29. Waiting for a house, part 4

In 2004 we sold our co-op apartment, which had been my co-op apartment since I bought it in 1992, and my first real home on my own. Since that time I’ve had a recurring dream about that charming 1920s flat on Prairie Street. The details vary—time of day, situation, who I’m with, what the building or apartment actually look like—but the theme is always the same:  I am trying to somehow sneak back into that apartment, even though I know it no longer belongs to me. Sometimes I’m caught by the owner taking a bath in the old, giant pedestal tub. Sometimes the current owner welcomes me and shows me around at all the changes s/he’s made. Sometimes it’s empty and I just sit on the floor in the dark. Sometimes the dreams have an apocalyptic bent, and I am sneaking into the apartment seeking refuge from some cataclysmic event. 

Dream analysts would probably enjoy breaking it down for me, but I’ve never been fully able to understand what the dreams mean. But I do know when they occur: during times of stress, and when I feel insecure or unmoored. I’m not sure if the apartment represents something else in my dream, but I do know that usually what it’s telling me is loud and clear—I want to go home. And it’s especially troubling when I don’t feel I have a home, or where I call home is changing.

I’ve had the dream a lot lately, and more of the apocalyptic variety. As I lie awake at 4am, wondering if I should give it up and get out of bed or keep trying to fall back asleep, I think about all the changes the past year has brought. New friends, new city, new climate, new ways of doing things. It’s not a surprise that I feel insecure, and especially when I’m not sure where “home” is. 

For those of you not familiar with how a construction loan works, here’s a little primer:  first, your builder gives you an estimate of how much it’s going to cost to build your house. He gives everything his best guess and adds in his labor and his fee for being a general contractor and making sure everything goes smoothly. We’ll call that sum “X.” So, you go to the bank and you say, we’d like a loan to build our house, and the builder says it will cost X. So the bank takes your application, orders title work creating a brand new title for your new property, and hires an appraiser. They will loan you an amount that is 80-95% (based on your credit rating and how much you want to owe) of the total costs. But the costs aren’t figured based on the actual cost to build—no, no, no. The appraisal is based on comparables, houses that most closely fit the description of the house you want to build, built in the same neighborhood. If there aren’t any houses like yours in the neighborhood, then they will go to another, similar neighborhood. The number they come up with is what they think they can sell your house for, should you default on the loan. We’ll call that sum “Y.”

The bank will loan you its percentage of X or Y, whichever is less. But with rapidly rising building costs, usually Y is considerably less than X, leaving the buyer to come up with the difference. Getting the appraisal back was a huge deal, telling us how much money we’d have to cough up to build the house, in addition to the money we’d already paid for the lot.

In our case, the difference between X and Y was considerable. Almost $100,000, to be exact. Our house would be an anomaly in our neighborhood, much larger and newer than any of the other houses, bringing down the amount it could re-sell for. If you’ve followed me so far, you can lead this to the inevitable conclusion. If the bank only thinks you can get Y if and when you sell the property, then you’re at risk of losing all the money you’ve put it, that is X minus Y, plus the cost of the lot. For all of the time and emotion and money we’d already spent on this project, for all the people we’d involved—our landlady, our builder, other builders, our designer, our realtor, our son and our dog—we couldn’t argue with the numbers in black and white. It wasn’t financially responsible to build a house. Especially in a place that wasn’t going to be our forever-place. We want to travel. We want to live other places, see other things. The two Washingtons had opened our eyes, and somehow made it easier to make the decision.

We decided to not build the house. Turtle Cove would remain a lovely lot with a pond and turtles and gorgeous trees and flowers, but it would not be the site of our future house. For now, it will remain empty and wild.

Once we made the decision, the thing that shocked me most was an overwhelming sense of relief. We could have a house in a month, not a year. We could move and get on with our lives. We could rid ourselves of the nagging worry of “what if”—what if our mortgage is too much, what if our house doesn’t get built on time, what if my husband gets a job somewhere else, what if, what if, what if? I hadn’t realized how weighed-down I’d started to feel from all the decision-making. I hadn’t realized how miserable I was having to wait yet another year for a place to call our own. 

Our temporary euphoria at having cut free from the burden of worry was cut short, though, by the thought of all the people we would have to tell about our decision. The banker, the realtor, the builder, our landlady, our son…..but everyone seemed to take it in stride. And we made an appointment that very evening to go view a house in a neighborhood on the other side of town. Because what was most important, after all, was not building a house, but finding a home.