Our Original Vision
Okay, so we’ve bought 19.2 acres of land in Sevierville, TN. Now what?
From the very moment we looked at the property, we had a vision with two phases:
Phase 1: Renovate the existing buildings into rentable units
I mean, it’s normal to think we could just renovate these metal buildings into living spaces, right? When we first looked at these buildings my mind started overflowing with ideas and things we could do to make this such a cool place to stay.
Originally, we planned to renovate the warehouse into four, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom units. The shop building was going to have three units in it and the barn was going to be two larger units. We’ve done a lot of renovating over the years, so we knew we had our work cut out for us. With that being said, we got busy looking for a General Contractor. We called a very dear friend who’s been in the construction industry for many years. He provided us with his top three General Contractors in the Sevierville area. He said, “start at the top of the list and work your way down”. So, that’s what I did. The first name on his list was Glenn Henderson, owner of Nolan Construction LLC . One afternoon, while I was sitting in the school pick up line, I decided to give him a call. We chatted for a while about the property itself, our vision and our very hopeful timeline. We wrapped up our conversation by scheduling a day/time to meet at the property and go over the project in more detail. Jase will tell you, I’m a vibe person. If I get a weird vibe from a contractor or subcontractor, I’m out. When you’re signing up to do long term business with someone, it has to be the right fit on multiple levels. Not only did Glenn seemed more than capable of leading this construction project, he seemed excited about it too. For me, that goes a long way.
If you’re into floor plans, here’s and arial view of the Warehouse floor plans we drew up.
With a meeting on the books, Jase and I started mapping out floor plans for each building and day dreaming about what the exterior of each building would look like. We started with just a piece of graph paper and a pencil. I would draw up a plan and then Jase would make adjustments or vice versa. Each of us have a unique perspective, so we were always trying to combine those into a beautifully unique but functional space for our guests.
Meeting day finally arrives and Jase and I both took the entire day off from work. We saw our youngest daughter off to school and then excitedly made our way to the property, with our hand-drawn floor plans in tow. Overall, it was a great meeting. We walked through each building discussing all our wild ideas, reviewing the floor plans, looking at each buildings structure and Glenn level-setting our exceptions. The vibe was still good and the three of us seemed to hit it off quickly. Glenn seemed as excited about the project as us and that was big win for us. We each walked away from that meeting with an action item list, but ultimately felt like we had found a great partner to help lead this project.
Phase 2: New Construction Cottages
So, once the existing buildings were complete, rented and stable…our plan was to build some new construction cottages in the field next to the barn.
It wasn’t long after our meeting with our Contractor, we received a call from him with some bad news. Based on our discussions in the meeting, he started looking into local building codes and requirements specific to this type of renovation project. He learned that any building that houses two or more short term rental units is required to have a fire suppression system…basically a sprinkler system in each building/unit. In addition, the sprinklers must be able to run for 30 minutes consecutively to meet fire codes. We already had water to the property, but it was from a well. We quickly realized that in order to meeting this requirement, we would need to install under ground water holding tanks. So basically, it was quickly becoming an expensive little adventure to install everything required to meet code.
Needless to say, Jase and I took a few days to take a step back and think through what made sense for us given our goals, our vision and also our financial situation. We processed it, prayed about it and ultimately decided it was time to pivot.
