Word of the Day: Money

We're in one of those spots where it feels like nothings going on. But, I know better... it's not true. Only, I can't really put my finger on what I should be doing? Confused? So I am, so how better than to sort it all out via the blog.

First things first, I didn't get much further on the floor over the weekend. With Easter, my time was limited, although I did get over Saturday morning to pull nails and boards. I forgot the camera, so no pics, but I think I've got about three more feet of floor left. Almost there! (and btw, just to show my level of addiction, I went shopping saturday afternoon for groceries and beer and noticed that I had about 20 extra minutes before I needed to get home to cook, so what did I do... well, naturally, I went to the house and pulled nails. lame, i know.)

So, what else? Well, the word of the week is "money". Money, money, money. After spending Dec, Jan and Feb blissfully going about designing our new house, reality came back in a strong way when we had our "dream" quoted out. As mentioned before, our dreams are apparently expensive.... well at least according to our builder of choice. So, we chopped and chopped and then chopped some more until finally we got close.

All along we've had this "strategy" with our architect that we'd do all that chopping and then hit him at the end with "we've chopped enough, now it's your turn." Well, it kind of happened that way, except I couldn't wait for our next group meeting. Over the phone late last week, I laid it out. I said, look you're close, but here's the number we're trying to hit. We can't chop any more without compromising our vision (all the time thinking that we kind of already were, but anyway...) and that I wanted to know if he was willing to sacrifice as well. He said yes, but said he didn't have a lot of room to do so, although he told me what he had to play with, so that was helpful. But, that said, he couldn't commit to anything until he could re-quote out all the changes we'd been making so he knew what amount he was playing with.

So, I said fine. We'll have Ryan draw up the changes, you'll re-quote and its then up to you to see how close you can get to our number. If you can't, we're looking elsewhere. He said fair enough and well, that's where we are now. So, Ryan's drawing and we're working on plan B. What's plan B you ask? Well, do you want to keep reading. Ah, who cares, I'm going to keep writing. :)

Plan B is interviewing a couple more builders. Builders who, at least according to Ryan, are maybe a tier below Mike Otto Construction. The idea being that should MOC not hit our number, we're ready to keep moving with someone else.

Here's what I think is going to happen though. MOC is going to re-quote and get really close to our number, but not hit it. We'll find a Plan B guy that we like enough, have him quote it out and he'll beat MOC by $30K. Well, what then?! That $30K can buy back a lot of that vision, but if we're that close with MOC, haven't we already kind of committed? Ugh.

So, tomorrow is "call the Plan B guys" day. Oh and btw, continuing on the word of the day, we had some fun emails with Ryan yesterday talking about keeping his costs in line, while subtly notioning at who got us to this point of being over budget to begin with... hmm, seems like a posting for another day. Maybe I should start writing that now.

...hmmm, not sure I really answered that question of what I should be doing.