The image on the front page of the blog is of the property we are buying. If I tell the story about how we arrived there, it might give a little insight into the journey we’ve already been on, and how it has shaped what we’re doing. There’s also some cool God-Provision stuff along the way too.
And just so you know, I have a feeling this might be a long post. So maybe this is going to take more than one post.
We’ve talked off and on for a couple years about building a new house. It’s been one of those, “hey maybe someday that would be cool” kind of conversations. I’ve thought about floor plans a bit, I’ve thought about what we would want in a house we could design and build ourselves.
There has also been this property for sale down the road from us for the last couple years. It’s 3 doors down from where we live now, and there use to be a house there, but someone bought it, knocked the house down, and then their plans must have changed because they put the empty lot back up for sale. It is a double lot, twice the size of the one I’m on currently. We could use a bigger yard for sure, and the ability to start from scratch is really appealing.
So we discussed it over the years, and a few months ago I finally called the listing agent for the property. I thought maybe it’s time to put a budget together and see if we could make it happen.
The property had sold 2 months earlier. But the thought of buying property, even one so close to home, had got us thinking and dreaming a little. So the conversation progressed to where these conversations normally go, which meant us talking about what we actually wanted in a property. What would be worth moving for? What kind of location would we want to be in? Neighborhood or country? Acreage? What do we want to accomplish with it?
With a large family, the appeal of having acreage is pretty strong. I’d love some space to not only build a bigger house, but be able to spread out a little and have space for the kids outdoors as well. There isn’t much property like that close to home, so we set a search radius of a 30 minute drive to work (for me), and shifted our search to the north of where we are, since that’s the direction most of our kids’ sports and activities are. Ideally we’d be looking for 5 acres or more.
Somewhere around this time of going through drawings of potential floor plans, the thought hit me kind of out of the blue – apartments. What if we built the house in phase 1, and then we could have a phase 2 where we carve out an apartment or two in the house? We could rent those apartments out to kids coming out of foster care as kind of a transitional independent living arrangement.
The more we talked about it, the more into focus this idea has become. We’d like to include 2, 2 bedroom apartments as part of the house. We can rent those out to kids who age out of the system, and because it’s our house and we’re not looking at them as income properties, we can build a lot of flexibility into the lease. Maybe they don’t pay rent for the first 2 or 3 months while they build some savings, or maybe instead of rent for those months they have to have budget meetings with us so we can help them learn how to save. And maybe the rent increases incrementally for a period of time until they are paying something a little bit closer to actual rent.
We could help kids build rental history that they can use to get a real apartment later on, as well as the space to build some saving for a security deposit. And along the way, they can have access to a family environment with us, kind of a hybrid living arrangement of having and renting their own space and being independent, but with parents and a family close by to lean on when needed.
The first couple of properties we looked at were very different. One was 10 acres in a very rural area, one was 2.5 acres in between 2 subdivisions and walking distance to the local (very good) high school. Comparing these two forced us to refine what we wanted most and what was most important to us. Rural living means propane heat, gravel roads, long distance access for most things, but it also means more space and more privacy. In town means less space, but utilities and access to a lot of things that are important to us. And the more we looked, 2.5 acres seemed like it might be just enough.
I was pretty fired about about that smaller property when I ran into a major obstacle — the zoning commission.
It turns out that building such a house would be illegal in the spaces I was looking to build it. Multi-family residential housing requires multi-family zoning, and so far the properties I had inquired about were all zoned single family.
I talked with a guy from the zoning department at length for the 2.5 acre property that I really really loved, trying to find a way that we could make it work. I think I pushed him a little too hard because he got kind of mad at some point, something like, “SINGLE FAMILY means SINGLE FAMILY. I am NOT going to help you get around that!”
So… anyway, we can’t build in that township anymore.
Getting shot down for that property put the issue into focus for us. We had to ask, how important to us are those apartments? I loved the property, I loved the location, I loved most things about it. But apartments were impossible there. So do we stick with the property that I loved, or do we let it go so that we can build and rent out apartments?
We kept looking. Let me tell you, searching for acreage that is zoned multi-family residential is really hard! It required keeping track of the different zoning labels for different townships, looking parcels up on all the zoning maps, and keeping track of what uses are allowed in which zones across several different townships.
I came up with one property that would kind of allow what we wanted to do, but not quite fully. It’s a little smaller parcel, again about 2.5 acres, and a 2 family unit is an option for sure, but we still needed to keep looking.
Honestly, as much as I liked that property, and there was a lot to like about it, I had a hard time thinking of it as home. It seemed hard to imagine leaving where we are now in order to go there. Yes, we could do it, but would it be a positive trade?
I had searched every property within a 30 minute radius and compared them to zoning maps, and I hadn’t come up with anything that really fit. I started to wonder if such a property even existed…