Architectural services selected, balancing act

We're getting our foot in the door of this project and the balancing act must begin.  Budget with desires, our crazy designs with resale-ability, ideas with time.  Luckily our designs have shrank steadily over time (thanks to not winning the lottery, dangit! ;) ) so we have more reasonable ideas space-wise, so that helps a lot in moving this project toward an affordable outcome.  The one item other than finances that I think we'll struggle a bit with is how this place will look in the end.  We're not going to live forever.  We don't expect our offspring to want to continue to keep the house.  That means someone else will buy it.  Frankly, there's a limited pool of people that would be interested in buying something far out there, and even more limited bunch that could actually afford it; that means the more wild and crazy a project is the harder it will be to find someone that's willing to pay us for what it's worth.  If we were able to build something amazing by ourselves for less than $150,000 we probably would go that route, but alas it will likely cost more than that and we'll need to get a return on the investment.  I'd also like to stay married and get the house built in this lifetime!

Creating this idea using a more conventional route to homebuilding will likely mean dream/design sacrifices.  If we did it totally DIY, the only ones to tell us that we can't do something would be the engineer or local codes so there would be no limits other than time and money.  That's not how things are working out, but hopefully we'll be able to get some parts of it done just right - tastefully - and folks will think, "Castle!" or, "Schloss!" when they see it.  A suggestion of a turret.  A bit of crenellation, perhaps?  Steep roof somewhere?  Some half-timbering here, a lot of stone there.  Yep.  No reason it can't be done, we've got books full of great houses pictured with those details and they are very desireable homes.  Of course, many were built 75+ years and more ago by millionaires; but hey, who's counting?

Anyway, first thing's first; we'll get a survey done and get the septic in.  We are considering a super-small house on the property (perhaps it will remain as a "mother-in-law") to get out of our current house and out from under the mortgage.  It wasn't too bad before, but with the little'un here and the other half not working as much in order to be home and take care of her (Day care/Baby sitters are expensive!) it would help more to get out of this place and into something with a much, much lower overhead.  But that's all on the drawing table.

Will keep the blog updated, and we'll post that first shovel of dirt getting displaced for the future "castle".