Build Your Dream Home

Why not build your dream home in retirement?  You’re entering into a new stage in life so why not go all the way?  We had been in our house over thirty years, had paid off our mortgage and had built up a lot of equity in the value of our home.  We also knew (or at least I did) that Long Island was not where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives.  Yes, we had a lot of friends and ties to our church and our community, but I just couldn’t see staying in a place that was so crowded.  The beach was two blocks away, but we rarely went there.  The mountains were calling.

While my first choice had initially been Virginia, the distance away from our children and the extremely hot summers were disqualifiers.  We ended up looking in upstate New York and found a little community with a small lake about forty miles south of Albany.  It was well within the four hour limit my wife had created.  A small-town right along the Hudson River with a view of the Catskill Mountains was perfect.  The lakefront lot was perfect.  Now all we had to do was design our house.

Not surprisingly, I had done some research on this.  I looked around for builders in our area and found that they were all pretty busy.  Our community has a property owner’s association meeting periodically, so we attended one to see what was being discussed and perhaps get some information about builders.  One of the residents said to look into a modular home builder.  The immediate vision was something that looked like a glorified trailer (not that there’s anything wrong with living in a trailer) so we told him we were looking for something a little bit more elaborate since we were only going to do this once.  He said that he knew exactly what was going through our minds but said don’t give up on considering a modular home.  He gave us his address and invited us to come by.  He said we would be pleasantly surprised.

Build your Dream Home and you'll find the Design Process can be a lot of fun.

Apparently modular home building has come a long way because we would never have guessed his home was a modular construction.  Upon further investigation, I became convinced that a modular home had a lot of advantages.  I never thought I would say this but, if you’re going to build your dream home, at least consider modular construction.  Throw out that box like trailer look that you might have in your head.  Anything you can imagine can be constructed in a modular fashion.  The advantage is that I’m convinced that the modular home is better made for a number of reasons.  They’re built inside in a an environmentally controlled building.  There’s no rain to interfere with construction and no paralyzing heat for the builders to take short cuts.  They have added support to withstand lifting and moving onto a trailer for transport.  Why is that important?  Our builder had a video of the aftermath of a tornado going through a Midwest community.  The traditionally built homes were destroyed but the modular homes were intact.  That made quite an impact on me.

When you build your dream home you want to be sure that you get exactly what you want.  We knew we were only going to do this once.  It was a bigger undertaking than we thought but everything turned out better than we expected.  Our ability to custom design everything was something that we had not expected.  One of our best friends recently moved into one of those big builders who specializes in the 55 and over communities and she was extremely limited in what she could do, and everything had a high price tag attached to it.  With the design process in the modular construction software, almost everything can be easily accommodated.  We started with one of their designs (there were over 300 to choose from) and found something very close to what we designed on our own before we ever got started.  The 3D visualization allowed you to see the view from anywhere in your home.  When we were very close to being finished, we simulated walking through the front door and realized it wasn’t as inviting as we would like. We wanted the lake to dominate the view but, as it was designed, the stairway to the second floor is what you saw when you walked in the front door.  We thought we had to go back to the drawing board but our design engineer expanded the front hallway just a bit and changed the stairs from one flight straight up to an “L” shaped stairway that moved everything to one side and made our living room and the lake visible as soon as you walked in.

The other amazing thing about the modular home was how quickly it was assembled at our property site.  Our house is big and required seven different boxes.  It took an entire day, but everything was lifted and put in place basically giving us an instant house from what you could see from the street.  It was amazing.  The inside would take another ten weeks to finish but from day one you could see what the house would look like.  Construction is still going on in our community and we have become even more grateful for our decision to go modular.  Construction on some homes has dragged on over a year and those homes are much smaller than ours.  Our builder continues to bring people to see our home and no one can believe it’s a modular home that, when everything is taken into account, usually costs ten to fifteen percent less than the traditionally constructed home.  Needless to say, we are very happy.

So don’t give up on your idea to build your dream home in retirement.  It will be the adventure of a lifetime and the design and building process will be one of the most exciting things you will ever do.  Life isn't a Dress Rehearsal - it's the real thing and you only get to do it once. Live your dream.  It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!

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