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New House, New Arrangement

by Jonathan Quincy Graves
Madge and I have been trying to get this house built for quite a long time. More than three years ago, we bought five acres in the country - plenty of room for horses, a large garden, some fruit trees, and whatever else struck our fancy. The property is about an hour's drive from where we lived in the city, in beautiful rolling hills, mostly devoted to growing wheat and alfalfa. We saw it as the place for us to eventually retire, and for Madge to finally be able to move her horses (she has three) from the stable where they were boarded to our very own property. I loved being on the land, and spent many hours putting in fence posts and stretching wire. All we had to do now was to build the house and barn so that we could begin to actually live there.

The first architect that we hired proved to have no imagination whatsoever, and even worse, he seemed incapable of incorporating the design features that we had set our hearts on. After wasting many months trying to work with him, we finally decided to start all over with someone else.

With some effort, and a lot more care in the selection than we had exercised before, we found an architect that really seemed to understand what we were after. Naturally, since he was starting all over at the beginning, and because we were not the only ones who had discovered his skills, it took almost six months before we had the final sets of plans. Madge and I were overjoyed; it was finally coming together.

The next step, of course was financing the build. Not really a problem, I was working and making very good money. Bankers actually smiled at me when I talked to them about borrowing for a new home. They smiled, that is, until about three days before we were scheduled to close the loan and my employer announced that my services were no longer needed. This was not a total surprise, I knew that the economic downturn was hitting them hard, but I really had not expected that I would be included in any redundancies. Nonetheless, the banker traded his smile with a look of sincere condolence for my loss of employment, and our plans had to once again be put on hold.

It was a good year later, by which time I had replaced part of my lost income. We had trimmed down the house design a little, and deleted the barn for now (in my youth, I had built one myself, and was toying with the idea of doing it again). We finally received financing to complete our dream - albeit modified, but still our dream.

If you have ever built a house, you know that it can be very stressful. Skilled workmen are not always reliable; the amount that you thought that things would cost is never quite as much as they actually do cost; and the whole process takes longer than you expect or than you wish that it would.