My husband Chris and I have always wanted to live in a cottage on a chunk of land. We are both very inspired by the past, so we wanted our house to look old, and we wanted our kids to be able to play outside as much as possible. We also didn’t have a ton of money to work with, considering that we have been a single income family ever since our oldest daughter was born eight years ago.
We were looking online and in person for land pretty much since we got married. At first it was just “window shopping” and felt very out of reality, but as time went on we got more serious about looking. For a while we weren’t sure whether we wanted to buy an already built house on land or build our own- in our price range it was clear that we would be doing a lot of work on a house either way and it would come down to what was cheapest. What I originally wanted to do was to buy a camper and put it on land while we built slowly to save money, but that didn’t end up working out because of laws in our area.
We found our dream land!
We bought our land (just under 12 acres) in late Summer 2020. We were both getting a little desperate to “get out of Dodge” at that point. We were living in a Duplex that we owned, but it had no yard and wasn’t in the nicest neighborhood. The land we bought had been on the market for a while- we had actually looked into it almost a year before that and I couldn’t believe it had just sat there that whole time. I know it’s where we were meant to be because the price was so reasonable and the seller chose us out of a few different offers.
Our first step to beginning our build was to find a bank that would work with our contractor- we wanted to use him specifically because he was someone we already knew and trusted and he was willing to let Chris be on site working alongside him and making decisions. The one bank that we could use had a few demands before closing, the biggest one being that they wanted us to sell our current house. So we put it on the market with the stipulation that whoever bought it had to let us keep living there for one year. I really didn’t think anyone would be interested. The house was nothing amazing- in fact, one half of it would have to be completely gutted. Our tenants had lived there and smoked indoors for 20 years. Right after we put the house on the market, the tenants told us they were moving out, which we were thankful for because it absolutely made the house more sellable. Oddly enough, a vice president of the Hershey’s chocolate company purchased our home for a friend- sight unseen, pending inspections. Now that we had the house sold, and somewhere to live, it was time to get serious about getting our new house plan materialized. Stay tuned for part 2!