RespiteFarm

The 1,140-foot driveway is now complete. Thanks, Alfred and David.

We’re happy to report that we closed on our purchase of 10.43 acres in Hanover County! This is the third piece of property that we had under contract and the first we’ve taken all the way to closing.

The land is almost all cleared and rolls gently. It is ringed with mature trees all around and is bordered by a stream on one side.

The previous owner had it logged a number of years ago, but the stumps still remain, as do about three acres worth of saplings.

We will be removing the stumps and saplings and turning the property into pasture land for future animals.

I’ll report back on the clearing – we are looking at two entirely different methods of doing this.

Potential problems down the road with a flat roof led us to consider an alternative. The following are concepts drawn by SunStyles.net.

Front elevation.

Rear elevation.

We know they do valuable work, but why charge 10+ percent of the building cost?

The house we will attempt to build was designed by Laura and me based on a conglomeration of houses we’ve seen in magazines and Web sites. It is a simple floor plan which suits us well.

Front elevation – carport will be in front of the right portion of house.

Rear elevation – looks out over the woods and pond.

East elevation – master suite.

West elevation – guest suite.

See the Floor Plan – It’s an Adobe PDF file.

When we signed an agreement to build with Topsider, we had them add a clause that would sever us from the contract in the event of our land purchase not working out to our satisfaction:
Should Purchaser be unsuccessful in acquiring their property and wish to cancel this Agreement, they shall be entitled to a full refund, less only charges for actual work performed which, if any, is pre-authorized by Purchaser.

Well, because our land purchase has not moved forward, we want to get our downpayment back and into the bank where it will earn some interest, modest as it may be.

An email was sent to Topsider on Sunday, April 19 asking them to stop all design work on our house, as we didn’t want to incur any additional expenses. We followed up that email with a phone call the following Monday to let them know that we hit a road block on our land purchase and we wanted the design process to stop.

The person we spoke to was the designer and he was very agreeable and understood our plight.

As the land purchase crumbled even more, we decided to get our down payment back from Topsider.

Laura’s phone call with them today, ended well but getting them to live up to the letter of the agreement was not as straightforward as it should have been. After all, it was their language, specially written into the contract for us, that gave us unlimited time to get this specific land purchase worked out to our satisfaction; it we weren’t able to close on the land, our down payment, minus any design fees accrued, would be refunded.

So after some needless back-and-forth, they agreed to refund our money – only they said it would take two weeks to do so.

When we signed the contract, we paid them on the spot. Waiting two weeks before they could return our money to us is unacceptable. In the end, they agreed to issue the refund next week.

This experience gave us great pause about going forward with Topsider.

Up until today, our relationship with them was smooth and agreeable. Now, not so much.

Update:May 21 – We finally received our down payment refund minus the charge for the design work already performed – Yay!.

Update:We were supposed to receive an email today, May 4, from Topsider letting us know when to expect the refudn. It never came. We put a stop on the payment.

We spoke to the owners of the adjacent land last Sunday.

Their meeting with their attorney is scheduled for Wednesday, May 29.

As of this writing, we have not heard anything from the seller’s agent about the resuslts of the meeting.

In the meantime, the online search for alternative property will resume.

Update: May 22 – the owners of the lot we are trying to buy received a notice from the lawyer of the owner of the adjoining lot giving notice that they intend to dispute the use of a certain portion of the road which, according to documents filed in 1993 when the lots were established, is to be shared – in whole – by both lots. This comes on the heels by an offer of the owner of the adjoining lot to build, at his expense, a road that would parallel a portion of the shared road into “our” property. We’re assuming he abandoned that plan after finding out just how expensive it would be to do – we’re talking building on a steep dropoff populated by a stream.

Update: June 6 – We are no longer waiting for this issue to resolve. We purchased a 2.5 acre plot in Powhatan County on June 5. While not as “roomy” as the Louisa property, this parcel has plenty of charm.

It is half wooded and half pasture. The wooded half backs up to a neighboring pond. It is on the wooded half where we will build the house. I plan to have some pictures of the lot posted soon.

Friday and Saturday found us out on the land on which we plan to build our house.

The reason of the visits was to get an estimate on putting in a driveway from the boundary of the land to the site on which the house will sit. The driveway length will be 600+ feet.

As of this writing, we are waiting for the written estimates to come in. We expect the cost to be in the mid- to high-four-figure range.

However – things could get ugly.

As we were beginning to walk the driveway path with our last contractor of the day, our neighbor came over to see what was going on.

Our neighbor’s land essentially sits between our land and the main road. We both have a fifty-foot easement at the road to access our respective properties.

In 1993, when these parcels were recorded with the county, a driveway (referred to as a “road” in the covenants) existed from the main road into our neighbor’s property; our parcel had no such “road”.

The covenants stated that the road was to service both our and our neighbor’s property, and the cost of maintenance would be shared by both parties.

It seems like our neighbor has a different understanding on just how much “road” is to be shared.

As shown on the plat map that was recorded with Louisa County in 1999, and as stated in the MLS listing for the lot, the shared road runs from the main road to the body of our property. The seller’s real estate agent and, as far as we know, the sellers believe that the road is to be shared all the way to our property at which point, a separate driveway will be build to the home site.

Our neighbor believes, and was told by the agent through which he bought the property, that the shared portion of the road is very limited and our driveway would have to be cut into our parcel at a distance much farther up-road – so much farther that a ballpark estimate would ad 20k-30k to the cost that we had already planned for. A creek and steep drop-offs, plus the length, will contribute to that increased cost.

Our neighbor has not shown any eager willingness to grant us an exception (understandably), so the issue is unresolved. The sellers and their agent are in the process of finding a remedy. Until then, we have put the design process with Topsider on hold.

The parcel is ideal for us and we remain hopeful that something can be worked out without costing us any more than what we have budgeted for.

Stay tuned.