Pfefferkorn Purchase

Making the decision to build our house on Pfefferkorn Road.

---

A confluence of factors sparked our decision to leave our house at Paddington Court and build a new home on Pfefferkorn Road. With some of the bonuses I earned in 2000 and 2001, we paid off our Paddington mortgage which seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I discovered, however, that without the mortgage interest tax deduction I had to pay closer attention to quarterly tax filings and actually needed more cash on hand to make the payments. It made for an unexpected tax burden in 2002 and especially 2003. Until then, we’d always gotten tax refunds. I didn’t like actually having to make tax payments through year, even if we had no actual debt.

By early 2003 the stock market had declined nearly 50% from its bubbly peak in 2000 and appeared close to bottoming as the U.S. and the world recovered from the dual shocks of the burst tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks. As my bonus payments continued through 2002 and 2003, I kept a lot of it in cash, not wanting to invest in a clearly declining market. I knew that sooner or later, however, I would need to do something more productive with the funds.

• 

Despite the general economic downturn in 2002, the housing market in Howard County remained firm, even frothy, boosted by plans to expand the well-paid workforces at Fort Meade and the NSA. Interest rates were relatively low, below 5%, and I began to think it might be a good time to take out a new mortgage and use the cash from selling Paddington as an investment pot for the future. I figured I would only need to make long-term stock market returns greater than 4% to come out ahead. The historical average was at least twice that, so I felt it was a pretty good bet. (Turned out to be correct so far, fortunately, despite some pretty significant downturns for the 2008 financial crisis and 2020 coronavirus…knock on wood.)

• 

After Allie’s second grade in 2003, we decided to enroll her at Glenelg Country School for third grade. Over that summer, I left my job at Spirent and started on the process of becoming a financial planner, enrolling in an online certificate program through Kansas State University in the fall semester.

At some point in 2003, I started nosing around housing developments near us. I wasn’t necessarily looking for someplace to build, in fact I would have preferred to find an interesting, well-looked after house that we could move into. I looked at some places on my own and connected once again with Joan Ward, our real estate agent friend who helped keep an eye out for other prospects. I looked at homes in the The Preserve just adjacent to Paddington, some near Gaither Farm Road off Route 108, the Farside development off Homewood and checked out some new houses going up around the Hobbit’s Glen golf course.

Once I started driving Allie to and from Glenelg Country School, my focus shifted westward. The existing houses tended to be bigger, older and on larger lots than I wanted since there had been building restrictions on new homes in the rural western half of Howard County. We didn’t want to make Barb’s commute much longer than it already was and wanted to stay relatively close to Columbia and Ellicott City’s shops and restaurants. I looked at some houses and lots near Cattail Creek but decided they were too far out of the way.

In March or so of 2004, I came across the site of a new home development on Pfefferkorn Road, one of several properties being developed by the Selfridge group. I can’t remember if I found it first or if Joan clued me in, but I was the one that started discussions with sales people that were stationed in a trailer on the corner. The location seemed to fit most of our criteria: it was on the western edge of what I deemed feasible but the connections to I-70 and Route 32 were good. We did some quick research into Selfridge and they seemed reputable builders of good-quality homes. There were a total of 16 homes to be built.

• 

• 

• 

The development was waiting on county permitting so Selfridge was taking names of interested parties. After some deliberation, on April 23, 2004, Barb and I took a deep breath and put down a deposit to get our names on a waiting list of potential buyers. We were 13th on the list, so we were confident we would get a shot at one of the 16 lots.

• 

The Selfridge folks (we worked mostly with Andrea) gave us a packet of information about the lots and potential home styles. I scouted the property a number of times and decided that Lot 3 facing Pfefferkorn Road was the most appealing. It was on the highest ground and the back faced more or less southwest which would give a chance for nice view out the back and some good sunsets. I very much had in mind sitting on the back deck with a drink watching the sunset.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

With us as wiggling fish on the line, things started to move rather quickly. The county permitting came through and Selfridge had a green light to move forward with the development. They contacted various folks on the wait list to make their selections. As it turned out, Lot 3 was still available when it became our turn to choose, and it was among those slated for the earliest construction. In fact, ours would become the first house in the community to be built.

Our next task was to choose a home style. Selfridge offered a number of floor plans pre-selected through Southern Living designs or we could choose from one of hundreds of other Southern Living layouts. I’m still not entirely clear why Southern Living magazine offers all these house plans and relationships with selected builders but it turned out to be a useful arrangement.

We had some basic ideas of things we wanted including the number of bedrooms (four, though we would likely use one as a study), the master bedroom on the main floor, an open family room/kitchen, an office space for me, and upstairs family room (with no open ceiling over the main family room — we’d learned that lesson from Paddington), and a three-car garage.

We looked through all the pre-selected designs and didn’t fall in love with any of them. I spent hours scouring through the Southern Living website until we finally settled on the Somerset model (still available online, if you want one). Even then, there were some modifications we wanted like removing an arched wall between the kitchen and family room, and closing off the open ceiling to the main family room.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We signed our main construction agreement, effectively our purchase of the new house, on June 11, 2004. The contract included nearly 100 pages of addenda and exhibits, committing both us and Selfridge to getting the house constructed over the next year or so. The total price tag floated above $1.1 million.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I thought that contract was more or less the culmination of the major purchase decision. We’d already made lots of decisions what to include and exclude including the screened-in porch, the floor over the family room and resulting “upper great room,” the three-car garage with another storage room above, the walk-out unfinished basement, kitchen upgrades, ceiling fans, and so on. But, in fact, it just opened the door to hundreds of new decisions to be made on all sorts of things. The Selfridge sales agents we’d been working with introduced me to our project manager, Tim Ragen, with whom I’d end up working very closely over the coming months.

Tim introduced me to the concept of change orders as he delved into further detail on everything that needed to be done. I started making appointments with sub-contractors to select specific kitchen and bathroom cabinets down to the doorknobs, kitchen appliances and layout, lighting fixtures, bathroom fixtures, flooring specialists, tile specialists, carpeting centers, electrical supply houses for light switches, a quarry for marble countertop selections, and so on and so forth.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

To help with the decisions about colors and exteriors, I started scouting houses in the area that had features we liked. Here are some of the ones we found. It was very helpful to have pictures to show Tim what we liked and didn’t.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

One of the most helpful models was the house Chris and Gerard built in River Hill. We liked lots of things about their house and design choices.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We especially liked their interior colors and clean, modern design. We stole a lot of ideas from them, with their blessing. We could only dream of keeping our house as neat and uncluttered as they did.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I had to specify locations of everything in the house, including every power, TV and phone outlet. I wasn’t sure if we would end up getting decent cable service or might need a satellite dish, so we wired the house for both, along with Ethernet cabling for local area network connectivity in those pre-WiFi days. We chose a home security package that included sensors on all the ground floor windows and doors, along with motion sensors in central areas.

I included Allie in some of the planning and fantasizing. She offered these layouts of her prospective bedroom and playroom. I think at that point we were thinking she might have a “suite” where we now have the family room and her study.

• 

• 

I had a fantasy that we might install an indoor lap pool in the basement for exercise. That idea didn’t get very far once I learned more about the maintenance and expense of such an item (much less the fact that I never actually liked swimming or getting wet, for that matter), but we did put in extra water piping and sump pumps in the basement just in case.

September 21, 2004

We were nearly ready to break ground. Here are photos I took on that day. Our name was on the lot; the address was improperly marked as 2950 Pfefferkorn Road, an error that would persist online for years.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I went to the Selfridge trailer to meet with Tim and sign off on the “final” set of Exterior Selections.

• 

• 

• 

• 

By the time I finished signing the paperwork, a crew had already started to put up storm fencing on our property. Thus began the next phase of actually building the place, the subject of the next post.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Building Pfefferkorn, Part 1

Pfefferkorn House page