The Bid

Where to start. It's been quite a week since my last post. In what's becoming sort of an obsessive behavior, I stopped by the house on Tuesday morning to snap some picks of the progress I've made since I started ripping things apart and couldn't help but pick up the crow bar and start taking stuff down. So, there I am in my dress slacks, shirt and sweater pulling down walls and swinging the hammer. Yeah, I got a little dirty, but it was well worth it. :) Here's a quick before and after.



These are actually taken from the same spot. The before on the left is the original wall structure just with the wood paneling taken down. The after, on the right, is with that wall completely removed showing all the paneling that's been taken down. I'm hoping to remove the wall in the back next.

I have to say, I've been itching since then to get back out, but as always, work seems to get in the way.

Outside of that, we knew the bid from Mike Otto was coming and that we'd meet on Friday. We've also been spending time looking over lighting configurations and options. I think we made some good progress, but it was something like trying to decide how many canned light vs flushmounts to put in a room. Or what flushmounts we like for certain rooms. Or what heads we like for a monorail system we're hoping to do in the music room. Any votes?....



By Wednesday, we finally got the call on "The Bid". Mike Otto, our preferred builder, has been putting together a firm bid on where the plans are at today. In probably a good move, Ann took the call and found it was coming almost 20% above our ceiling. Not good. We weren't exactly a couple of happy campers that night. We had a couple of tense, but productive conversations the next day with Mike and Ryan, our architect. We made it clear that we were way over our number, but that we were open to working that down.

We hoped that that would be that and we'd meet on Friday and work through things, but oh no... We got the detail Thursday night (up to this point, we just new the total) and found out that their number didn't include things we thought should be in the plan... like a bathroom, cabinets in several of the rooms and other things. Apparently, there was some confusion about what was an option.

Anyway, Ann and I got ourselves positioned best we could for what we thought was going to be a tough conversation today. On the bright side, when we walked into the meeting today, Mike and Ryan had worked through enough things to actually get the total down to our budget amount. Good, right!? Well, they had some good ideas, but once we added our not-so-options back in, we're still over.

The meeting was productive and we talked through cost saving measures like different siding options, different roof options, insulation options, etc. Some were big (like taking the stone completely out of the exterior or adjusting the insulation) and some where small (taking out the skylights), but it looks like this weekend is going to be full of interesting discussions, decisions and hard choices.

There's too many to share here, so maybe I'll update as we go through the weekend. The big one for me is what we do regarding the insulation of the house. I really want to take a different approach and apply rigid foam to the exterior and nothing between the studs, but apparently that means big time custom windows because you end up with thicker walls. Decisions, decisions.

Oh, and I owe some pictures too. I'll try to get on that now.