We'd been looking for a new home for years. Really. Years. Ask our real estate agent. He's shown us over 70 homes, and I've looked a quite a few on my own without him.
We wanted four bedrooms above ground, a living room, dining room, kitchen and family room on the first floor, a house with lots of light and decent outdoor space where the kids have room to safely run around. Oh, yeah, and we want to stay in not only in our school district in Chicago, but in our neighborhood as well. Yes, we were asking for a lot.
We were about to compromise and move out of our neighborhood. We were in the final stages of negotiations on a beautiful, historic victorian less than a block away from the elementary school. The houe had been on the market for over a year, we had been going back and forth for about a month. We were within $20,ooo of getting the house at the price we wanted when it happened. My dream lot was listed.
The dream lot is corner lot close to the lake and still in our little neighborhood. It has amazing east, west and south exposures. There was supposed to be a $4 million home built on the lot. I knew I loved the location and also knew that I was unlikely to win the lottery and be able to pay $4 million for a house. The construction on that home had stopped - the builder went bankrupt. Nothing happened on the lot for year. Finally, the bank took back the land and listed it.
My real estate agent was expecting me to show up at his office to finalize our negotiating strategy for getting to a price agreement on the house we had bid on. Instead, I showed up and said that I wanted to put an offer in on the "corner lot down the block", but first I needed to learn a little about building a house.
I called a few people, ask a surprisingly small number of questions considering the magnitude of the task. I called my husband to see if he was up for it - he was. So, we canceled our bid on the other house and put in an offer on the land. We reached agreement with the bank on price in about a week. Now, all we needed to do was design and build a house.
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