I like looking at and playing with floor plans. I’ve never quite understood why, but to be honest I’ve also never really thought about it. As weird hobbies go, it’s a fairly harmless one. Several years ago, a co-worker and I discovered a mutual interest in following real estate listings as well. I discovered that it scratched the same itch that playing with floor plans did. It’s also about as harmful.
Well, most of the time, anyway.
With the upheaval in my life last year, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what comes next. My current situation is stable, but temporary; I’ll be ready to move into the final permanent phase within about 12-18 months. In other words, now is the time to start planning.
The combination of the two means my habit of floor plans and real estate listings has focused a little: I’m looking at things with an eye toward creating the last third of my life. I’ll admit it: I’d been despairing. No matter what I found, I just couldn’t come up with a way to make things feasible. I’d find a place I adored, but realize I likely wouldn’t qualify for the mortgage. Or I’d find a place that was financially feasible, only to discover I would likely end up regretting the purchase.
And then I remembered an idea I’d had fifteen years or so ago, at another time and in another place and with another purpose.
I hunted it up online, took another look, and realized that while it’s not exactly what I want, it’s very close. So then I looked into the cost and discovered that if I do it in phases, it was well within my restrictions and parameters.
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Even better, when I looked at the concept sketch, I could see exactly how to divide it into phases — and when I priced out the cost of phase one, even allowing for overruns and problems, I still came in under the bottom line figure I knew was my limit. Or, in other words, I could afford to start pretty much immediately after I finish settling my transition.
It wasn’t too long after that, that I actually had the concept itself worked out.
- Phase I involves finding a small piece of land (quarter- to half-acre) that allows placement of singlewide mobile homes. The home I have in mind is Clayton Blue Ridge’s Flex plan (22BLR16764AH) with three of the five available options included.
- Phase II is the addition of a single carport and gravel landscaping paths, a moveable entry porch, and the installation of a permanent foundation. That’s a relatively moderate set of upgrades, cost-wise, and could be quite possible within a few years of finishing Phase I. (I may actually try to include the foundation in Phase I.)
- Phase III is a higher-priced renovation that would see me moving the entry porch forward and adding a sunroom, screened garden, and paver patio, as well as rigging the setup to run partly on solar power. I’m not sure exactly how I would pull this one off yet, but the estimated price tag came out to something that didn’t give me sticker shock.
There’s also a potential Phase IV that I could design for, but likely would not be interested in implementing myself. As drawn here, this home would have 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, and an office. But there was an obvious place where a future owner could add on to make it a 3- or 4-bedroom home. They would simply need to move the carport forward (and possibly expand it) and then build another addition. Even if I didn’t implement this phase myself, having it set up would make it a lot easier for my estate to sell the house once I no longer have any need of it.
Is it perfect? No. Are manufactured homes problematic? Yes, they can be. But is this something I can handle?
All my research says yes.
Which when I realized that my daydream, which had become a concept, is now ready to become a plan. And having that plan eases my unease and despair considerably.
Time will tell if this is the route I end up going. But knowing that it’s not a castle in the air means I can work toward it — and, by doing so, work toward doing things another way as well.
That’s good enough for the foreseeable future. So, as of now, this is what I’m planning to do. And I get excited thinking about it, which is a definite plus.