Recap after Yet Another Long Absence

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To the mind of tres_arboles, not to be confused with the Mind of Mencia, there comes a point in the process of building one's own house where the owner threatens to become a developer.  Wife of tres_arboles and I have not really reached that point, yet.  Indeed, we both work in fields that lead us to view developers (along with the building industry and realtors at large) with an extremely skeptical eye.  But we are oh-so-close to building this beloved house that I thought this entry on the process might best be used to summarize everything we have done until today to illustrate all that one can do to build a house without crossing that ethereal plain into full-fledged (albeit for a modest single family residence project) developer-hood.

First and foremost, the process starts with a dream.  That dream can follow one of a multitude of practical considerations or fly on the wings of nothing more than that complex emotion, desire.  The residential cultural economy (wha-the-huh?) in this country has created an entire industry devoted to dreaming about our houses, from supermarket magazine shelves overflowing with magazines purporting to tell us what we want in our houses to cable television programs showing us what it looks like to build these things we supposedly want, albeit in half-hour incremental chunks that leave out much of the salient detail.  Important details on things like "soft" costs.  Wait just one second here.  If I give you my money for something, it's a goddamn expense so don't frilly it up with bullshit terminology like "soft" costs.  Or permitting for projects you thought integral to the project, but but for which the local permitting authority doesn't see it from the same pragmatic point of view you do (who knew one could have a whole house built while still waiting for the permit to build the driveway to it?)!  At any rate, the magazines and television programs show you plenty of pretty pictures of other developers' successes (despite some really dreadful common denominators in American residential building these days) all inspiring one to dream without moving them one inch closer to developing.

Then, one can buy some land in a place he loves.  Where he wants to live, play, hug his child, drink cocktails, and have sex for the rest of his life.  Where he and his wife want to hang art, make art, make meals, and share it all with friends and family.  Armed with all of these great intentions (are there any more important?), one has become a land baron, but is still no closer to being a developer than before he and his wife signed on the dotted line.

Now possessed of a dream and a beloved parcel of land, one seeks a house design and a true professional to build it.  The design part can start easily enough, and owning a piece of land can serve as enough evidence of intent that some design professionals will take one seriously enough to give him a hearing.  Actually, some like Greg Lavardera, will take a genuine interest in that project, well after they have realized one is still actually hemming and hawing about house design and what it is one actually wants in a house.  All the while, not getting any closer to actually developing the thing.

For that matter, actually owning land (or a fully stamped set of house plans) might not be inducement enough for some of those who make up one's universe of contracting choices to pick up the plans and prepare one a bid for the construction of the dream.  One must wade through the market place of builders who are actually little more than pretenders, or debtors, or ignorers, and locates and meets the one builder who appears to be the most earnest and yet professional in that beloved market.  Even then, that builder might still force one to think critically about the initial design choice.  Which might lead to the process of dropping a plan one saw one's self living in, by an architect one had grown to like very well.  But that decision forces one and his wife to create a design of their own imagination (details in a forthcoming post to this blog).  Then, having acquired fully engineered, locally permittable plans based on that design through the spilling of one's own creative juice, and hired a contractor, they find they still have yet to become developers.

Having dreamed the dream, bought land, created a design, acquired a plan, hired a builder, applied for and received permits, even begun sourcing windows, doors and appliances for the build, one pursues the financial capacity to actually purchase the dream.  Through a suspiciously easy process, one works with a friendly, even enthusiastic banker, willing to lend more money than one could possibly pay back from month to month.  And it costs next to nothing to borrow that money.  Weird.  But still, wife of tres_arboles and I don't sport the look or feel of developers.  Or the self-interested, money grubbing, anti-environmental, anti-government, ironnically anti-neighborhood or even anti-community mindset of developers.  And thankfully so.  Because we'll live here, with these neighbors, in this community, amongst this environment well after the building's done.  And that suits us just fine.