MEETING WITH HOME BUILDERS.
Day 2 – 44 degrees this morning at 6:15 a.m.; what a surprise! Clear & sunny. The campground was quiet and all went well last night. We departed in the car (leaving the cats behind in the RV) at 7:30 a.m. for Claremont, NH via I-91 north, crossing from MA into VT, then NH. Beautiful country up here.
A little background: we first considered putting a house on our land soon after we bought the land in Maine. We even bought a design kit & built a very large dream house on a paper grid, placing furniture & everything. We thought at the time that we’d move to Maine permanently when we retired, selling our home in NY. For the next couple of years, we visited many builders, toured custom homes, and talked to dealers. We really liked post & beam and timberframe homes, particularly for sites in the woods. This was quite awhile ago, and we’ve changed our plans considerably. We now laugh at the old plan – who needs a mansion when you’ve lived in a 31 foot RV for many months at a time! Also, our land is so remote (which is wonderful in many ways), we had decided that living there full-time, particularly when older, wouldn’t be a good idea due to the lack of close-by medical facilities.
We’ve found that we cannot stay on our land in the RV once the temperatures drop, beginning usually early November. Winter there is long, and staying there comfortably in the RV isn’t really desired until spring arrives about 6 months later. A few months ago, we started seriously thinking about a house again so that we could stay for extended periods of time even during inclement weather conditions. We redesigned our house, on the computer this time. Actually, we redesigned it over and over again, making it smaller & smaller, partially due to budget constraints and partially due to the fact that we just don’t need that much space anymore. Also, we want to leave the smallest footprint on the land that we can.
Doing the research, we discovered different possibilities for our plan: timberframe/post & beam of course were still in the picture, maybe a “tiny house”, a green home (but the dense spruce make full solar difficult), a modular home, a pre-fab home, or a stick-built house. We contacted several companies to get estimates but found this was easier said than done. Basically, we got numbers ranging anywhere from $100 per square foot to $600 per square foot APPROXIMATELY, and each company offered different packages, many with different levels of service within. We narrowed down the field somewhat but needed much more information, even needing to know something as basic as: do we have enough room for a home (with a good water view) when taking into account the 75-foot shoreland zone setback; how big a home could we fit; what about our current septic system – down closer to the ledge, we’d have to pump uphill to the septic tank, how to deal with that, etc.
A trip to the land was in order to talk to builders and contractors in person. We needed to measure places on the property to decide on a possible homesite. We set up interviews and headed out on the current trip. The first interviews were scheduled for today. We’d already had to drop two favorite companies (Unity & GO Logic) and a potential post & beam company (John Libby) due to their prices. After the three in-person interviews today (Davis Frame, Timberpeg, and Habitat Post & Beam), and previous phone calls & e-mails with other companies, we found that our budget was a major problem. We then cancelled two other interviews with timberframe/post & beam companies that had been scheduled for the next couple of days, deciding to regroup & find out more about actual costs of the local subcontractors before moving forward further.
We did enjoy the three meetings today, and in particular appreciate the efforts & time taken by Habitat Post & Beam. If we do find that a timberframe/post & beam home is feasible after getting estimates from local contractors, at this time, Habitat would be our first choice.
Today the high was 76 degrees and it was sunny and breezy. Beautiful day and a really nice drive through a corner of VT & all around NH & MA. We got back to our campsite at 4:15 p.m. with minds boggled from all the home building information that we’d received.