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WORK ON A HOUSING development began in early 2000 about a mile from where we lived. This was right around the time that my wife Lisa and I were starting to feel like we wanted some more room for our family. In addition, we were concerned about our current backyard. There was a swale—a shallow ditch—that ran the length of the yard, parallel to the house.
When we bought the house, there was grass in the base of the swale and nothing looked unusual. The first summer I mowed, I noticed that some parts of the swale seemed wet even though there’d been no rain for days. The second summer, mowing the swale became a bit more difficult, and the mower dug deep grooves into the soft, wet soil.
By the third summer, we had standing water in the swale and it was impossible to mow. It was now a swamp. I had a friend who’s a landscape architect come out and look at our backyard. His conclusion: The swale intersected with a spring. Years later, we found out that the previous owners had dumped six truckloads of dirt into the swale and grew grass there, shortly before putting the house on the market.
I went to the nearby development to look at lots. By then, I’d settled on a nonnegotiable criterion: a level lot that was at a higher elevation than the rest of the neighborhood. I didn’t want water issues again. In the entire development of 50 or so lots, lot No. 30 stood out. It was the perfect size, it was rectangular, it was at the neighborhood’s highest elevation and it was almost completely flat. There was only one problem: It also had a “sold” sign.
I told Hope, the realtor for the new development, that if lot 30 had been available, I would have made a deposit that day. She picked up the phone and made a call. She confirmed that the folks who had put a deposit on lot 30 had changed their minds and, in fact, it was available. I quickly wrote a check for $1,000 and we were on our way.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, I wanted to keep the cost of the new house to under $200,000. My wife and I decided on a standard two-story colonial design, about 2,200 square feet in size. We picked white siding, black shutters, a red door and a three-car garage. My dad, who lived nearby, was especially enthusiastic about the three-car garage.
The day before we were to meet with the builder and sign all the contracts, we got a call from Hope. She knew we’d already determined the design specifics for our house, but she’d recently come across a floor plan that she thought we might like even more. I wasn’t too excited about considering changes to our design. But since Hope was such a stellar realtor, we agreed to take a look.
She showed us plans for a colonial house of nearly 3,000 square feet that would cost just $5,000 more. We were kind of dumbfounded and I repeatedly asked if she was certain this new model was priced accurately. Hope had actually called the president of the building company and received his assurance that it was indeed an accurate price.
It didn’t require much thought on our part to go with the new option. To keep the total cost under $200,000, we did have to downsize the garage, much to Dad’s chagrin. We signed the papers the next day.
It was a long summer for me. I had anticipatory anxiety as we awaited the start of the homebuilding process. I was relieved when construction finally got underway. My dad went to the job site pretty much every day, befriending the workers and confirming that things were being done right. He had a great time, perhaps reliving memories from 50 years earlier when he had built his own house.
Our new house was completed with few difficulties and, in November 2000, we moved in. We’ve been very satisfied homeowners. We didn’t skimp on the basement waterproofing package and have never had any water-related issues. Of course, my dad never let me forget about the three-car garage we should have built.
Meanwhile, we had to sell our existing home. We used Hope as our realtor for that transaction as well. This time, the swale, with its perennial damp soil and overgrown weeds, wasn’t hidden from prospective buyers. Even so, the home sold easily.
I’ve never won the lottery. I don’t remember ever even playing the lottery, except for a couple times when I joined the office pool for a mega-jackpot drawing. Eventually, I became one of the few office holdouts when the signup sheet would come around.
Remember the suspiciously low price for our house? A few months after we had signed on the dotted line, Hope informed us she’d learned that the builder had indeed made a mistake on the price, to the tune of some $36,000. I’m pretty sure that’s as close to winning the jackpot as I’ll ever come.
Ken Cutler lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has worked as an electrical engineer in the nuclear power industry for more than 38 years. There, he has become an informal financial advisor for many of his coworkers. Ken is involved in his church, enjoys traveling and hiking with his wife Lisa, is a shortwave radio hobbyist, and has a soft spot for cats and dogs. Check out Ken’s earlier articles.
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Ken, you made a wise decision about making water drainage your priority.
I have an over 100 year old house, in an older neighborhood, in the Bay View area of Milwaukee close to lake Michigan. The area in general slopes down from a hill to the west. The north end of the block where my house is slopes also down to the south. So, I’m on sort of a two sided hill at my end of the block.
Because of the way they did things a hundred years ago, most of the houses are located right on the lot lines. The north side of my house is right on an alley line, but because the block to the west is higher, the alley is at downward slope with my foundation being elevated above the alley about 3 feet at the west and 12 feet at the east. I have one of the few double lots with sand and gravel below the grass next to my house which turns to clay the closer you get to my neighbor’s house.
Because my area is older it has combined storm and sanitary sewers which have never been separated, and in other areas of the city, have caused large back up problems in people’s basements during heavy rains. However, thanks be to God, I’ve never had any water problems in the 30 or so years I’ve lived here.
Tim, glad to hear you have gone three decades without any water problems. Thanks for sharing your story.
Whenever I buy a home, I always ask myself, “Where will the water go?”
Love your story, Ken, not least because it so closely matches ours. We were driven to sell our Oregon beach house at least partly by water incursion. Rising sea levels meant the increasingly frequent and unnerving sight of waves washing into the back yard. All I wanted in Washington state was a house on a hilltop with a big view and no water issues. But we were consistently outbid for houses we liked, sometimes by $100K or more.
So on a rainy day with nothing else to do, we drove to a large hillside development under construction. I commented offhandedly to the onsite sales rep that I wished we’d been there to grab the already-sold house at the very tippy-top of the hill. And she says, “Oh, that fell out of escrow this morning!” Pow.
A few hours and a flurry of phone calls later — I woke our realtor from his nap on a Maui beach and he padded barefoot to the hotel desk to fax in our offer — we had the house. No bidding wars… if you pay the developer’s price, it’s yours. The brand-new place cost us half, on a per-square-foot basis, of what we’d been futilely bidding for existing view homes in the area. I’m looking across the water at the Seattle skyline and Mt. Rainier right now. It’s our frog house (I plan to croak here).
And we got a lottery bonus too. We convinced the developer’s rep to commit to install a heat pump for air conditioning, a $6500 freebie (caught him in a weak moment, I guess). We heard later he got in serious trouble for that. Hee-hee!
Mike, the parallels are uncanny…kind of like Lincoln and Kennedy. Although I doubt anyone got in trouble for our lottery windfall since it was the company president’s mistake. Thanks for sharing!
That was definitely smiling providence!
And a very appropriate title. You can sleep well knowing you were an honest seller.