Epilogue: The markets speak loudly...
Well, let's recap our story thus far. Young family decides to design and build a modern house that's easy on the planet and well designed for family life, on a budget affordable by work-a-day folks. Initial design development is exciting and the family finds a great team of architects to design a beautiful space. Constraints from the city and the crazy cost of Vancouver construction send the initial cost estimate through the roof. The combination of the initial estimate and the financial meltdown in North America puts the project on hold indefinitely while our young family sorts out the best way forward. Looking back now, that's the way it played out. Hindsight shows us that we were planning the project through the peak of the Vancouver housing and construction markets and both of these have since cooled off substantially. After a bit of a roller coaster ride these last few months (and many nights left sleepless weighing the options) we decided to sell our house (that sat on our to-be-redeveloped lot) and look for a lower-cost, lower-risk solution. We sold our house just after the bizarre inundation of snow that hit us at Christmas and then spent several painful weeks trying to find a suitable replacement. Last week we found that solution - a beautiful architect-designed home in our current neighbourhood at a remarkable price. It's about the same size as the house we were designing (1900 sq ft including a suite below) on a slightly smaller lot. It's about 9 years old and, to our surprise, came available at a price substantially lower than what we could have built for. It's unfortunate that our project had to come to this end but there was only so much risk and debt that we could take on to realize the dream of building a classic house. With the financial crisis and the uncertainty around that, I'm convinced that we would not have been able to raise the required financing for the build and I'm certain that we made the right decision. We'll keep looking out for an opportunity to build but the falling real estate market offered us an opportunity we would have been crazy to pass up... Until next time.