Plan B

More than a few things to blog about, but we'll take it one at a time.

Yesterday (Wed that is), Ann and I met with our second "Plan B" builder. As mentioned, because the original bid from our "build of choice" came in high, we decided to interview a couple builders from what might be considered a level below.

We met with a first one last week.... Tim. He was really nice, was straightforward in both his approach and thoughts and was definately eager to work on the project. He's a smaller operation in that it's just him and a couple carpenters on staff. His work ranged from whole home remodels to multi-room remodels to additions. We asked him our standard set of questions, and with the benefit of five months of design and dicussions with our "builder of choice" (BOC), we were able to dig in deeper than we've been able to compared to our first round of builder interviews. This is probably where we learned the most about Tim.

To this point, we've valued a few different things from a potential builder. We want someone who's going to share our vision in responsible building, looking outside the box and considering innovative solutions (i.e. let's talk this through) and even getting into the building science. OK, maybe that last one's only me, but hey, look who's writting.

Our BOC meets all these criteria. Tim came up short unfortunately. Nice guy and would build what we asked him to, but we figured out that we'd be throwing some new stuff at him (i.e. wall construction & insulation).

Anyway, we kept an open mind...

And next we met Dan yesterday. We're waffled on even interviewing Dan. He's new to the game, having gone off on his own last year and is just new to the business period being a few years younger than us. But, Ryan (our architect) convinced us to at least talk to him. And we did.

I think Dan's pros were probably Tim's cons. Dan's approach was probably in the ballpark of how we'd like to approach the project. But, he didn't do anything to change our mindset on his experience. He's never led a project of our size and in fact hasn't done anything than 1000 sq ft basement. I mean he has worked on bigger projects, just not as the Big Kahuna.... or GC. :)

So, here we sit. Neither are ideal. Both would probably come in at a lower cost. But how accurate would their quotes be? How much extra oversight would we have to ask of Ryan? I think Dan is out. We just can't risk our project on his level of experience. Nice guy and we'd definately consider him on a smaller deal, but not this one.

Tim? Maybe. We talked to BOC today and he just got the revised plans. His words were something along the line of "it's going to be tough" to hit our budget. But, he's trying, which still tells me he's going to come awfully close. But, as the subject of this post suggests, it's about a safety net, or risk mitigation as we like to say work.... makes us sound smart, ya know. I think we'll chat with Ryan tomorrow and we'll see what to do. Part of me just wants a second bid for the heck of it. Just to kind of answer the knawwing question of whether our BOC is really that competitive. Anyway, we'll see.

Oh, so close

I'll start with the floor for anyone following along at home. In my post from two weeks ago, I had gotten far enough that a new vantage point for the photos was needed. Since that point, I made it over for a half day before Saturday and then again for a day and a half this past weekend. It's nearly there! See for yourself...



I'm not sure what happened to my light. Well, in the last shot, I literally lost my work light. Otherwise, either my flash wasn't going or blah, blah, blah.. you don't care. Actually, what's kind of fun is my wood pile. Yep, the pile where good wood comes to rest.



That's the floor up against the redwood. And what's really fun is going back to the post on March 27th and seeing the transformation from pre-demo through to complete rip-up, all from the same vantage spot.

So, what else is going on? Well, we're still waiting for Ryan to finish his edits to the drawing so we can do final bids. He's supposed to finish by next Monday. Mike Otto (our builder of choice) seems pretty confident he can hit our number, but we'll see. Plan B comes into play tomorrow. We interview another builder tomorrow afternoon. We also have got an Arborist (i.e. tree dude... I'll save you the Google lookup) coming to the house to look at our Franken-tree. It's a big ol' Linden with three main trunks that are cabled together about 40 ft up. One of the trunks has a big sheet of metal nailed into it. Not sure why, but it does. The tree is kind of the centerpiece of the front yard, so we're hoping that we can either leave it (and trim it up) or keep most of it with out it completley falling over.

Otherwise, nothing much else. Oh, I've got to re-visit my building science on wall structure / insulation. Good stuff. What, you don't think so? OK, how about Windows? Is there a big difference between a U value of 0.31 and 0.34? Maybe?....we'll soon find out. I'll post in more detail later this week, so consider that your teaser.

Stonework Options

Here's something you might be interested in. No, no talk about demo or money here, instead we've got some elevations of the front of the house. During the process of trying to drop the cost of the house, we were told that we could save a fair chunk if we cut the amount of stone used. We decided that we weren't willing to do that inside, but would be open to it on the exterior. We then had Ryan draw up some options of how to incorporate half as much stone. I suppose as a base point, it's probably helpful to say that the original plan had stone pretty much on the face of the entire lower level of the house...well, front of the house only.

What you'll see in these two pics are three options Ryan came up with. The stone is in the brown color. If you look closely he's got some windows grayed out or moved on the lower right depending on where the stone is used. Have a look and see which one you like....



And just for some perspective as well, those windows that are affected by the stone placement either look into the master closet or bathroom, so none are terribly important but do play a part in the exterior look and flow.

Well, after much deliberation... I'd say about 2 minutes... we picked option 2. Seemed pretty clear cut to us. I think it was the combination of symmetry and elegance. Ryan said something about it making the house seem bigger, but I'm not sure that was something we initially noticed.

I was back out at the house yesterday pulling more floor and may go out again today, so I'll post another update later.

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.

Chimneys...they're supposed to match.. Really?!

So, I'm learning all sorts of new things through this process. Like, for instance, apparently people match the materials their chimneys are built with or covered with to the rest of the house. Who new!?!?!

This came about while we were looking at things to try trim out of cost of the house. We have to extend the existing chimney up since we're building a second story on the west side of the house. Apparently, unbeknown to us (which is a separate issue/annoyance), the thought is to extend the chimney up with standard concrete block and then cover it with the same stone that we'll be using on the front of the house and inside.

I thought why not just extend it up with the same brick being used now. Surely that must be cheaper, right! Apparently that's not the issue because then the chimney wouldn't match. Really?!? That matters?

So, I don't have a lot of examples, but here are some shots of houses in our neighborhood. (Yikes, kinda makes our little cabin stick out!) But, if you squint hard enough, you can see that the chimney matches.



Well, that's probably enough on this. My suggestion of not using the stone on the chimney was roundly rejected, so now I'm just left with looking at the chimney of every house I drive by now.

And The Floor Keeps On Coming

Lot's of progress on the floor over the weekend here. Pics below, but with a lot of help from Jake (my designated nail puller #1), I managed to pull up a lot of the flooring. I think one more weekend should do it. With Jake back in San Diego, I may need to find another "helper". Any takers?

Here's a row of shots from the same vantage point as the last post.



You can see it's getting harder to see progress on the right hand side, so I think a new perspective may be in order....



Check out the post from the 27th to really see how far this has come.

That's all I got for today. Well, besides bruised knees (knee pads are good, but...) and a sore back. But, I can't complain too much....it's worth it.

How much is that floor worth?

So, how much is that floor worth? It's in awful good shape and wouldn't you love hardwood in your house?

Here's the deal. The house basically has one big slab (maybe 1000 sq ft?) of hardwood that really hasn't been touched since it was put in 50 years ago. It's in great shape, is true 3/4" thick and guess what, we already own it!! Well, apparently that still doesn't make it cheaper than carpet. So, what's a guy to do? I really have a preference for hardwood over carpet, but we're in this big budget debate and some things have to go. Ugh. Well, I suppose I've already shown my cards....



And did I mention my knees hurt? Actually, it wasn't too bad. Probably only spent a couple hours on each day. Anyway, back to the point... what to do with it? I hate to toss it. I could give it or sell it or even store it away until the carpet is ready to be pulled. I don't know.

But, that's where we're at.... trying to wipe about $75K off the original quote from the builder. We've agreed to several things... nix the powder room, change out the shingles, move from Hardy siding to steel, etc. One of the big price drops involves taking half the stone off the front of the house. I think we'll be OK though. We'll still use it, but make it more strategic. And you probably don't even want the insulation decisions.

So, where are we at? Well, we've taken about $50K off the original quote and are still hoping for more...somehow. We'll see how that goes over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, Jake is here helping. He's volunteered (yeah!!!) to pull nails out of the hardwood planks. He helped last weekend take down some walls too. He loves it though and it's a big help.