The Golan Home

Well, maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, but I guess when you get a very quick response from government it’s not good news. We got a surprisingly fast reply from the Local Committee, full of information about what I’m aloud to build and how but without an answer to the one question that we asked – what is the tax estimate on our land…

We are hearing from different people that the tax on a 330 sq meter lot, with a house that uses all the rights (meaning that it is the maximum aloud size), is about $30,000. We have a bigger lot but plan on building a lot less then the max so we are guessing we’ll be taxed up to $35,000.

The way we see it at this point, we should build the house we want, and if it costs a little more, will pay extra. Changing our minds later will only cost us more, so why go through the agony?

The good news is that we have new plans. The bigger master bedroom is back, as is the bigger cellar. We also enlarged the kids’ bathroom and increased the size of the living room window so it now stretched the entire length of the room. It will be beautiful sitting there with a grand vista of our backyard!

I did another round of searching for images of structures that have that certain ‘thing’ that we like so much. Is it Adobe style or Mediterranean? Is it American Southwest architecture perhaps, the style found in Arizona and New Mexico?

I’m not sure anymore. The word eclectic is too vague as a description when you want to sit down with an architect and describe your dream home.

Now that we are already in the early planning stages, we brought up the look and feel topic again, as a reminder. It seemed to jar them a little. They were looking at certain elements in the photos, while we were thinking of others.

Will this put us on the track we want to be on? Or should we let them lead with the hopes that they’ll take us to our destination, sans baseless fantasy?

Following are some of the photos that demonstrate what we have in mind. One great source of inspiration was Bill’s house from the movie Kill Bill II:

A few more ideas:

We took a slower approach at our last meeting with the architects. While we are waiting to hear back from the local authority on how much in taxes we will have to pay, it’s not clear how much we’ll have left. So we set and examined the budget.

It looks straightforward but I wanted to make sure we understand it and the alternatives. It’s going t o be a long road…

Our next meeting will be at our house. They want to get a feel of what we like, what furniture we have, etc. Should be interesting.