at takes off and shapes up like the builder anticipates? Keep looking at existing houses? ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!

It's enough to make a person crazy. If we didn't have such specific needs - handicap accessiblity - there would be a blue million houses in this town that would work perfectly well for us. So far, I have only seen two townhouses with completely step-free entrances, and no free-standing houses at all. We're pretty sure the townhouses wouldn't suit us in the long run, and the only way to get a house we need is to build it. We could perhaps find one that could be modified to suit, but so far I haven't seen a good candidate. The house we have could be made to work, but putting that much money into an older house wouldn't be sensible.

And, quite frankly, we would both like a new house, a little fancier and better than we have had. All our married lives we have been frugal about house buying, and now that we are retired, it might be time to step it up a notch. I'm not talking about those monstrosities you see on HGTV, just a little nicer finishes, higher ceilings, a more open floor plan. No bigger than the one we have (how much room do two people need, anyway?), just a little more wow factor.

We found a builder than specializes in barrier-free houses, and a new development is starting in town, in an area we like. Four houses are already under construction, and if everything shapes up like the builder plans, it will be nice. It is a planned community with a HOA which provides all the lawncare, a clubhouse, a pool, streetlights, underground utilities, sidewalks, located away from the traffic and rush, and peaceful and quiet. The all-brick houses aren't enormous but tastefully done. We have walked through a model and we both like the house. The problem? The money. If you're looking for anything out of the ordinary like this barrier-free house, it will cost you.

Do we make the leap? Do I have the nerves to build a new house? I don't know yet.

Dragonfly progress

Or rather, lack of progress. Eight patches and some basting does not progress make. But I have been doing a lot of everything except sewing this week.

You can see how the dragonfly body pops off the background. There's one small wing segment there too. It's going to be great, if I can ever get back to working on it.

If you're a homeowner, water is the enemy

I looked at a few houses today, and the theme seemed to be "control water runoff before it gets under your house". The first was a lovely stucco and stone house in a golfcourse community. The house was situated on a corner lot, where the side yard unfortunately sloped up to the street, which was higher than the foundation. The front yard had a beautiful planting bed ringed with stone. A path of irregular fieldstone wound from the planting bed across the side yard into the back. It looked like decorative landscaping at first. When I walked over the property, I realized that it was a gravel-filled french drain trench topped with the fieldstone pieces to disguise it. The owner had laid the drain trench to try to catch runoff before it got to his house. It might work, it might not, but I wouldn't want to trust it. If the curb is higher than your foundation, the water is going to run downhill, come what may, and you're in its path. He also had a crawlspace exhaust fan and had put pea gravel over the dirt in his whole crawlspace, so I have suspicions that the plan wasn't working.

At the second house we saw something of the same situation - corner lot, side road higher than the yard, sloping side yard. This guy was in the process of installing a french drain around his house and had back-filled and seeded the recently installed trench, which was strewn with straw to protect the grass seed. It was all too obvious that there was a problem he was trying to correct so he could unload his house. Pity the poor buyer who doesn't understand what he's seeing. Let's hope he has a good house inspector.

All this can be eliminated of course if the builder understands how to grade off the lot to control the water flow. I've had two houses that could have had water problems if the builders weren't smart. I live in a hilly area of the country, and elevation changes are par for the course in subdivisions. You don't find much very flat land around here, and if you do, it might be swampy. If you lay out the lot around the house site to allow the water to funnel away from the foundation there's not a problem. Where I live now drainage control is effected by crowning the lot at the house site, letting the elevation roll down slightly toward the property lines away from the foundation, and sculpting a slight dip along each property line to channel the water away from the houses and out to the street. It works wonderfully. There is also a small dip in my back yard that allows the gutter downspout discharge to run away from the house, since they don't go to buried french drains. (It's fine with me, because those drains just silt up and clog anyway, and this method always works. Buried drains may be prettier, but not when you're digging up your lawn to clean them out -- and you always have to, sooner or later.) The street in front of my house goes up a hill, and each lot up the street is slightly higher than the one before it. Everybody's house would be catching the runoff from the house above him on the hill, and the guy at the bottom - i.e., me - would have a terrible mess if this wasn't done right. But in the 60's when these houses were built, the builders were smart about it.

This is just one more example of the axiom - the newer the house, the more careful the buyer has to be. At least in my city. By the late 80's, houses were springing up like mushrooms and had all kinds of problems. The houses built nowadays may be showy, with their granite countertops and such, but if you look at a house that's been there a few years, it will declare its problems. If it's just been there a few months, who knows what you really have?

An apology in advance to realtors, if there are any reading this

Not that what I have to say isn't true, but you may not want to hear it.

I went to see a house in a new development next to a golf course yesterday. (No, we don't golf. But we do like nice landscaping, lakes and built-in lawn upkeep.) I had initially pulled the information on this new house for cost per square foot comparison purposes with the builder-who-wants-the-sun-and-moon. It was cheaper by a significant amount and I was wondering what he did that they didn't. When I showed the listing to my husband, he said it looked interesting and why not go take a look?

So I called the listing agent and made arrangements t0 meet her there. Let me say right now that it was one of those new developments with the clubhouse and pool and the office in the model home where you have to go sign in to see the property. I felt like I was trying to get into Fort Knox. So, I got in the realtor's car and we started down the street looking for the address. We circled through and finally decided that the address listed was the open lot three doors down from the clubhouse. I.E., THERE WASN'T A HOUSE THERE YET! I don't know where they got the picture of the house on the MLS listing, but it sure wasn't here. However, it was one of the standard plans they were building, and there was a nearly completed identical one around the corner so we went in that one.

From the front it looked so promising. Only two steps to a nice front porch, which made the elevation not too high to add a ramp. It was attractive inside, too, with three bedrooms downstairs and a guest room with bath and unfinished attic storage upstairs. We weren't really looking for a house with any room upstairs, but putting the guest suite up there was a practical thing. (I was already figuring out how to make the unfinished bonus space a sewing room!)

Then I opened the door to the garage and it all went to crap. This was a plan with the garage in the rear off an alley. The lot was lower in the rear, enough that there were seven steps down to the garage floor. That many steps absolutely won't work, so this unit was off the list.

As if the house wasn't enough of a disappointment, this realtor is running her mouth the whole time we're looking around, interrupting me as I'm trying to explain what kind of house we have to have. And she's pushing some development up the road, talking about how this house is overpriced and not very well done and Mulberry Park is so much better, yadda, yadda, yadda. I had the distinct impression what was happening is her company was hooked up with this new Mulberry Park thing and she would make a lot more money selling one of those houses.

After I while I just wanted to kill her and hide the body in one of that house's many walk-in closets.

So, we leave and I tell her I will drive by Mulberry Park on the way home (mostly to shut her up). Except it's not on the way home, but waaaaay out of town and not in a handy place. I loop through and peruse the place anyway, and yeah, it's all Craftsman style and cute and everything, but it's very crowded together and I really wanted brick no-maintenance exterior. I stop at the office and check out the available floorplans, and none of them are more than 1800 sq. ft. This after I repeatedly said that we have a 2000 sq. ft. house and are not interested in downsizing.

So here is the root of my gripe: is there a realtor out there that will really listen to you and try to find the house you want? Because this isn't the first time this has happened to me. When we were looking for our last house, I gave the lady a detailed explanation of what our needs were before we even looked at a single property. (Let me add that this isn't me being overly picky, but actual handicap accessibility issues.) And after all that, she drives us to a two story house. I looked at her and said, just what part of one level house do you not understand? It was like she was going to trot us around to all the properties she had languishing on the market in the hopes she could fob one of them off on us. She made no real effort to try to locate a house we could use.

We've found the last two houses we bought by ourselves. I've never gotten any help worth mentioning from a realtor. The realtor for our first house was a bored doctor's wife that sold houses for something to do. She surely didn't need the money; in fact, she cut her commission to lower our price. I've only dealt with one realtor that approached the job in a businesslike manner, and it was a man. (OK, even I winced when I said that.) All the female realtors we've seen try to manipulate you emotionally to sell you on a house and push the properties that make the most money for them.

I've been thumbing through the MLS for weeks now, finding a good 90% of the houses have to be removed from consideration immediately due to handicap accessibility issues. The remaining ones are either too small, or too far out of town, or waaaaay too much money.

So I'm irritated and disappointed and depressed with the whole process. It took two years to find the house we're in now, and I was a whole lot younger then. I'm not sure I can do it again.

I'm disgusted

Well, we found the perfect house for us - but it is obscenely expensive. I figure it's because there are absolutely boatloads of deep-pocketed aging baby boomers out there. We met with a builder who specializes in the perfect type of house for us - adequate size, all one level, handicap accessible, maintenance free exterior, beautiful interior finishes, sensible floorplans - and he wants the sun, moon and stars for his houses ...... and there seems to be a ready population willing to give them to him. There's a new development with four houses so far under construction, and two sold before they were out of the framing stage. This makes me a little ill. I'm willing to pay a fair price for a house - but not the kind of inflated price this guy is demanding - and evidently getting.

We looked at the townhouse but it wouldn't work out because there is no usable exterior space at all - it would be like that apartment we rented that nearly drove us bonkers. The interior of the townhouse was pretty good, but it would have been claustrophobic to have nowhere to go outside. This builder also had one more townhouse available in a different new development close to where we now live that would have been a very good fit for our needs too, but it was way too expensive, like his houses.

Well, I guess we struck out. Back to the MLS.

Dragonfly applique project

Here is my dragonfly applique panel. It's been about a week since I started, and I thought it would be interesting to post pictures at intervals chronicling my progress.
I know right now it just looks like blobs of green. You can see the black area where the first dragonfly body will be inserted. I have four more green patches to add to the right side, and then I will start on the wings, which are made up of smaller patches and will be easier to handle.

All in all, I'm happy with the progress. I think I might rather have picked my fabrics myself instead of using those from the Keepsake Quilting kit, though, if only because the weight and texture of the different fat eights included vary so much. Some are very easy to applique, and some are harder to turn under tiny points and sharp curves because they are thicker. Not all are true batiks. Two of them are printed and have a tendency to show the actual white color of the greige goods on which the pattern is printed in areas around your needle holes if you pull your stitch tight and distort the fabric's threads. (I didn't quite know how to explain that, but you probably get the drift.)

Anyway, it feels good to be actually making this, and it will look great in the living room. But lest I get too cocky, here is what I have left to finish:

A little daunting, isn't it?

House shopping.....

......or, rather, subdivision shopping. We have been driving around the city after dinner these past several weeks (with a few ice cream stops for rewards) looking at newer real estate developments. Without looking for actual houses, we are taking the pulse of the subdivisions, seeing how busy the streets are, what the houses look like, how many kids are playing in the middle of the street (you think I joke), are there sidewalks and lights, etc.

The thing is, we want to decide whether to fix up the old rancher and stay here, or buy something with less maintenance and in a quieter area. In the house shopping arena, we have several strikes against us: we have to have a one level house, and not only a one level house, but with a minimum (preferably no) steps to enter the house. We also need to have room for the humongous TV and home theater setup, his computer desk (including surround sound and sub woofer - and here I am satisfied with just a laptop!) and my home office stuff as well as quilting stuff. So we can't easily go smaller than the 1907 square foot ranch we have now.

Actually, if you compare apples to apples with this house and a new 2000 square foot house, you come up short on the new house because of all the walk-in closets, and enormous bathrooms, and sun rooms that seem to sprout in all new construction, all of which eat up room and don't mean a lot to me. Oh, I like a big closet as much as the next girl, but I've seen closets as big as whole rooms. And how big does a bathroom really need to be? Those huge jetted tubs are ho-hum to me. I'm a shower girl. What a waste of space.

I have been combing the MLS and finding new development to tour, and sometimes we just pick a major road and drive, zipping into any interesting side streets. Using that plan, we came upon a townhouse development on the north side of the river that seems to have possibilities.

An aside - where I live, you are either north-of-the-river people or south-of-the-river people. Almost no one I know looks upon them as interchangeable. Darned if I understand why. Where I live, and where this new townhouse development are, seem pretty comparable to me.

Anyway, in this development, there are three three-bedroom townhouses for sale. Two are being sold by the original owners, who only lived there 3 or 4 years (why do people move so much?). The third is the model home and is still owned by the developer. It is technically a townhouse, but it is freestanding, no common walls. A real plus to this former brief apartment-dweller, who was almost driven to distraction by neighbor noise. We're going to look at the model home tomorrow and see if a townhouse is a possible for us. I've peeked in the windows and it's got a killer kitchen, but I'm just not sure if it's big enough.

There is another possibility. This builder is starting a "garden homes" development up the street from the townhouses, which are all basically free-standing town homes. The HOA takes care of the outside maintenance like at the townhouses. This is a little pricey, but looks like it has real possibilities. I spoke with the real estate lady today and she is going to email me the plot map and house plans (which I haven't received yet because I suspect she's waiting to set eyes on us tomorrow to decide if we're good for the money!). I'm looking forward to seeing the house plans, because this may be just what we need.

If we go the route of fixing up our house and staying here, the only danger is increased noise. Our little metropolis has an airport with only two runways - the one that is in service, and the spare. The main runway is parallel to us and we don't get any noise from air traffic. However, and this is major, when the main runway is out of service for repairs or such, they use the alternate which puts the planes' approach path right over our house. It's loud, even though the airport isn't that close. It's just in our end of town. If they ever decide to use the alternate runway daily, we are screwed.

The upgrades our house will need, such as replacement windows, will ameliorate the noise somewhat, but it's not a good thing. As is it, on Reserve weekends, we get a lot of military air traffic noise; the helicopters are the worst. There is talk that the Reserve is going to relocate their airstrip, but that may only allow the airport to expand here since they won't have to share it with military craft, and that's no improvement.

These are tough decisions. We're going to have to drop major money on this house if we stay. Replacement windows, new driveway, new garage doors, interior painting, carpet, new vanities and flooring in all the bathrooms, a screen porch or somewhere to sit outside that you can reach without descending a precipitous set of concrete stairs with no handrail out the sliding door in the den. Also rework the front steps so we can add a ramp later if we have to. The house is structurally sound, it just needs a lot of cosmetic updating. We painted and re-carpeted when we moved here in 1993; we replaced the kitchen about five years ago, re-roofed and repainted the outside about four years ago; replaced the heat pump last year. After living here fifteen years, everything needs a little brush-up. Not to mention my yellow bedroom, which I liked fifteen years ago, but is wearing on me now. And the wallpaper in the guest room which must go.

Decisions, decisions. This house has been a good one, and I don't want to jump into a situation where I'm seduced by a pretty new facade. Not to worry about my husband in that regard; he absolutely does not allow emotion to influence major purchases. I've seen him drive a car dealer nuts because he refuses to get pulled in by a shiny new vehicle's charms. He's the same with houses, so he is the official voice of sanity!