And so it has begun. We have already been working on the new home. It has not quite 14 acres and a large pond on the site.

This is the land we plan to live out the rest of our lives. We will be building it with Green technology (Solar, Geothermal, reclaimed wood, etc). We plan to grow organic and non-GMO foods. We also plan to home school our children. We had the Architect design a home school room into the plans.

Just wanted this to be a simple post about some of the topics we will go into deeper in the days ahead.

The biggest challenge we had was looking for a home plan that fit the bill for a ‘Home School’. We found little out there for as far as designs for homes that suited our needs let alone for a Home School. We did find one Architect that had a number of plans that were on his sight. He had some wonderful designs but ones that just a little too large and costly for our needs.

The additional challenge was that we wanted a wrap around porch and a home not designed for a neighborhood. When I say ‘not designed fora  neighborhood’, we found most home designs on site were made for neighborhoods with smaller lots. Not for one with 14 acres in mind. This also meant that most were designed without window on the sides of the house facing the neighbors. Yes, we could put them in, but again most of these homes were designed on the interiors to have no windows either.

The other dilemma was that hiring an Architect for our needs was costly too. Architects usually charge a percentage of what the house will cost in the end. This bill would have been over $10,000 for our home and just not worth the money. We are not that picky in our needs. We also felt that we were not designing a huge massive custom castle. Just a home with a few specific needs.

The ‘Wants’ for the New Home

Overall our needs besides the porch were we wanted to ideally have the whole living space on a single story. We were tired of going up and down stairs on our last home. We did allow for the Home Schooling room to be on the second story. We also wanted to downsize from the 3500+ square feet in the last home. We felt it was too much room for us currently and in the future. And, too much to keep up with. We do not have a cleaning service or lawn service. Our family is small with just a toddler and perhaps one or more on the way. So the new home is a little over 2500 square feet plus a 500 square foot Home School room. The garage is about  2 1/2 cars in size.  We love to cook and wanted to have an above average kitchen.  Not a kitchen with Wolf or Viking appliances but ones that were practical in cost and could hand serving a number of folks.

So what did we do?

We ended finding some plans that we liked and mostly fit the bill by about 75% and hiring an Architect to adjust the plans. This was a local Architect that had a full time job at a firm and worked on our plans on the side. The cost of changing the plans was $1300. His cost would have moved up if we made some massive changes or made him change after every draft. We only changed our house plans really twice during the process. And even after the final we are making a few changes along the way that I will go into more detail later. But overall a huge savings in money.