The inflation over the past 3-4 years has been a killer. The VT tax increases are just the icing on the cake. At $550K, which is what it would have cost 4 years ago to build, I would be all in. At a million plus, the opportunity cost is just way too high.Mister Moose wrote: ↑Apr 3rd, '24, 13:23 In some respects, I feel like we are becoming our grandparents or parents that groaned about how gas was 25 cents a gallon when they were going on dates in high school. Everything has gone up. A lot. There's still post COVID shortages in some materials.
That huge porch is a big item. So is the dual opening fireplace. And the retaining walls. Have you thought about renting an excavator and saving most of the 30k for utilities? You can downsize the dream, but still attain it.
Yes, the house I posted is very basic. But it illustrates where the starting point is. And there's only 2 houses currently that come up (in Rutland) using the 'new construction' qualifier.
In the end, I don't think I would build my 'dream home' in VT either. I might build something, but it would be far smaller/less view/short driveway so the taxes wouldn't cause me gastric distress. It's unfortunate that the tax structure imposes those decisions, but there we are.
What, no garage? How can you have a dream home with no multi bay, beer fridge, tool chest, car lift, big stereo garage?
And I wouldn't exactly say that it is our dream home, the dream home would be quite a bit different. We just wanted a house big enough to hold our 3 kids and their families once in a while and entertain some other family and friends every now and then. We also wanted it to be big enough in case we decided to bail on NJ in retirement and spend a large part of the year in VT. I could never live in VT full time, but I could spend a significant amount of the year there, my wife not so much. But she does agree that it needs to be big enough to have that option if needed.
And the garage was the first "value engineering" item to go. There was an attached 3 car garage originally with a future garage apartment above it but it got the axe for cost reasons as the house size crept up. To be honest, I had my eye on the toy barn below instead to be built at a later date further down the driveway anyway. I love barns, even more than I do garages, and I'm a huge garage guy.
To answer Ozzy's "what now question", I'm not sure but we still have 3-5 years to figure it out before retirement. I'm leaning heavily towards a condo in CO to spend Jan, Feb, and Mar and a couple of weeks in the summer. If we sell the VT property, I will build that house on it and then sell it but we really don't want to sell, I have 21 years of sweat equity on it cutting and clearing and building a small barn and we have a lot of happy memories there and have made some close friends with many of our neighbors over the years. We may build a very basic small "cabin" on it but that is hard to do because the home site has really great views and you would destroy it with a cabin. The view warrants a much nicer home. But, maybe build it somewhere else on the property where it could be a guest cabin someday but there are zoning issues with that. We wight build the barn below and create and apartment space up top or might just leave the property as is, not build anything and just leave it to the kids someday. We really don't know right now but we have time. We had originally planned to start construction next summer at the earliest and the following summer (2026) at the latest.
