The never ending project

In 1989, we started to plan for a new home and entrusted a local architect to come up with some great ideas in conceiving our dream house. We had in fact so much confidence that the man knew what he was doing, that we left him pretty much carte-blanche.

Not a good idea, as he designed a house much larger than what we had in mind, and when the project was already significantly advanced, it was no longer possible to shrink it. Not only that, but we also had the bad idea to straddle our new dwelling in the middle of the two lots we had bought. We should have built on just one and left the other vacant. Well, live and learn!

We ended up staying 12 years in this large, 5,000 square feet home and the folks who bought it from us, did some minor improvements and sold it two years later to a 9/11 widow and her two sons. She stayed in the place for 13 years, moved out, and a local contractor bought it.

He put an enormous amount of money into it, enlarged it to 6,300 square feet, and sold it last year for over $4 millions, to a rich, retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Recently this new owner obviously didn’t quite like what he bought, and proceeded to enlarge the house to 10,000 square feet and turning over the entire front of the house so it now look like a battle zone.

When will this folly stop?