Sorry for the delay in posting again. I have to say that the summer and fall was fairly stressful for us. The problems we ran into with the water during the excavation continued to plague us. The neighbors ended up filing a complaint because the water we re-directed from the excavation site ended up on their property and was flooding their garden. The regional district said we would need to get a water management plan in place to deal with the water. Since we were making no progress on the excavation, we called in the engineers to draw up a plan to stabilize the building site and water issues as well as draw up a water management plan. It took them until the end of August to provide us the plans and once we got a quote on implementing the plans we were looking at a huge amount of money (20 times more than we had budgeted for the excavation originally).
At this point we stopped and evaluated the whole project. If we proceeded with the build we were going to be extremely over budget right from the start of the project and then we knew we could run into a similar situation when we started to build the house. When we calculated the total amount we could end up spending, building both the house and garage/loft house, it just didn’t make sense any more. This was a pretty difficult and emotional decision, since we have been working and planning for this for many years. So what do we do now?
Well we decided to have our realtor show us some properties in the area that have existing houses. We thought that we might find an amazing property where we could just renovate the house instead of building from scratch. We viewed around a dozen properties and none of them really fit the bill for us. At that point our realtor mentioned he had been saving something amazing to show us if we were open to looking at a piece of raw land. I was very hesitant after our recent heart break, I just didn’t think I could start again from scratch on another place. But we decided to at least have a look. The property is about 3 acres on the Slocan River. We spend a few hours on the property getting a feel for the place and exploring.
Here are a few photos of the property:
Since the property is long and narrow, there is about 1500 feet of river frontage. Here are the pros and cons we had to consider:
Pros
- Amazing river frontage
- Private sandy beach
- Private, no visible neighbors
- Walking distance to nearest community
- Easy access to Rails and Trails for hiking, biking and cross country skiing
Cons
- Raw land, no electricity, road, sewer, well
- Gov’t approval required to get roads and electric in place, may take signigifcant time and money to acquire
- Road noise can be heard
- Small area avaiable to build, will have to get new house plan (smaller in size)
After much consideration, we decided to put an offer on the land. After some negotation on the price, our offer was accepted. As of Nov 28th, 2014 we became the official owners.
You are probably wondering what we plan to do with our original property. Well we still love it and have decided to hang on to it. We will fill in the excavation that was done last summer and deal with the water issues. Our future plans are to build a small 2 bedroom cabin that will be a vacation rental.
For our new property, we have to work a bit longer to pay for it before we can start to build a home on the property. Our timeline is to start building a home in 2017. In the meantime, we purchased a used 28′ travel trailer, which we will park on the property so we can stay in it when we are out there. Over the next couple of years we will work on getting the intrastructure in place (well, electricity and a road). I will post here periodically as we visit the property and start making some progress.