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.