Closing and Christmas

It was a very busy Christmas for the Babineaux family!

We closed on our new house on Dec 19th and then spent thirteen hours on the 20th moving all our belongings over. After that, we took the next couple of days to arrange most of our stuff and get unpacked. Then we had to work on getting the old place ready for renting again and finally having family over for the holidays. (That part was fun!)

I also went over and met the neighbors. They informed me they had already received notice from the town regarding my request for a Zoning exception. In this case, the exception is for building height only. The town has a height restriction of 17' (5m) (I believe) and I'm wanting to go 21' (6.4m) to allow for walking headroom on top of the boat.

The building idea is a wood framed, gambrel roof structure something like this:

The building will be 32' x 50' (9.7m x 15.2m)
If all goes accordingly, we plan on breaking ground sometime in April 2015.

In other news, I finally had a good excuse to buy the track saw on my shopping list!
(The floors of our new house are not completely flat due to settling. Some of the doors were dragging on the carpet and needed to be cut higher for clearance)

WOW - does this saw cut a nice line!

New home in the works

After the other deal fell through, I asked Debbie to start looking for something else closer to work with enough land to build a boat shed. I assumed it would be a long time before something popped up, but she found something right away and set up a meeting with the Realtor.

As it turns out, the house was repossessed and sold in April to some guys that want to start flipping houses for a living. They ripped out all the plaster and replaced it with drywall. Installed new wiring, plumbing, insulation, windows, flooring, bath and kitchen. They also fixed up the decks and cleaned up the yard.

The house sits on just over an acre of land and is ten minutes closer to work, so that helps a lot. It backs up to the baseball field, sand volleyball court and community building (previously a school) where they have open gym twice a week for Basketball & etc.

I contacted the town zoning officials to float the idea of building "something bigger than a two car garage but not as big as a four car garage". The neighbor has a good sized building next door and they didn't really seem to care one way or another so long as I stayed inside the setbacks.
Just pick up a Permit App and pay the lady.

Let's hope it's that easy!

Anyway, we put in an offer and went back and forth a few times with the seller before getting to a comfortable price. Contract is signed and Closing is planned for the first week of January 2015.

It'll take a while to get the funds together for the shed, but getting this done will be a big step in the right direction! I won't get too excited until the ink is dried...

Some pics below:

Back to the square one...

For almost five months we struggled to bring this deal together.
But for whatever reason, things just didn't work out as planned.
We finally soured on the purchase and mutually agreed with the seller to dissolve the contract.

So now we are back to square one.

We're feeling a bit discouraged at the moment, but in the end "Life goes on".

We'll just start over and look at different options. Unfortunately, those options are looking more and more like a new home purchase closer to work and a remotely located shop for the actual construction.

Options are limited... that is certainly not the ideal situation.

:(

Building Permit in hand!

It took a while, cost some money and caused a bit of heart-ache. But in the end, it all paid off!

The City Council meeting last night was pretty good. It seemed as if some of the board members didn't realize it would take a lawsuit to overturn the Zoning Board's decision. Once that point was made abundantly clear, the attention quickly turned to more pressing matters - like updating the existing ordinances to better reflect the needs of today's society. There were still some ruffled feathers in the room, but no further objections were made and the meeting moved on to the next topic.

After the meeting I spoke briefly with the mayor about the Building Permit and was assured that it would be ready in the morning. I also got to meet my new Alderman (in charge of the ward we'll be moving into). Both really nice folks, looking forward to seeing the progress and improvements we make on the place.

In the end, Debbie and I are really glad we went through this process. We learned a lot, met a lot of great people and got a much better understanding of town politics/procedures & etc. It was very educational and a lesson in patience.

That being said, I secretly hoped someone would ask about the boat. It would have been rather entertaining to tell them all about building a 40' Trimaran in the middle of corn fields. However, I assume it's best they didn't... they might have thought I was crazy!

:)

In other news, the appraisal was done yesterday.
I assume the bank will have that back by next Monday or so and then we should get a closing date.

Small Town Drama

After last post, we moved ahead with the Sales Contract, Title work, appraisals and bank financing.

We assumed we were done and simply waited for the building Permit to show up in the mail.

However, most any time you work with a group of people there is always one or more that leave the table feeling as if the decision was incorrect or improper. So while we were off doing our thing, there were objections raised at the previous City Council meeting that resulted in the City Attorney getting involved and a host of questions being raised again.

From what I have gathered, the Zoning Boards decision to approve my Request for Variance is final and the only way to get the decision reversed is for the city to sue itself. So from what I understand, that is one of the topics to be discussed this Tuesday evening (September 2).

Will the city of Atlanta, IL decide to sue itself to reverse the decision?

We'll know more on Wednesday.
Keeping our hopes up for the time being.

Stay tuned...

Future Building Site

I suppose central Illinois has it's nuances just like any other place, but when it comes to finding a suitable place to build a large project it can become quite the challenge!

The obvious choice is to find a piece of land out of town, yet close to work where you might be able to build a shed and go about your business. But here in Logan County we are faced with the "Five Acre" rule. That means you are restricted from building a house on anything smaller than five-acres and there's not much chance of finding something that will work since most of the land is tied up in Trusts and cannot be sold. Even if you could get it, you'd have to build a house before you were allowed to build an auxiliary building. So you really have to find something already built, but most of those places tend to be an over-priced, run-down piece property with junk barns. I didn't even mention that these country places are mostly heated with propane. Have you seen the price of propane lately!?

We considered buying a house in town and constructing a shop, but that is not allowed due to various zoning regulations regarding percentage of lot used, building size, height and use restrictions.

And finally, Commercial space is very expensive and not really something I've looked into because I really want to be close to the project. I feel it's important to touch the project every day... to stay "connected", even if it's just cleaning up and laying out tools in preparation for the next job. If building the boat was your job, then driving to some remote rented location on a daily basis wouldn't be an issue. You might even get weekends off, but coming home from work only to say "Hello", grab something to eat, change your clothes and drive off to spend the evening with epoxy and foam puts an unacceptable strain on relationships.

Anyway, enough of that!

My wife and I were walking around town a couple months ago and noticed this recently vacated home on the other side of town that was advertised as "For Sale by Owner".

We contacted the Estate Trustee regarding pricing and after further discussions agreed upon terms with a single contingency regarding a Zoning Board Variance to build a workshop with office/storage/kitchen & bath. The house itself is not in good condition and the existing outbuildings need to be torn down before winter, but overall, it'll work for a while.
It just so happens to sit on 2.25 Acres and is within city limits.
Strangely enough, it is zoned Agricultural yet has access to city water/sewer/gas and Cable Internet.

The idea is to build a 40'x80'x12' (12m x 24m x 3.6m) steel building on the back half of the lot:

This arrangement will provide everything I need and also gives plenty of room for a small orchard, vineyard, garden and maybe a hobby farm to keep the kids busy.

Agreeing on a fair price was a five minute affair, but the Zoning Variance required a month of paperwork submission and waiting for meeting dates. We finally got to present our case before the board on August 13, 2014.

At first we assumed it might be a rather simple affair, walk in - answer some questions get a vote and go home. But due to the nature of this property (Agriculture Zoning within town limits) and the size of the building there ended up being an hours worth of give and take over the applicable Zoning Ordinances. But eventually, it came down to a vote and after a few tense moments we were thrilled to get a 6-1 vote in our favor! What a relief, I didn't know something like that could be so stressful!

The purchase contract was signed this evening so now we need to go through the closing process before we can get the place ready for a long winter. Lots of planning, cost estimates and coordination are in the very near future so this blog will be taking a detour to cover that part of the building process.