So, I got good news from the bank yesterday: They’ll be happy to give us a loan. In fact, they’d be okay with loaning $100,000 more than we think we need right now. They just need two things from us before we sign:
- The value of the land. This may be difficult to know for sure, since the land was a gift and not sold. We may just give them a random guess and hope that they’re happy with it.
- How much the house will cost. We’re currently anxiously awaiting word from our builder on that (as well as when he’ll start drilling the well).
So, things are going quite well. We got blueprints a few weeks back, but I didn’t post them since we don’t have them in digital form since we don’t have a scanner and they’re on much-larger-than-normal sheets of paper. Does anyone have a scanner that could scan tabloid-sized-or-larger sheets of paper? (At the moment, the bank has our copy, but we should be getting them back at some point… And there are more copies at my parents’ house.)
1. The value of the land. This may be difficult to know for sure, since the land was a gift and not sold. We may just give them a random guess and hope that they’re happy with it.
That’s a good one. Although US Census data covers property values for towns in the United States, it does not, in fact, separate the land from the improvements. However, Charlton’s average property value per family is $135,331, and that’s for a 2.443 acre/person estate (again, on average). If we postulate that improvements represent at least 90% of that number, it would put your land value at around $7,709 on average (as the lot is only 1.39 acres). Of course, this is an untrained roll against Appraise(Real-Estate) with a -4 penalty for Incompetence, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in my estimate.
BTW, when I had to scan my larger-than-reasonable blueprints for Lexington, I ended up going to the Kinko’s on Route 9 outside Worcester. They have the capacity for large-format scanning and will burn the resultant TIFs to CD for you. Note that they have only black-and-white large format scanning, so if your blueprint artist decided to fly in the face of normal material designation convention and use grayscale, it won’t work, but its worth investigating.
Just remember to round the value up. ;)
If it’s Census data, I assume it’s from 2000, and land and house values have gone up considerably since then. There have been similar 1-acre-or-so lots being sold in the area (without improvements) for $75,000 to $100,000. The improvements (that is, the buildings) are closer to 60% or 70% than 90%. There’s also a lot of value in that we’ve gone through much of the permitting process (such as to be allowed to build within 200 ft. of a stream), and thus the land is worth more now than it was when we got it.
“Buy land. They’ve stopped making it.” — Mark Twain
These are real, actual, blueprints. They’re dark blue lines on lightish blue paper, if I recall correctly. I might try a place like that out… Where are they more specifically?
They are located in the Petco plaza near White City east of Worcester on Route 9 (map). You probably would want to call ahead (508-756-1977), as the last time I had to do this type of scanning, it required a specific person with expert knowledge on how to intercept the TIF stream to be there. The setup is automated for duplication, so it requires somebody to tell the system not to immediately print the large-format document once its been scanned.
If you don’t need very high resolution images then you could just use a digital camera instead of scanning them in. I don’t think that the paper was shiny so you shouldn’t have any glare effects or such.
If you did want a very detailed version then what you could do is scan part of the image at a time and then overlap the images, adjust for lighting differences, and create one large full image. This is fairly common practice when trying to scan in the album pages at work :)
As with anything else, the “value” of the land could have two meanings. A) The price when buying it or B) The price when trying to sell it. These two numbers differ significantly.
So that you can get an idea of how much things vary, go to http://charlton.patriotproperties.com/ , type in a street of “Berry Corner Rd” (note that “Road” does not work.. unfortunate), and head to 190. It states that 61.190 acres is worth 116,100. However, it also says that the house is only worth 113,100, which is off by probably a factor of three…
Well, I don’t have the technical expertise to splice things together like that, and I don’t have much interest in learning at the moment. But maybe a digital photo would be accurate enough. I basically just want to post them on the Internet for others to see, and it’d be nice to have a permanent version of them that I’ll be able to always find in the future.
You know you’re a geek when…
…you want to scan the paper blueprints into electronic form so that you’ll have a permanent version.
Hmm… I didn’t find wanting to do that odd at all.
I can find important files much easier than I can find important papers.
All we need now is Google image or music search.
“Something that looks sorta like this *scribble*”
“Something that sounds like *hmm hmm hmmm*”
Then when Google brings its much touted desktop solution to bear, well, good times. :)