My wife, Jayne, and I decided that we wanted to find our way to a more permanent Jersey shore situation. We watched the real estate market carefully, but for years found ourselves saying "we should have bought that house last year." By the beginning of 2003, we had decided that real estate market would cool off only when we invested in it. So we took the plunge. We bought a small duplex with the plan to rent it to vacationers during the summers.
We were wrong again. The real estate market on the island continued to heat up to the point that the house, a perfectly good house, accounted for less than 20% of the property value.
Our original thinking was that five or seven years down the road we might do a major renovation or build new. But within months of our purchase the economic pressure to maximize that property value was already building. We also suffer from a periodic compulsion to build.
So, we seized the opportunity to once again make things more difficult for ourselves and embarked on a project to build a new house on the site.
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| The difference a year makes... | ||
We have several home construction projects under our belts, but this one has given me the most muscle aches, been the most fun, and has generated the most stories and photos. (I am up to date on the photos, but way behind on the stories.)
My second compulsion is to photograph and document every detail. That's just me and this Web site is my expression.
