Some Choppy Water and a Couple of Icebergs

[Larry jogs out to the mound to break up a players' conference]
Larry: Excuse me, but what the hell's going on out here?
Crash Davis: Well, Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. We need a live... is it a live rooster?
[Jose nods]
Crash Davis: . We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present.
[to the players]
Crash Davis: Is that about right?
[the players nod]
Crash Davis: We're dealing with a lot of shit.

For those of you who know the movie well enough, you know that’s from the movie Bull Durham. And if you didn’t know that, it means you haven’t seen the movie or not for a while anyway. Well, despite being over 20 years old it holds up pretty well, so take the time to put it in your Netflix queue. In fact, stop reading this and if you can find an actual video store rent it, then come back.

Anyway, I think that summarizes the last few weeks for us. We’ve been dealing with a lot of shit. It hasn’t been fun. Two weeks ago we got the initial bid package from our builder…and it was high. Really high. Too high. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Acceptance. We went through them, the four of us did. Some at different speeds than others. And over the next week or so we were all over the place. Cut. Start over. Wait. Give up. We ran through it all. And to be honest, the whole plan went from life support to flatlining for just a little while. We talked about just walking away from the whole plan and going our separate ways. But instead of swimming towards the light we stayed put. There’s still plenty of work to do (and plenty of shit to deal with) but we’re feeling better about it.

I told myself when I decided to blog about this I would try to share the good with the bad. So here’s some more detail on the problems we’ve been having and how we’ve been dealing with them.

Switching Our Land Plan
I think it’s a little funny the first post of this blog is entitled “We Have Land!” because, well, we don’t. Or we kinda have some land we don’t want and are close on some land we do want. Let me explain. We had some land locked up north of Brownsburg. We pushed the close date way out (July 15) from the agreement date because we wanted to skip the lot loan and go right into the construction loan, saving us a set of closing costs. (Tom’s idea, and a damn good one) To get a construction loan you need your plans complete so they can be appraised. So we started working on plans a few months ago. At the same time we all sold our houses and moved to our apartments in Zionsville – Gretchen and Tom the first of May and us mid-June. Gretchen really fell in love with Zionsville and also voiced reservations regarding how far out in the country the Brownsburg land is (about a 20 minute drive from “town”). There was, however, some land outside of Zionsville that was up for auction many months ago and has still not sold. So it was decided that we bail on the Brownsburg property and go after the Zionsville property. But the guy that owns the Brownsburg property wasn’t too thrilled about this as you can imagine. And as we have a contract with him and this is America we were afraid he would sue us. In fact, we still are. He still hasn’t signed the mutual release, even though signing it allows him to collect the $1,000 earnest money and an additional $1,000 we are throwing in “at his request”. So this dude is just being difficult and making it hard for us to move on. We do have a contingency in our new land (with a close date of August 31) that lets us out if we don’t have that mutual release signed. But what are we supposed to do? He won’t even get back to his own realtor. I think we should leave sleeping dogs lie and not provoke this guy. More to come on this, but much to our chagrin we still have a purchase agreement in place for a piece of land we don’t want. Not fun.

Over Budget – What To Do?
If you have had a chance to review the plans in previous posts, you might be close to as excited as I am about the house. I’m sorry to give you the bad news, but we can’t afford that house. We dove into the budget and started cuttingcuttingcutting. No frills. Smaller basement. Vinyl siding instead of cement-board. Cut money out of the cabinet budget. Cut money out of the flooring budget. Cut money out of the (gulp) appliance budget. At some point you aren’t cutting flesh any more – you’re cutting bone. We hit that point and said “stop!” We were headed toward a big box with lousy fixtures and a dirt yard for the kids to play in ‘cause we can’t afford grass seed.

So after we made it through the aforementioned stages of grief we circled the wagons and had some good dialogue. We’re cutting square footage. We’re cutting much of the meat. But we’re confident we will end up with a house we can afford and a house we like – maybe one that could use some more space and one that could use better faucets, but a really good start. We should see a revised sketch of a floor plan and a revised budget sometime next week.

Money
This is America and we don’t talk about money here. Sure, we all know what Alfonso Soriano, Kosuke Fukudome and Carlos Zambrano make (fellow Cubs fans just punched a wall) but the rest of us don’t talk about what we make, how we spend it, how much debt we have, how much we have in savings. It’s The Big Secret in American communities. If you think about it, that’s one of the reasons our cohabitation adventure seems weird. “Wait, they are going to have to manage money together, aren’t they? How will that happen? What if one family makes more than the other? What if one family wants to borrow against the house and the other doesn’t? What if Tom wants to get NFL Ticket and Sarah says it’s ridiculous, for Pete’s sake!” Excellent points, actually. And something we’re working through. We’re aware money is the #1 reason couples fight and a leading cause of divorce, and we know we need to have open conversations about money between the four of us. This is easier said than done as we have found out. The over-budget bid tested our mettle when it came to this. I’m sure many of you would agree when it comes to a house purchase there are a few different budgets:
1. There is what you would like to pay for a house, leaving enough money to still have some left over for savings, college accounts, etc.
2. There is what you can afford for a house if you really stretched it, assuming nothing bad happens and you get the raises you think you will get over the next couple years.
3. There is what your real estate agent thinks you can afford as they keep showing you houses that you would be crazy to buy yet they are beautiful and make the houses in the two aforementioned bullets look like crap. Finally you have to be a dick and say “how about showing me something I can afford, jackass. Oh, and why do you guys all drive Saab’s, Audi’s and Volvo’s?” (note: our real estate agents are not like this, and I’m not just saying that because they may be reading this. If you need an outstanding real estate agent in Minneapolis, I highly recommend Charly Marggraf with Edina Realty. My talented sister-in-law Cyndi Gudac Ribolzi will take great care of you on Chicago’s North side, and our Indianapolis agent Jim Schleuter with FC Tucker will do right by you, I swear. Oh, and Charley drives a Saab, Cyndi an Audi and Jim a Volvo.)
4. And then of course there is the “someday” house. Which, if you really think about it, would probably be way too much house and more work than you wanted to do. Plus you have to buy all that furniture to fill it. Even if you could afford it you probably shouldn’t ‘cause it’s just silly. But nice to dream about.

Most of us buy the house behind Door #2. My point is that many of us are pushing it. And it’s one thing to push it with your own family, but a whole other game of Parcheesi to do it with another family. Like today I was watching the two youngest – son Frankie and nephew Charlie – at the small playground at our apartment building today. I took a phone call and let Charlie get away from me a bit and he fell off the equipment face-first into the gravel. It’s one thing to be a dumbass on my cell phone and let my toddler do a face plant, but a different thing to do it with my nephew, right? You feel worse. Because you know you have a bigger responsibility with others than with your own. The same thing with this house. Just as the return has the potential to be really great, so does the risk.

So you should know that it’s not all puppy dogs and rainbows on this project, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. And you should also know that we’re getting through it. And if you did in fact see Bull Durham you also remember that candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she's registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let's get two! Go get 'em.