Many of you may have seen our announcement in early 2019 that John and I were planning to build a barndominium near our family farm in South Georgia. You may have also seen our announcement about six months later that we were moving about two hours away and bought a house. Confusing right? Well I wanted to hop on and fill you guys in on what happened in Q&A format!
What happened to the Barndominium?
The long and the short of it is that we could not find a bank who was willing to finance such a unique property. We designed the barndominium to have a large apartment on top of our barn and horse stalls on the bottom. This type of property cannot be financed by a traditional mortgage. The other difficulty was finding comparable sales in order for the bank to do an appraisal for other types of financing. After exploring 20+ options over the course of six months, we decided to put the project on hold.
Why not build a house and barn separately on the same land?
The land where we were building is family land, meaning my family owns the surrounding land. John and I were building the barndominium as a place to live now and then eventually turn into a place for our guests to stay when we built our forever home on another part of the property. Neither one of us really felt ready to build a forever home that we knew we would not want to sell in the future. Life still has a lot of unanswered questions, ya know?
Why not buy a house in the same area?
Where we currently live is fairly rural with not a lot of turnover in the housing market, especially with what we were looking for with acreage and barn. We decided to expand our search to the Athens, Georgia area because among other reasons my parents and my sister/her fiancé live there. The second house we looked at in that area checked all of the boxes.
What are you going to do for work?
John's sales territory covers the entire state of Georgia and he works from home when he is not traveling. Moving closer to the metro Atlanta area will make his commute a lot easier most of the time. I will still commute every other week or so back to my office in Vidalia, but can manage most things remotely. Also being an hour away from the Atlanta airport is a lot easier for our travels than almost three hours away.
When can we see the new place?
We are in the process of remodeling certain areas of the new house and I cannot wait to share. Stay tuned for a reveal of the new house in the coming weeks!
