Wayne Homes meeting

The Meeting...

We had our first "official" meeting with a Wayne Homes rep a few days ago. We'd just dropped in the first time a few weeks ago to the center with no appointment and still got to spend an hour with Tory, one of the reps. We spent about an hour this time as well, the first portion of it getting our numerous questions answered, and the second part getting a quote for some additional options we were interested in. We also spent a little time in their Design Center, which shows samples of what you can choose from as far as siding, shingles, flooring, cabinets, faucets, etc. There are choices within the items that are included in the home price as well as upgradable items. Being a guy, everything looks about the same to me. This is where I sit back and let Sharon make most of the decisions - as long as it doesn't look too "girly"....

Since the meeting we thought of several things we'd forgotten and emailed Tory about them; she's been great about getting back to us.

Finding A Lender

I also had my first discussion with a lender today, and it was extremely helpful. Wayne Homes provides a list of lenders with whom their customers have successfully dealt. Having made a couple of unsuccessful attempts already to find someone who actually did construction loans, I was happy for the list. From reading other blogs it seemed like the loan process had the potential for stringing out the overall construction process, so we wanted to get an early start on it (our hopeful dig date target is March 2013). During the discussion I found out a couple of things I wasn't clear about and one thing I had absolutely no clue on...

In the last post we were pondering the issue of getting water from our spring on the family farm. Well, from a lender's perspective that idea is out for us. Since the spring won't be part of our newly subdivided lot the source can't be considered reliable. They figure that someone else in the future might own the spring and there wouldn't be access to water. That brings us back to digging a well most probably since the municipal water line is so far away.

I also mentioned to the builder that we were contemplating getting some of our infrastructure (road, septic, water supply) done early to have it out of the way before home construction starts, and perhaps paying some of those costs out of pocket. He told me in no uncertain terms that I would become like a leper (my words) to a lender by doing so. They apparently want no work done before a loan is in place because of issues with making sure that payment for the work has been done, avoiding liens against the property, etc. They have a representative who actually comes out to look at the site and, among other things, makes sure you haven't done anything. This was my first time finding out about this information and it really surprised me. Luckily, cutting down some trees on my own doesn't count.

The lender took the usual loan app info from me to start the ball rolling. He also mentioned that there's a formula that's used in the biz to see if the value of your land stays below a 30% threshold of the total value of house + property. If you were putting a cheap house on a huge piece of property I guess that would be a bad thing for some reason. I'm not sure I followed the rationale behind this idea.

This process has been an educational one thus far. I imagine my schooling will continue into the future....

Thoughts About Water

Back again after a few days' hiatus. We had a couple more developments.


The Roadway

I met again with my neighbor the excavator, and he went over in more detail his plan to straighten out our access road, create better drainage to avoid erosion, and raise the level a bit in a low spot to avoid problems in the winter. He also will create a temporary access area for construction and delivery vehicles at the construction site. Last night, per his request, I dug out some Plat diagrams of the placement of the gas wells and lines in relation to the road; we don't want any unpleasant surprises on that front.... Our plan is to start this phase relatively soon; if we're shooting for a dig date in March for the house then I'd like this done well before Winter arrives.

Here's the entrance to the road:



Here's some of the erosion that we need to eliminate when the road is redone. Right now you need the clearance of an SUV to drive down here; this is about the worst section of the road:



A Water Source

Now I'd pretty much resigned myself to the idea of digging a well for our water supply; being more than a half mile from the city water line seems a bit far to run a water line. As I was talking to Tom about moving some trees to clear away a potential drilling site, he came up with another idea which I found intriguing - using a spring as our water source.

We have a spring on the farm surrounded by the remnants of an old spring house. When I was a kid we used to drink from there and used it to cool off watermelons in the Summer. I can never remember it going dry either. Tom thought we might set up a collection area along with a storage tank and then pump the water to the house. I immediately started researching the idea online to educate myself, at least a little. Here's a shot of the spring:


The pros - 1) I like the idea of using what is already available and it appeals to the sentimental side of me by taking advantage of what my parents set up for us when they bought the farm. 2) We would also not have a water bill. 3) This approach might cost less than drilling a well.

The cons - 1) The spring is the primary source of water for our pond; I don't want to lower the water levels by taking too much water. Statistics say that a family of 4 can use 400 gallons a day; there's only the 2 of us. If we have even a minimal water flow from the spring of 1.5 gal per minute, that's over 2,000 gallons per day produced. 2) Water quality - since it's an open air spring, it could be contaminated by surface runoff, animals, people, etc. We currently use bottled water for drinking and some cooking, and are happy with the arrangement. It would still be a good idea to get the water tested though. 3) The logistics of pumping water close to 1,000 feet away and perhaps 50 feet in elevation. The amount of pumping schemes online are dizzying. There are a number of solar powered pumps which seemed cool, but I'm not sure if that would work here in PA.

Anyway, those are some of the issues we're tossing around. Until next time....

The House...

So what house did we finally settle on? As I mentioned last time, after looking through the selection at Wayne Homes (www.waynehomes.com) we settled on a ranch design we liked - the Montgomery.

Sharon spent quite a bit of time plowing through reviews of Wayne Homes. Being a veteran review browser myself, I wasn't surprised when a number of negatives surfaced about them. Any time you look at reviews of anything you'll have some folks that weren't happy. Sharon also took the time to look up some blogs of people who have built or are building a Wayne home. We found them useful as a reference, which is one reason I decided to do this blog; kind of a "pay it forward" philosophy. Anyway, we felt that the positives outweighed the negatives for us. You seem to get a decent value for what you pay.

The Montgomery seemed to best fit our needs - 2100+ square feet, which will give us plenty of room for the occasional gathering or overnight guests; a huge Master Bedroom with the option of adding the luxury bath; a formal Dining Room and Living Room, both of which can be walled in and used as offices - something we need. Since we only have guests once in a while overnight, we thought one of the 2 guest rooms would become our exercise room.

Wayne Homes has a cool online interface, which immediately appealed to me, being a geek. They have a tool which lets you choose from a list of options and see what they'll look like on the house you're looking at - luxury bath, 2 sink vanity, 2 extra feet on the garage, a side garage door, etc. what they don't list, however is how much all these options will cost. For that you actually have to talk to someone.

We decided to visit the closest model home center near Delmont, PA, a pleasant 25 minute ride on back roads. We got to talk with the rep, Tory, and gave her a list of what options we were interested in. We weren't that interested in the alternate "elevations", which add a dressier look to the exterior, figuring rightly that they would be more than we wanted to pay. Tory emailed me a few days later with a breakdown of costs for all of the extras we gave her. We were pleasantly surprised that our list of options only added about $10K to the price.

We were also supplied with a list of references - those people who have built a Wayne home. Some of the people are only a few miles away, which is surprising in the rural area we're in. We'll probably talk to them as well as try to attend an open house in the area in August.

We're scheduled to meet again with Tory in a few days to fine tune our list of desired options and also see how much Sharon's wish list of kitchen upgrades will be.

We had a few more developments today on some other fronts; I'll save those for next time.....


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What We've Done So Far....

The amount of things to take care of in this process seems staggering, and that's not even considering the actual building the house part.  Here's what we've done so far:

Sewage/Septic - There is no public sewage system where we are, so it had to be a septic system of some type.  I educated myself a little bit on the options and quickly saw that a mound system was going to be seriously expensive - perhaps $15-20K.  A conventional system would be a lot cheaper, and this was where we got our first break.  Instead of being mandated by the county on what type of system we had to have, we qualified for an exception based on the size of the proposed site (10 contiguous acres or more) and time of family ownership (has to pre-date January 1987 - my folks bought the place in 1950).  With this exception we don't have to do testing and can put in whatever type of system we want.  We'll put in something decent that will work for us but won't break the bank.


Roadway Access -Although we're building in a relatively remote location, we thought we'd take advantage of the roadway that was built some years ago to support the gas wells that are on the property.  By doing this we won't need to start from scratch to build a road 1/2 mile through the woods.  The road is decent now, but you still need the clearance of a 4WD vehicle to get back there.  We need to make the road passable for the access of construction vehicles as well as our own normal auto access.  To do this we'll need a lot of rock and some grading done.  This is where we'll probably catch our 2nd major break.  My neighbor Tom just happens to own an excavation company.  He stopped over for a consultation, and said we'd save a lot of money if we could locate a source of stone right here on our farm.  Well, he poked around a little with his backhoe and found enough rock in a location close to the road to take care of our needs - yippee!  No buying and hauling rock from somewhere else!  He also mentioned that since the roadwork will be done before house construction starts that we would have a convenient hole to dump all the excess dirt from the foundation excavation.  I love it when a plan comes together....


Water - we're on the public water system at the trailer where we are now, but it's probably another 1/2 mile to our homesite.  We're leaning strongly towards having a well dug instead.  Growing up here as a kid we had 2 wells for our farmhouse and numerous springs around, so I'm thinking we should be OK with water.  The sewage folks require that a septic system be 200 feet away from a well; my plan in my head is to place the well further up the hill behind our new home to get some distance and to have gravity working for us as well - the septic system would be downhill (slightly) from the house.  We have yet to get line up a well digger.  I wanna see one of those guys come out with the old school Divining Rod and find some water....

Other Utils - I've had preliminary contact with the Electric company (West Penn) & Cable company (Comcast), but have yet to talk to the gas folks (Peneco).  We have a surveyor working on subdividing the property for us.

The Home - Hey, I almost forgot - what kind of house are we putting up?  We started out with the idea of a modular home since they are built out of the weather and look pretty nice.  We'd looked at a number of models and saw something we liked.  It was a cool looking cedar exterior, which would look great in a rustic setting.  We about fell off our collective chairs when they told us the price was about twice the price of the same model with normal siding.
      We next fell in love with the idea of a Chalet style home, which we saw at the lot of another modular home dealer.  It would be great in our wooded setting even if we didn't spring for the cedar exterior look.  I drove by a Chalet style home in our area that had been there for awhile - it looked great from a distance, but as you got close it looked pretty weathered.  I understand that if you keep up on the maintenance that they will weather pretty well, but I know myself, and that's not gonna happen.
      A relative who is in the construction business thought that we could build a house for less than we could buy a modular home.  That got the wheels turning, and we actually started giving a traditional "stick built" home serious consideration.  A friend whom I asked for any thoughts on builders mentioned that their home was built by Wayne Homes.  I'd never heard of them before - I found out that they build homes on your lot and will do some degree of customizing.  Their prices are also surprisingly good.   They were unable to do anything with the Chalet idea we had however, which was probably a positive thing in the long run.  We started looking at their models and decided that we should look at a ranch style home.  Why?  a) We have plenty of room for the spread that a decent size ranch requires.  b) We're in our 50's and in good health, but you never know when steps may begin to present a future challenge.

OK - enough for now.  Next time  I'll talk about our specific choice of home and what we're considering as far as options and configuration - and whatever other developments come up....

Our Future Homesite

Here is what we're looking at:

We're subdividing our family property (87 acres) and carving out about 12 acres, onto which we'll put our new home. In the satellite view below, our family property is the mostly wooded area, and the trailer we currently are living in is on the left side of the image in the middle. The pin near the center indicates where we plan on building...



There are no utilities at the site, and so we'll need to get gas, water, electric, sewage and cable there. We need cable as opposed to satellite because both of us have home offices which require a good high speed Internet connection.

There is an existing road from gas wells on the property that we plan on improving for access to our site. The property is on a hillside which overlooks a medium sized pond. Below is a view of our potential homesite from early in the spring:



We've already done some preliminary clearing away of wood as you can see.

Enough for now. Next time I'll lay out some more specifics on steps we've taken so far, and what we still need to take care of.

Here we go....

Hello everybody - whoever might choose to drop by and peruse.

Although my primary intent is to share my home building experience with my friends on Facebook who would already know me and my situation, let me take a moment to introduce myself:

My name is Mark and my wife is Sharon. After living in the West for about 7 years we decided to move back East to my family's farm in Western PA, primarily to be closer to family. We intended to build a house on the property after a few years, and that time is just about upon us.

I hope to share our experience in building a home on a rural plot of land with no utilities to the building site, our choice of builder, things expected and unexpected. Our goal is to be living in the house by this time next year, July 2013. The goal of the blog is to keep my friends and family informed as well as perhaps help out other potential home builders in similar circumstances.

I welcome your comments and input - Enjoy!


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