Getting New Home Just Right Doesn't End With Driving Of The Last Nail

As a loan officer for North Cascades Bank, Randi Burchett is familiar not only with the financial intricacies of homeownership but also with home construction.

- Mike Irwin

She’s come away from her and her husband Shelby’s first foray into the latter with some sage advice: “Know your ‘must-haves’ and decide what you can let go if you need to, and be sure you do that thinking early on.”

She and Shelby love their new house high on a hillside in Clos Chevalle, a gated subdivision above Chelan’s south shore. It’s quiet, with only 29 homes built on an available 69 lots (half of them owned by part-timers), and five miles of dedicated walking trails are interspersed with working vineyard plots.

“There are three great wineries within a few minutes of here, too,” Randi said.

The house is a great getaway spot they can enjoy every day. But a year and a half after settling in, she’s reconsidering a few of their simple choices, some made inadvertently, some made as cost-cutting measures, and she’s enjoying the prospect of getting it just right over the next few years.

The home was a dream deferred for a decade. With young children, the couple moved from Spokane, first to Orondo and then Chelan, with solid employment (she in banking, Shelby works for the PUD, where he’s now a power system operator) and they bought the .69-acre view lot in 2007.

That was a bad year for newbuilds, so instead, they moved into a two-story spec home in Grandview, a subdivision down the hill, while their son and daughter finished high school and then headed off to their own lives.

By 2016, Randi and Shelby were ready to move on up to their beloved property.

Then started the balancing act between square footage and building costs, which Randi explained are surprisingly high here because of new demand and a good but limited skilled labor pool. “People want to move here from Seattle, which we always think of as expensive, and go “Hey, what gives?!’” she said.