May 20, 2018 Building a New Farm House

This was one of our first preliminary Farm plans.
The Farmhouse goes in the upper right-hand corner.
It is shown in Fuschia.

We have arrived on the Farm, even if it resembles (somewhat) the scene from the 60s television show Green Acres. We have built a greenhouse and also the second half of the Cabin. We have planted a crop and have been clearing the land. And if the stars align we will have sold our old house by the end of June. Everything according to a plan which we made but that works on a schedule all of its own. Our next major step is building a new Farmhouse for us to live in.

We have been thinking about this new house for many months. I even came up with a preliminary design for where the House would go. Of course the drawing (at the left) was done long before we could actually see the Farm property. There was much to do.

As we cleared the land,over time, the Farm layout maintained much of its layout, and this included the placement of the house. But was always knew that we would have to be flexible in our desires.

The dark, shaded, area was the projected placement
of MacGregors Garden. Our first Market Garden.
It was actually built one-hundred feet to the left.

 In the interim we also spent time dreaming up the perfect dream Farmhouse.  (Above is a rendering of our dream Farmhouse.) A tight little house which amounted to a large bathroom and a kitchen, with no second bathroom and no extra bedrooms.

And as the time for building grew near we began finding a builder to.

At first my own plan was to find a builder willing to let me do much of the work of putting the thing together. This all seems so long ago. Calling builders led to us finding our first obstacle: price.

The Portland area is experiencing a booming market for new home construction. The few builders willing to return phone calls all said roughly the same thing: "Your custom house will cost about three hundred dollars a square foot to build". And this was an unexpected thing to hear. We were thinking that our one-thousand foot home ought to cost about $100,000 to put up. We weren't expecting much. This news pushed us into finding an option. 

We thought about buying a "mover", a house that a developer might want to get rid of so that they might build ten new homes in its place. Back in the early 2000s these houses might cost as little as a dollar, but seventy thousand to set up on a lot. A good value, but in the contemporary market these homes no longer exist. So we began to think that maybe, no matter our desires, we ought to look at a manufactured home. 

I won't bore you with the saga of the search. We drove to every manufacturer, looking for something resembling our dream house. We found one in McMinnville that was about the right thing. We sat down with a guy and found that we could get it for about $75.00 a square foot, customized. But we would have to buy four hundred more feet of floor-space than we had planned. 

Even with the unnecessary space it sounded good enough. But we are never people to jump at the first thing we see, and finding a contractor to set the house up was proving to be a problem. So we continued the search a bit longer. Eventually we found another manufacturer in Albany. 

The first view we had.

Entering the place from the side door (which we will not have in ours), this was the view (to the right). 

I immediately knew that this was the winner and Ann fell for it like a ton of bricks. The kitchen was large, long, and had a spectacular number of cabinets and counter-tops. The windows we large and the view through these would cover the entire Farm.

Ann fell immediately in love with the kitchen.
(You can click on any image to see the bigger picture.)

A bit of "curb appeal".
From the front room we will
be able to see the entire Farm.

Living room view.
We won't have the door.

We are about to order the house, paying cash once the old house sells. We still have to find someone to do the preparation of the home site on the Farm But all of this seems less daunting than building the thing entirely from scratch and they can have it up by mid-November. 

Even with the development costs, extra bedrooms, extra bathroom, and with customizations, we will still hit out $100 per square foot goal. Hopefully leaving us without a mortgage so that we can spend our lives in comfortable retirement from the world of workers and living our lives as farmers.

This is roughly the same layout as the plan we desired at the onset.
Ours will be about four feet narrower.
Making the place smaller, but better.