Entries Tagged 'development' ↓

It took a day and a half, but our plans have now officially been submitted to the City of Philadelphia for zoning approval. We filed for an accelerated review of the plans in order to get an answer within 5 days so if all goes well we will have zoning approval for both homes from […]

We passed another milestone yesterday, which was to get the appraisal on the homes back based on our plans. Since we are the first to build a new home in this up and coming neighborhood and there are few comparable new construction sales nearby, we were a bit nervous. We got the call late yesterday […]

Due to our concerns over spec’ing the best mechanical system for our homes, we officially hired the Ross Mechanical Group, Inc. to design a custom mechanical package for both homes today. We originally met the owner, Ross, at the 2007 GreenFest Philly event last fall. He has been in contact ever since and has already […]

Today I ordered an estimate for soil and environmental testing for the lots from Ambric Tech Corp. Ambric is an engineering firm recommended to me by Brian at Interface Studios. The testing basically consists of drilling a few holes at least 10′ deep in each lot to determine the content and quality of the soil. […]

Hurray! I just received the commitment letter from our lender - The Bancorp Bank. The Vice President of Commercial Lending, Edward Dixon, got all of the necessary signatures to approve us for the loan and move us to the next level. Our closing on the land is scheduled for February 22nd and we simply need […]

Last night I met with the zoning committee from the East Kensington Neighbors Association which is the local neighborhood group for the area our project is in. In Philly, each neighborhood is represented by an association of neighbors that appoints a zoning committee from its members to assist developers and homeowners who require zoning variances […]

Yesterday we made the decision to go forward with seeking LEED for Homes Silver rating on both homes in the 100k house project. If you remember in this previous post we were still grappling with this decision due to its uncertain impact on our tight $100K construction budget.
What solidified this decision was an informal meeting […]

We had a brief design meeting today at ISA to finalize the plans that we will have quoted next week. We’ve been so focused on the design lately that we haven’t discussed the schedule in a while. We originally had discussed breaking ground in March when the ground was hopefully beginning to loosen up after […]

This inspirational project was completed by architect Edward M Baum and developer Diane Cheatham in Dallas in 2004. As I review the Dwell article detailing the project I am reminded at the similarities to our current project. The project was a prototype for building modern and affordable homes on Dallas’s standard building lots of 50′ x 150′. They were able to fit four, one-story, 1,700 square foot homes on two of these lots and build them for roughly $100 psf using mainly materials sourced from local big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowes…

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on our financing situation. The previous posts on financing have been some of the most popular posts from the blog to date so I can assume that many are hungry for more info on the topic.
When we left off last, we had been rejected by the […]