How we got into this mess

So our home building adventures began just four months ago, but this saga really begins in January of 2010.  (If you really want to get technical we can go back 9 years to when David began his obsession with Real Estate and spent hours searching out available listings on-line instead of paying close attention in Optometry School.  If any of you have problems with the Posterior Segment of your eye you may want to seek out alternative care from Dave.  Just saying.)  If it is any indication as to the depth of his obsession, this is our fourth home in Evanston and we have lived here a little less than 7 years!

Home #1

(and baby Molly coming home!)



Home #2

Home #3

In any case, about a year and a half ago David decided to act on an impulse to buy some land on which to build a new office.  He'd been scheming for this for years and came upon a great option for not a ton of money so we jumped.  It took six months of re-zoning and approval from the city council (with a few complainers from the neighborhood sure that an Optometry office would attract all kinds of trouble to the neighborhood.  Well, I'm sure you know how drifters and disaffected teens are attracted to seedy places like a professional building.  They should be worried.) but eventually we were able to officially buy the land and the really interesting house that sat upon it.  When we closed the title company ladies laughed as they gave us the keys to our "Super nice house!" and we did indeed deserve those laughs. 

The house that sat on the back lot of our land had a small original home that had  been added onto several times creating an odd, piecemeal home with about four different levels, a creepy sun room/bathhouse, and an almost completely intact bedroom of a teenaged boy that I went to high school with, including his posters of the sexy ladies of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  Then, the real kicker came when we got the appraisal.  The land was full of worth, but the house had an esitmate worth of $0.  Actually, with the cost of demolition it probably was worth -$10,000!  

We tried to sell it to some friends-no luck, the seven foot ceilings of the original home were unpalatable to our 6'7" friend for some reason!  We decided to just build a bigger office and rent out the other half to someone else, but it was too much money to start with.  The banks basically laugh when they see our debt to income ratio, so we had to take what we could get if we were going to move forward.

Dave pitched a lot of ideas to me in the hopes to save some money, including 1) selling our then-current house, 2) selling the land we bought 4 years ago and still hadn't built on, and 3) living in the basement of the office after we built it.  I just looked at him and said "Seriously?  Five kids in the basement of your office?  You're insane."

After about 6 months of debating what to do with this land I finally listened to Dave's only rational suggestion that WE build a house there and maybe sell it in a few years and finally build our dream home.  So, we put our home on the market (again - but that's another story) and hoped.  Finally in January of 2011 everything seemed to come together.  Dave had a patient who shared with him her fears of never being able to find a nice home for her family, we found a great floor plan and a builder with a great reputation and a great bid, my parents readily agreed to let us live with them while we built and in April we started work!

The only real change was that after all this headache, the pains of moving and the joyous trials of building this has become our dream-home and not a step to it.  Besides, who doesn't want to live next door to their work!  But, I'll share more about that later!