<p>Well, I was trying to keep from boring everyone with my usual tomes 
so I left out some details but you really can’t get an accurate picture without them.</p>
<p>“Are there any one acre lots, or tear downs? A lot more trouble I know, but you could build exactly what you want.”
Well you see - actually, until a couple months ago, we actually owned outright the most gorgeous, perfectly located 9 acres imaginable. It was within the city limits, in what was recently the outskirts but we bought the lot just before growth exploded in that area. It’s still residential but even if the road it faces turns commercial - which it might, as it is now the main artery to our new A&M campus - the lot is so deep that you could build way back and never be bothered. Big huge trees on gently rolling fields. We’ve owned it since before we bought this house, actually, and for years, have been planning to build our dream house and shop on that.</p>
<p>But we finally, reluctantly, after years of scheming on it, came to the conclusion that we couldn’t afford to build. Which sounds wrong, especially as he’s in the building industry, and theoretically we could do some work ourselves. But realistically, in our market right now and for the foreseeable future, it costs about 30 dollars a square foot MORE to build than to buy existing. Roughly, depending on what you buy, but that’s an average, and you never know for absolute certain how much a house will end up costing you until you are done building it. It’s a risk we just didn’t want to take, because almost always you end up spending more than you swear you will, but stuff happens. And, that doesn’t take into consideration the road and developing the lot…which, we have no buddies in the road business, and let me tell you, roads might as well be paved with diamonds. They are damn expensive. And I don’t want to drive down a rutted dirt path with mud puddles during my retirement years…</p>
<p>So we sold it and that was hard because it was saying goodbye to the nicest pipe dream you can imagine. We did make a pretty good profit on it - sold it for 4 times what we bought it for - so it wasn’t a loss. It’s the reason we can upgrade a little bit. But though a smaller lot might not bring the problems of a lengthy road, it still is the issues of costing more to build than to buy here - plus the time involved - I think we just decided we didn’t have the energy and time to go that route. Which I hate. But I think it’s a more honest assessment of what we need to do.</p>
<p>As for expanding our search - not really, at least not on a large scale, on account of his job, which isn’t the kind you transfer (works for a small local company) and he’s been very successful in most part because he has been here so long and everyone in his field knows him personally and his reputation. It’s the payoff of 30 years of hard work and integrity and it doesn’t follow you when you relocate, because it’s a pretty regionalized industry.</p>
<p>As far as a more localized expansion - Actually there are a couple little towns within 15 or 20 miles of this town where a lot of people do live and they commute to our town, which is the largest one in our region, and he keeps wanting to consider a house in one of them just because we could get a lot of land for the money, but I won’t have it. I hate commuting and I don’t want to spend an hour of my day in the car. Lots of people do and don’t mind, which is cool, but why go through all this upheaval to end up in something that I never wanted? And I bet he’d be sick of that drive after a while, anyway. We still have 10 to fifteen years before we retire, so we have to find something that will work when we do but that still works now.</p>
<p>I know I sound awful picky, don’t I? But the thing is we don’t HAVE to move, not like you do if you relocate or something - but we need to, for our long term best interests, and better now than later. So we don’t want to move unless we can get exactly what we want. I mean, I already have a house that isn’t exactly what I want, why go through all this to be in another one? haha. And I love what I’ve done to our house and sometimes we wish we knew that the neighborhood would remain stable for the next 20 years because we could expand it and expand our existing (too small) shop. But if we expand this house and end up having to move anyway, we’ll lose our shirts, because we would never recoup that money when we resold - it would make this house worth more than the neighborhood would let it be sold for.</p>
<p>So you see the kind of running in circles we’ve been doing for the past decade and a half…add to that, that both of us are very risk averse and resistant to change overall and it makes for a lot of self induced angst. lol.</p>
<p>So thanks for letting me vent and thank you for the suggestions, which are good ones for people without our particular constraints…though I am going to try to reexamine every option once in a while and keep an open mind.</p>