A Big Impulse Purchase

About three weeks ago we impulse bought our dream house. It is the only way we know to buy a house. We decide to buy on a Monday and before the week is over we put down earnest money on our new home. 

On the particular Monday in question, I received an email that Ancestry reevaluated their future of work policy. I will be working from home ~95% of the time for the foreseeable future. 

Alison and I currently share an office. We converted one of our spare bedrooms into an office after the pandemic persisted for much longer than we expected. Alison found out a few months ago that she would not be required to go into the office. As a result the home office became more permanent for her. I shared the office, but at that point I still expected to eventually be heading back to the office 60-70% of the time. We figured out how to make sharing an office work. Alison is mostly on calls all day (and she is a loud talker). I have fewer calls so I move into another room for most of my calls, or if I have a day with lots of meetings I set up at the dining room table. This was sustainable in a world where I would eventually work in the office again more often than not. 

Finding out I wouldn’t be required to go back into the office changed the calculus. While our routine works temporarily, it is not meant to be long-term. We have a few options if I wanted to have a separate office in our current house. I could move my desk into the basement, but that wasn’t a great option. It is dark and the space isn’t particularly suited to an office. We could also get rid of our guest bedroom and turn it into an office. In that case Alison and I would have two large offices, but as soon as we have a kid we would be back in the same boat we are now. We intentionally did not plan for office space when we built this house and now our circumstances have changed. 

As Alison and I discussed our options, I casually suggested that MAYBE we should buy a new house. Alison took a minute to think about this and decided it wasn’t a bad idea. We both went to work looking at our options. We considered existing homes, but we are both a little picky and knew it would be challenging to find exactly what we want.  We quickly determined we should probably build. Then we began determining our options. We knew we wanted to stay in Daybreak. We briefly considered upper Daybreak (west of Mountain View Corridor), but Alison did not want to build over there. We would even drive over there, but it felt really far. This narrowed our options considerably, as most builders do not have lots available in lower Daybreak. 

There were a few lots available on the island. The island is a large man made island area in the middle of Daybreak lake. We found one builder, Parkwood Homes, that was currently building beautiful homes on the island. We really liked some of their floor plans. 

By the time we figured this all out they were closed for the day. Alison stayed up most of Monday night. She was looking at floor plans and crunching numbers. 

Tuesday morning we called and made an appointment for that evening to meet with a sales representative and walk through the model home. We also reached out to one other builder we liked, but they didn’t have any lots available in lower daybreak. 

Tuesday night we walked through the model and fell in love. Based on what we wanted our sales rep suggested a different model of home than we were initially thinking. After reviewing that floor plan we agreed. It would allow us to get everything we wanted - two offices, three bedrooms, a good sized gym space, and much more. There were two lots available, although one was going to be reserved within a few hours. The other lot was exactly what we wanted. We told our sales representative we probably wanted it. 

We took Tuesday night to think about it. It is a big decision, and we talked through many pros and cons. We decided we wanted to love forward. We met with our sales rep on Wednesday afternoon and talked through many of the structural options we want. One of the reasons we like Parkwood is that they offer semi-custom homes. We got to choose the floor plan that really fits us. 

Some of the structural options we chose include: a three car garage, a door off the mud room, an outdoor living area, a dedicated bathroom connected to each bedroom, a third floor loft, a covered deck off the loft, 10 foot ceilings in the basement, and a finished basement. 

Once we made our structural choices we put down our earnest money and reserved our lot. We were quite excited. 

Our lot is circled in red

The next day we put together a number of loan amortization scenarios with different loan amounts, payments, and interest rates to give us a better idea of our budget. We applied for pre-approval for a loan and we were approved. We also built a mock up budget for this new house. After all of this we were feeling good. We initially were not planning to finish the loft or fully finish the basement. But we decided it made sense to finish them along with the rest of the house. 

We have a long process ahead of us. We signed our contract on November 30. Now we have to pay our construction deposit and then we will meet with an architect to draw up our individualized house plan in December. Then there will be a lot of waiting. They told us we should plan on around 16 months before our home is finished. We cannot wait.