The Story of Buddy

We are building a cottage!  This blog is intended to chronicle that process.  Mostly for me, and my kids, but also for anyone else who might be interested.

The story:
About 5-ish years ago my husband, Andy and I bought some lake property in Michigan right next door to my parents' house.  We were living in NYC  (Greenpoint, Brooklyn) at the time, pregnant with our first, and given the high cost of living in NYC, our jobs as a nonprofit worker and a teacher, and lack of rich relatives with any promise of inheritance, we had no hope of owning anything worth while anywhere close to where we lived. So, in 2007 when the piece of property came on the market, we had a little savings and a desire to "own something", so we bought it.  Sounds great if I stopped there.

However, this was 2007.  Yes, a year before the housing bubble popped.  Oh yeah, and the property doesn't have a house on it, but rather a run-down circa 1960 single-wide trailer -- brand name "Buddy". And because Buddy was not a "real" house, it also came with one of those legendary predatory-bank a really bad mortgages with super high 8.9% interest and a 15 year balloon.  But, my parents just happen to live next door in a house that they bought from my Grandmother -- a house that my Grandfather (now passed) built himself, so along with the sale came many childhood memories of turtle hunting, sailing, campfires, boat rides.  Mix my memories with my Dad's childhood memories of the exact same spot on the exact same lake and the potential for my future children's future memories on the exact same lake and yes, you could say the property had a lot of emotional attachment - nearly to the point of being "sacred ground" to me and my kids.

Picture of the lake - this past summer:

Picture of Buddy the trailer (I love this pic because both of my kids are in diapers and because this is pretty much how they dressed that entire summer):

We were thrilled.  For the first few years, we loved the trailer (which we quickly started to simply call Buddy).  It was a major diversion from city life -- somewhere between camping and a hotel with a quaint/sleezy mix.  The well went out our first summer there and we couldn't afford to fix it, but we delighted in our no-cost solution of stringing a long hose from my parent's outdoor spout.  Soon after that, we started getting mild electric shocks in the shower and realized the hot water heater was on the fritz.  So, happily, we started showering next door when absolutely necessary and bathing the kids in the lake and only using the hose water ingeniously snaked through a hole in the floor so we had a working toilet and then split off from there to another hose that allowed us to wash our hands at the sink in the bathroom.  Sure, there was no water to the kitchen (and no stove for that matter anyway), but we were still in love in a kinda of "vintage", "kitchy", "New-Yorker Hipster wanna be" way. We burned oil lamps at night and drank boxed red wine while Ella, our then infant daughter slept.  We laid and listened to heavy rains on the thin trailer roof.  We glued pictures of us enjoying the lake to the kitchen cabinets. We sat up at lakeside campfires until wee hours with family and friends and guitars and bug spray and canned beer and the baby monitor crackling on the ground next to us.  I would say it was about 2 summers of bliss before things started to go downhill with our relationship to Buddy. 

Actually, the seeds of our animosity probably started the 2nd summer, when our daughter was 9 months old, kicked off by the now infamous "stranger peeing our our couch incident".  Encouraged by the broken front door on the 4th of July, a benevolent yet very drunk stranger wandered in after the fireworks and merriment to sleep it off on our couch.  We woke up to find him there, still drunk and stewing in his urine.  That situation was resolved by us emptying his wallet of $80, getting a new couch, and putting a chain on the door (though it is still technically broken). It was funny, yes, but probably the beginning of the end of our use of the words "quaint" and "upscale camping" and "retro fun" to describe the trailer and the beginning of the phrase "luxury storage" for camping clothes and bric-a-brac overflow from next door.

Next came the mice.  Despite our attempts to winterize the place at the end of the summer, we returned in the spring to find every soft spot had been used as a nest for the rodents, evidenced by mice poo everywhere -- on blankets, pillows, in Ella's crib, in drawers, counter tops.  It was everywhere, and we threw out all we could and spent a week scrubbing everything that wasn't nailed down, but I have to admit that after the mice, I have been slightly skeezed out with Buddy ever since. 

The next series of experiences included a septic tank smell wafting into the small bedroom periodically, a leek and suspected mold problem in the back bedroom, and the discovery of rotting, crumbly walls in just about every corner. The last nights we spent there (though we visit often) were 2 summers ago, but we had pretty much vacated the 2 bedrooms to uninhabitable storage and put our bed in the kitchen and the kids beds in the living room.

I should probably mention that about 2.5 years ago we moved back to Michigan, and now live about 25 miles south of the lake.

About a year ago we started to get really clear about the financial situation that comes with the property. While financially we could go ahead and keep paying the monthly mortgage, we were deeply "under water" on the place by $60k optimistically. The mortgage situation meant that we were pretty much paying only interest and not touching our principal at all ... and we had a 15 year "balloon" payment to worry about.

So, we started looking for a solution and after much council (including talking to a real estate lawyer) came to 4 options:

1. Sell it (short sale, and not likely given how underwater we are)
2. Walk away (attractive in some ways, but really a last resort option for us for lots of reasons)
3. Get a construction loan (complications here because we would have to hire a builder and we would need a down payment of 20% of the cost of the build PLUS what we owed, and that total couldn't be more than the property would be worth in the end).
4. Build a house ourselves, finance it ourselves, and then find a bank to refinance the property when we finished (yes, we made exhaustive attempts to refinance the trailer in its current state to no luck)

Option 4 seems to be our best bet as it keeps our credit intact, lets us keep the property we love, and increases the value without taking out additional loans. 

So, we spent the last year saving,  dreaming, pillow-talking, researching, buying blueprints, going round and round about our options and solutions and second and third guessing our decision.  The final trigger-pulling step was negotiating with our current lender to let us remove the trailer and we just got that letter today.   

So, here we are, and here is the cabin that we intend to build.

I guess I should say that by we I mean the "royal we", which will have to include our Dads and Uncles and Moms and family and friends (ahem) - many of whom have offered to help.  Andy and I certainly have no idea how to build a house, but we think we can do it with your help and history and collective expertise.  We hope to have fun and learn a lot along the way, but we are sure to make mistakes and create drama. 

The cabin plan is small, cute, just enough. 2 bedrooms - one for us and one for guests (and we hope there will be many)-- with a sleeping loft for kids. We will source the best deals for construction materials and make every effort to purchase things like cabinets and appliances and furniture and doors and anything else 2nd hand.

I plan to record everything here.  From tearing down the trailer to getting permits to breaking ground to selecting siding colors and wall paint. I welcome any advice and feedback you might have along the way (if anyone but me actually reads this).  

Thanks for reading. 

Sarah