Our Own Backyard

By Al Horn

Anyone that has ever had a home built from scratch can appreciate the joys and agonies that my wife and I are going through right now. We went on a comprehensive search for the perfect home site and floor plan back in March. At first we decided to keep an open mind as to where that would take us. We went to Lincoln, Warren and western St. Charles counties. We knew that real estate would be cheaper and thus be able to buy more home for the money.

We started off in Lincoln County because we played golf there the previous year and thought it would be nice to live near where we play. Even though that part of the state is starting to take off in development we decided other amenities were lagging. We weighed the pluses and the minuses, gave a couple of places a grade to work by, and then moved on.

Warren County wasn't that much different. Like Troy, it sported two golf courses as well as up and coming business communities. What we ran into at the time was small lots with cheap houses or large lots that would require individual development cost. We didn't know if we would be happy being able to spit out our window and hitting the next door neighbors house. Worse, what if they chose to spit on us for whatever reason. The large lots were nice but by the time we would have a dream home built it would have cost a lot more than the developments with small lots.

That brought us back to St. Charles County. At this point we had decided we wanted to stay close to the interstate and ruled out going any farther south than New Melle or too close to O'Fallon where lot prices were rumored to be much higher.

We cast about for a weekend or two looking at floor plans and prices. We were down to two new subdivisions and a hand full of floor plans when we stumbled across a fairly new subdivision that we didn't even know existed. We toured the displays and discovered that the developer had more models in subdivisions they were building in St. Peters and O'Fallon. What set them apart from the other two places was the fact that we could look at eleven different floor plans from a 3-d point of view. That wasn't the only thing we discovered.

Each set of display houses carried a price sheet for all the floor plans the builder had to offer. A nice size ranch in Wentzville could be built for around $160,000. The same model would cost fourteen thousand more in O'Fallon and twenty thousand more in St. Peters. On top of that, the minimum square footages for the lots grew the farther west you went. I hear people tell me location is everything. In this case they were right. We found that we could build a bigger house on a bigger lot by staying in our own back yard. It only took us a month and plenty of evenings in front of a calculator to figure that out.

We even figured out that price per square foot for premium lot spaces and things such as walkout frames made the site we finally settled on so attractive. We crunched numbers for the extras we felt were necessary to make this the last home we would live in until retirement. I should say, that before we did this, we set a number that we felt we could live with. After much soul searching, we came up with a number a few thousand over our target. We threw this number out to the builder to see if he was willing to help us out. He didn't bat an eye, just signed the contract.

So our dream home is about a month away from completion. We were recently given one bit of news that that made us glad we didn't opt for Lincoln County. The golf course we play at has been sold and will shut down at the end of the year. On the other hand, our daughter and two grand children just moved to Warrenton. Still, we will be moving closer to them when everything is said and done. They use to live in South St. Louis, about forty minutes away if traffic conditions are good. Once we move to the new house we will be less than twenty minutes away without traffic even being a factor.

The more I think about it, the better that will be. We can get out to see them easily enough without worrying about them dropping by daily to borrow a cup of something they need. Considering we are now raising grandchildren from another daughter, we probably have the best of both worlds. My daughter is close enough to drop kids off at their place if need be and we can go out and get the other two on short notice. I love it when a plan comes together.