Financing and drawings

I thought that as long as the foundation seemed intact, we could renovate the home to be the most awesome thing ever.  So I called a friend of mine, a builder that I worked with several years ago to ask him to take a look at the foundation. After walking the exterior of the home and looking around in the basement, he felt like it would work just fine.  It is pretty incredible that a home built in 1921 hadn't really settled all that much. The brick course looked good and that was very encouraging.

Hubby and I started really talking about the possibilities of owning this home.  I, of course, had some really big ideas, really big.  Originally, I wanted to take the roof off and add a second floor.  The home would look amazing with a second floor sitting squarely in the roof and clarestory windows letting in light to the main level.  Go to the Houzz.com website and search for the Porter Street Bungalow by Moore Architects to see my inspiration. I would just copy the image into the blog,  but the site won't let me.  

Unfortunately, I hadn't worked on CAD since I graduated two years ago, and my computer crashed that had the software on it.  So, thinking quick, I decided to sign up for a class at the local technical college to refresh my CAD skills, learn Revit ( a 3D software program) and get the student software for free.  I started working on the drawings after getting through most of  my training manual and hubby started working on financing.

After following the process for a conventional loan and getting an appraisal done, we discovered that they would only lend for the home if an additional $21K worth of repairs were done on the roof, sewer, and mold issues.  We were planning on doing these with the construction anyways, so it didn't make since for seller to repair the roof we would eventually tear off to add a second floor.

Clay began looking at what other options we might have, and I continued trying to figure out a floor plan that made room for a new staircase to the second floor.

About this same time, disaster struck.