Our House: Design I Build: Post 5: Resetting Goals

"What should we do now?"

So we finally, closed on the lots, now what?

We found beautiful, wooded, lots, had an offer accepted, and finally closed on them. The hard part was done, right?

I'm having flashbacks to July 2010 when my wife and I bought our first home, and where we still live today. We had just closed on a dilapidated duplex in the Church Hill neighborhood here in Richmond, and really had no idea really what we were getting into. We blogged about that one too back in the day and actually found it still exists somehow (click here if interested). Spending the next two years renovating it on weekends, nights after work, spending every nickel we had, gave us an appreciation for these types of big projects. So, I'd say at this moment we were a bit relieved but definitely cautious to wade into the water.

A little more background on just what we had...

The five lots are part of an established neighborhood in Richmond, VA. It's a bit of an oddball area, with narrow, winding streets with great changes in elevation and dotted with a diverse mixture of houses built from different eras. Close to the James river, the geology resembles that more of the Piedmont, and is close to the fall in elevation to the coastal plain. I'll admit I don't know all the history of the area, but it appears city dwellers had built weekend/ hunting cabins in what was at the time the "country" in and around the 1920's. Several of these eclectic houses still stand, and are amongst newer, post-war ramblers and cap cods.

Our particular lots were part of a subdivision from the 1950's but for whatever reason were never developed, except for the visible signs of decades-old grading for what would have been the road. Maybe the developer was holding them for themselves, maybe the topography proved too difficult, or maybe some other reason that's lost to history. Over the years, nature took over the lots and the right of way, and at some point the city installed a trail right down the middle of the right of way to access the nearby park.

Did I mention the park? That was one of the biggest, if not the biggest draw for us. On the other side of the right of way from the lots (see red area in the image below) sits a 100+ acre park (in green), largely wooded with mature hardwoods, and with several meandering creeks and trails. We knew this land could not be developed in the future, so what we saw would remain in perpetuity.

Here are the five lots in relation to the park and right-of-way.

What we needed to determine next was what to do with the five lots. As I show above, they're all contiguous, with the three center lots a uniform size and two "irregular" lots at the ends (irregular basically means it's not a nice rectangle :) Although there were no visible boundaries between them, we were able to generally guess where each lot was by walking it off, counting each step as roughly a foot. We studied what was happening at each lot, looking at the topography, vegetation, rock outcroppings, etc. and it quickly became apparent...that only three of the lots looked buildable. Lots 1 and 5, the ones bookending the property, and even most of lot 2, were in low-lying areas, with what looked like dry streambeds running through them. Lots 3 and 4 both had significant slopes that crested more or less on the dividing line between them. So does that mean only 2 out of the 5 lots are buildable? Is that why no one else seemed eager to buy this land? Did we just make a huge mistake? What should we do now?

I wanted to emphasize that last sentence there as it probably sounds familiar to many of you. Even my wife and I, an interior designer and architect respectively, who deal with similar issues all the time, somehow became emotionally involved in this land, maybe putting the blinders on at times simply because we saw the beauty in it. It's one thing to counsel others on purchases like this, but a whole other thing when you're personally involved. Lesson learned! OK, well, it was ours at this point, no point in thinking negatively, so what should we do now? There was no more developing all five lots, no dream of building a series of Passive Houses one by one. Heck, could we even build two? So, of course, we looked at each other and said, well, "maybe we can just keep it for ourselves??"