March 27, 2007

Finding the money


We've decided to bite the bullet and try to simultaneously shave the budget down and seek some financing we can handle. We realized that we came down here and fell in love with the lot and then the original concept for the house. We are going to somehow make this work and get the house we want built. The most desired aspect of this design was the triangle roof that juts out as the open air space. It allowed for an extremely large outdoor living area because it expands even further into the interior space when the glass shutters are opened. We got a few things in the works to get the money and we are committed again to going for what we really want.

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posted by Mrs Gottfried at 1:42 PM 0 Comments

A roof garden

One of the solutions could be to add a loft space to save on the elevated slab size. The house is also less sq. ft. overall. What we do like is the roof top garden which could really enhance our view out over Gottfried Creek. We don't like the layout as much and as the original house was only 2200 sq ft to begin with we really didn't want to go any smaller. What we really love about the first design was that it didn't sprawl too extensively but still felt very spacious in the layout.

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posted by Mrs Gottfried at 1:30 PM 0 Comments

Where did we leave off?


So we are not going to move forward on the service station/restaurant venture. We still believe it was a good idea but the bank wanted to tie up our entire net worth and control everything. It left us feeling a bit vulnerable. We then refocused on building our house but we still have the $$ issue. Our lot can be sub-divided and we thought about selling off the top corner to add to our funds. The problem with that is the real estate market in Englewood is at a stand still. Plus we'd really like to try to hang on to the property as whole as long as we can. Our architect, Tim Snyder at Osborn, Sharp Associates had come up with some other design options. One of the big budget busters is the fact that the house has to be elevated 10 ft. The smaller this elevated slab, the more savings we'd have. He came up with some more compact designs as a compromise when compared to the first design we've really become attached to.


posted by Mrs Gottfried at 1:16 PM 0 Comments

March 12, 2007

The lastest news on our major side-track


We've been at a stand still since reaching our crossroads. We've been re-evaluating if financially it makes sense to build our house so soon. It ended up being over budget for us ultimately because we don't want to lose completely our entire nest egg all in one fell swoop. Building the house right now would mean that chunk of change is gone forever without ever having that much cash again. It also meant hopping back on the big mortgage horse that we had rode out of town when we sold out and left Brooklyn. We began thinking, is there anything we can do with the money we currently have now, an investment perhaps, that might turn in our favor a year or so from now?



Long story short, and it is a very long story, we fell in love- again- only this time with a commercial property in historic Old Englewood Village which is around the corner from our future home. It is a 1957 service station that would make a great restaurant. I haven't posted about it because it does seem to be madness but the more we thought about it the more we wanted to pursue the idea. We'll know more in a few weeks if this particular prospect will come to fruition. If the deal doesn't go through, the seller is going to tear it down and build a mini strip mall. After hearing that news we became more determined but we'll have to see. If the deal did go through, we'd have a really great commercial property, save a really cool building and hopefully create a new income source to help us get closer to our house on Gottfried Creek. We are just trying to set ourselves up for the best of all worlds while we still have some money to play with.


posted by Mrs Gottfried at 7:01 PM 0 Comments