Our Dream Home, Delivered!

Floor plan view of our "Dream Home"

Jack and I have made our decision. We will be buying a manufactured home for our property rather than build a house on site.

We were able to make it to Hot Springs again to visit our favorite pre-fab home manufacturer’s rep, Darla. For over an hour we bombarded her with our many questions. When the grilling was done, we were satisfied. She was going to be making a sale.

We picked out a lovely 1,800+ square foot home with three bedrooms, an office, fireplace and oak kitchen cabinets. Our dining area will feature a 5 foot sliding glass door and our heating/cooling system will be a heat pump. We would have liked to do the geothermal system but we were told that runs another $25,000 – installed.

On Sunday, we met the site development person, Bud, at our property. For about $1,000 Bud is going to level out our hill - so our prefab house can go in along with space reserved for a carport. For $300 + materials he will create our driveway out of a gravel and clay mix that is very popular around here. We have to move our septic system location from the original plan...it doesn't fit in the current area. Bud will work with the original guy who mapped it out to get the plans changed and get the update approved with the county and heath board channels. The foundation of the house, connecting electric and plumbing and anything else required to set up the house will be done by the installers. Once the house is in place, we will be responsible for adding the decks and a carport/shed. How is that for manifesting easy!!!

There is some sad news though. As much as I wanted to save the trees, it's going to be brutal. Bud said he is required by law to grade the land away from the house by at least 10 feet. This is to insure that water does not drain under the house which would cause black mold; a serious problem around here because of our hot and humid summers. Also, our lot slants in two directions away from the top of the hill. Bud and his crew will have to level it in both directions to get the home to sit level and drain properly. There is at least a 6 foot drop from east to west and equally as large a drop from north to south. A lot of earth will have to be moved to the lower areas.

Our septic system plan involves four - 75 foot long trenches – dug 4 feet deep for laying the drainage system. That is in addition to the tank area and the pipes that go up to the house. The installer will use a backhoe for this work. It is possible to go around the larger trees, but the tree root systems will be compromised. All the smaller trees will be removed as they are too small to go around. The Oak trees are the majority of smaller trees.

In addition to all of that - the home is delivered in two halves on trailers. The site will have to be graded so the truck drivers can pull the house into position and still have room to drive the truck and trailer around the other side and get back to our driveway. There is a sharp drop on the east side of the house down to a gully that runs to the creek. Even if we put in a site built home, a lot of this work would need to take place to secure this side of the land. It was a sad day on Sunday, for me and the trees.

The upside of this is that we will now have a nice area to build a pond on the east side of the house, and we will have additional sunny areas for planting gardens. We were told that most of the trees growing on our land are considered scrub by the locals. Other than the oak trees, what is left is fast growing pines and a lot of weedy shrub stuff. We plan to replace a lot of the lost trees with Oak, Maple and local trees. I am thinking a magnolia tree in the front yard would be awesome!!! Zone 7 – I have a lot of trees to choose from!

We have also made decisions on our timing! Our current plan is to have the site leveled and the drive way put in by the end of March. This will give the land and drive way time to settle before we actually move the house in this fall. We are looking at having the house delivered November 1. That would give us a month to move out of our rental house and find a cheap apartment somewhere in Little Rock. Our plan is to live in the little apartment during the week and live out on the land on weekends, holidays and when Jack takes vacations. Preliminary numbers confirm that we will be able to rent a small place and pay our mortgage for the same amount we are currently paying for rent! Now I am wishing we only had a 6 month lease on this place. The time will be good though - in November the place won’t look so much like a construction zone when we move in as we will have the whole summer to work on landscaping!!!

The Land Is Calling

Here we are on one of our many adventures at our land. Even with little rain in the past few weeks, our creek is flowing at a fast rate! Behind Jack is our creek to the east and behind Joanne is our creek to the west.

Our land has been calling to us a lot lately. When Jack was not on call this month, we hung out at the land. We absolutely love it there and realized there is no way we can wait for Jack’s retirement to build our home!

One of our top priorities while visiting our lot this month was to determine where we would build our home. We wanted to be on the top of our hill, but not risk falling off into the ravine by the creek. We also wanted to be sure the builders would have adequate space to move their machinery around with minimal damage to the trees. I want to protect as many of the trees as possible. We spent hours moving around the stakes and running guide lines. The whole time we discussed all the work ahead of us. Because there are no housing codes out in the country we realized we would be babysitting this project to be sure everything was done to our expectations. And, there was so much we were going to have to do on our own if we were going to be able to afford the house of our dreams and still have a small house payment!

After marking out the dimensions of the dream home and spending some time cleaning up brush and trash; we headed to Hot Springs for a quick meal. On the way, we went by another one of those manufactured home places. We had spent a day in December checking out these type homes and were really impressed with what we saw. We were concerned though about the homes depreciating rather than appreciating in value, and had a lot of questions still. We decided to stop again and learn more about these homes.

Two hours later, we left with a bunch of our questions answered, a pile of brochures and a web site address to explore for more home design options. We had toured several of the homes and were really impressed with the quality and design of the homes. We realized with a manufactured home, we could buy a better quality built home for a lot lower price- like about 35% less than the cost of building a stick house. The manufactured home would be built to code because of all the HUD supervision at the manufacturing site. Most importantly, we didn’t need to hire a contractor or babysit the project – the manufacturer would take care of everything from site preparation to water and electric hook up. And, most of the costs were included in the price of the home!

We went home and read through all the materials and thoroughly explored the website! On the last page of the website was this really nice home with about 200 more feet of space than we were looking for. But, the house met all of our requirements for our dream home and the extra features were really nice.

Somehow we knew, we wouldn’t be building a home, we would be buying a manufactured home instead. And, once it was delivered – we could move in immediately. Now all we had left to do was figure out the timing.

The Pizza Experience

Friday night is date night - thanks to some good friends of ours, the Petersons, in MN. This is time Jack and I specifically set aside each week to be together and reconnect after a long work week. Lately, we have been using our date nights for dining experiences in our new community.

Last Friday night we went to a place called Larry's Pizza to see if their pizza could satisfy the pallet like a good ole Gina Special from Gina Maria's Pizza in Eden Prairie. We knew it was a pretty tall order, but we thought the place was up to it!

As we walked up to the front door we could see there were people standing around everywhere - lined up along the building, in the entry area and surrounding the hostess. I actually got excited thinking we had found the perfect pizza on our first attempt!

We slowly made our way to the hostess desk and starting asking questions. It appears we had arrived for the Friday night Pizza Buffet (also offered on Tuesdays) with all the salad and pizza you could eat for $10.00. We are trying to avoid buffets as we have found we tend to overeat and we knew we should have left. But, with so many people milling around waiting to be seated, we figured it must be really good pizza!

After 20 minutes of sipping on beverages, we were led to a numbered table. We dropped off our beverages and headed over to the salad bar to fill our plates. For the number of people seated in the restaurant, there was not much of a pizza selection under the warming lights. We headed back to our seats with salads. Within 2 minutes of sitting down, a waitress walked by us with a pizza in her hands and she was yelling out - "Garlic Ranch Chicken"! Following close behind was a co-worker offering "Peanut Butter Cookie with Chocolate". Shortly after that, a pizza ingredient I recognized - pepperoni - was offered. It was like a reverse buffet. The servers carried the pizzas around yelling out the ingredients and if you so much as twitched in their direction, they hand delivered their offerings to your plate. After snagging a few pieces of pizza in this way we were able to taste the wares.

It was what I call cardboard pizza – paper thin crust piled with a wild variety of ingredients, sauces and spices. They were offering pizzas I couldn't have imagined - even in my sleep! Ever try a margarita pizza? How about baked potato pizza. Not me! But people around us were gobbling them up like there was no tomorrow!

We decided we would try to snag a piece of the peach desert pizza. The desert was offered when we first came in but we didn't know how the game worked so we didn't snag any. We figured a fresh peach pizza desert would come out of the kitchen - eventually. After 10 minutes of waiting and watching, one of the servers spied us and came to our table. He noted we were not snagging pizza anymore and was wondering if we wanted refills on our beverage. We asked more questions and learned that if you want something special, you have to flag down a server and he/she will write down your table number on this huge white board by the kitchen. When the pizza of choice comes out - the server delivers the slices to the tables listed on the board, first.

I requested the peach pizza dessert. We had ample time to watch our fellow diners and servers as it took 20 minutes for the peach pizza dessert to be delivered - direct to our table. The server laid several small slices of the pizza on our plates and left yelling out "Peach Pizza Dessert." Jack and I figured peach must not be a local favorite. While it was delicious(much better than any of the meat and vegetable pizza's we tried) and well worth the wait; it will be a long time - if ever - before we venture back to Larry’s Pizza and his pizza buffet. As we battled our way through the massive wall of people still waiting to get seated, we decided the draw was on the quantity of pizza available - not the quality. Our search is still on for the perfect Arkansas pizza.

A Fresh New Year

Greetings from the warm southern state of Arkansas. As I check out the Minnesota weather on the internet, I am reminded once again of one of the many blessings of our move. While the North coils under a freezing arctic blast, we continue to stretch and grow under the southern warmth of sunshine.


And, we have been busy.

New Years Day seemed like a perfect opportunity to get outside and play in the sun. Our destination was the Coleman quartz mine and the forecast was calling for temps in the 50's. We were fortunate our weather had been favorable all week; no rain meant that we would not be digging in mud. It felt good to be outside digging in the earth and looking once again for her treasures - even though the ground was cold and our fingers froze up quickly. We came away with happy hearts but realized we probably wouldn't return again until the end of February. (Spring) This is "show" season as most of the mine operations are geared to preparing and attending the various shows around the country. The focus at the Coleman mine we were told was packing - no trucks were working down in the mine. Of course, it was a Holiday! We were content with going through the existing piles that were dumped the previous week. Most of the piles seemed to be from clean up work as there were not a lot of crystals to be found. Again, we were just happy to be outside – In January – digging in the earth.

Last weekend we finally made it out to our land for some quality time. We can only go on the weeks that Jack is not on call as his work cell phone has no reception on the land. We are working to find a solution to this phone issue as it will limit when we are actually able to move to our land as well.

We spent the weekend mapping out where we want our new home located and clearing out some of the small brush. The land is filled with very large pine trees and smaller oak trees. Our goal is to have a very minimal impact on the land and only remove as many of the larger trees as are absolutely necessary. A lot of the bush and clutter around the house site will have to go though as we don't want to encourage snakes and critters to take up residence in our immediate living space. We also enjoyed walking along our creek and spending time in meditation. It was so peaceful in the woods! I know I will have to visit the woods often until we can actually move out there.

So far this year, we also attended our first Course in Miracles class and were able to participate in a healing session at our new Unity Church. The course class was a little more structured than we were used to but both Jack and I realize that is what we need right now. At the healing session, we met a woman who has connections with the Psychic community of Little Rock. She also gave me a lead on a possible job at the University of Arkansas - in their research department. It was enough to motivate me to update my resume, get a haircut and freshen up my suit.

This afternoon - I think I'll head over to the local job service to see what is available in the area - besides retail! It feels like it's time for me to find a pleasurable way to earn income as we continue to settle into our new home and community.