Week 13 & 14: I Joists

Thanks giving holiday slowed things down for a couple of days. I joists went up the past 2 weeks. The house is starting to feel like a home. Today was the first day of real snow this year, hopefully it won't stick. We really need the good weather to keep going and get the roof done.
Started to buy furnishings for the house already. It seems too soon, but since we have everything stacked in our apartment living room, what's another few boxes anyway.

Week 12: WALLS & Balloon Project #3

Exciting week! Walls are up this week along with some beams. The house feels much more spacious now with all the walls up. We did a walk through and it feels great! Visualizing is now much easier.


We did another balloon project which was a complete success. The secret is to double the amount of balloons used to counter the small breeze. We finally got some good shots. The balloons went up about 200 feet.

Week 11: Concrete Floors

Biggest item this week was the concrete floors. 5 inches thick and fully dried. We are ready for walls to go up.
Received news this week that the well pump and lines would cost double than we originally thought...bummer! The Distance is more than 450 feet to run the electrical lines from well to the house, and we need a constant pressure pump since we have a low flow rate.

Concrete Pour!

Today, the concrete for the main living areas were poured!
Everything went smooth. These are pictures Matt took. Hopefully the animals stay off the concrete while it dries!

Week 10: Rebar & Balloon Project 2

The last preparations were done this week for the concrete pour coming Monday. Additional Rebar recommended by Matt cost $3000 more to prevent the floor from cracking. We also attempted our 2nd balloon project. Too bad it was way too windy and only managed to get a few usable pictures. Next time we would have to go to the land first before filling the balloons.
Han planted carrots and spread the rye seeds everywhere as a cover crop. Will we regret it later..maybe...or we could be eating lots of rye.
Also "realestate" Steve stopped by...try to give us some advice and sell us services... annoying.
Additional backfill cost us $3000, ouch!

Week 9: Radiant Flooring

Major item tackled this week is Radiant Flooring. Our plumber is an expert in this type of installation. He carefully marked and tested all the tubing, a very important step since we're pouring concrete right over the top.
The cost of the Radiant is very expensive, we have total 3 zones covering the all the living spaces.
Coming up is the concrete pouring.

Week 8: Mechanicals & Gardening

More plumbing and electrical were laid this week in preparation for the concrete slab pouring. Planning is crucial at this stage since there's no way to correct it afterwards.
We were planning to do another balloon project, couldn't fit it in the car after filling with helium, thought we would be OK with hanging it out the sunroof....not a good idea. One balloon popped immediately after the car started and the other had a small hole that ruptured. Will try again when the kit starts to get assembled.
My parents did some light gardening to see how the seeds would do with the native soil, just a test really.
While we were on site, some neigbors stopped by to check out the property. They were really nice and told us some history of the land. It was farm land about 20 years ago.
We found a lot of rounded rocks, this place must have been under water at one point in time.

THE BIG DAY: 10/15/09 - KIT DELIVERY

We had our Kit delivered on Thursday 10/15/09. Truck arrived promptly at 9:00AM. Was unloaded in about 4 hours. The weather was cooperative right till the finish line, then it started pouring, so we are super lucky in this aspect.
Unloading took a lot longer than expected because the factory didn't load it up with unloading in mind. A lot of maneuvering needed to safely unload each pack.
After everything was unloaded, plastic tarp was used to cover up the wood to protect it from the elements.
Also, opened an account with Porco, the propane supplier to start the 1000 gallon tank installation.

Week 6: Stem Walls & a Very Deep Well

This week, the stem walls were poured. Kit delivery date has been pushed back about 3 days due to bad weather in Missouri, now rescheduled for Wednesday or Thursday of coming week. Our garden cam failed, we were just a bit too greedy, taking too many pictures (every minute), it drained the batteries. We've finally figured out that as the cause of the problem and we've now set it at 30 minute intervals and will swap out the battery every week.
Bad news on the well, 400 feet deep and still only 1.5 gallons per minute which is too low compared to an average home. We're going to try hydro-fracture and hope that gets us 4-5 gallons per minute. Supposedly, it has a 97% chance of success, so let's hope for the best. The cost of the hydro-facture is flat fee of $2200.00 (ouch!!! + that 400 feet deep well). Everyone assured us that we would not face any problems in the area, so it was a complete shock that we're having this issue.
Finally brought my parents to the land. They are super excited about it, potential farming endeavors. Lots to plan for them.

Foundation Walls Inspection

Just a quick note that we passed the foundation wall inspection today!

Week 5: Balloon Project & Foundation Wall

Han had the idea to launch some balloons and attach a camera to take some aerial photos of our site. After hacking a canon camera with scripts provided by tech specialists, researching a camera attachment mechanism, some fishing wire and getting some kiddie party balloons, we were all set. The script for the camera in essence hacks the program on the camera and allows the user to take pictures continuously. Started out early today (8:30am), went to Walmart, party balloon shop, avoided some major roadblocks on Rt. 9W and we were all set to launch around noon.
Took many continuous shots set at 5 second intervals to get some good pictures. This was a good test for another round sometime in the next month. Learned lessons: do not get too many balloons. we wanted some rubber balloons about 30" diameter, but the party place didn't carry it, so we ended up getting 5 kiddie party balloons. (Cinderella, transformers & party zone theme). I think the party place got a kick out of what we were trying to do. We barely was able to fit it all in the back of our car.
After we got back to the city, we finally found 36" rubber balloon in Tribeca's Balloon Saloon. $ 6.00 each without helium and we plan to fill it up in route next time. The party supply place is in Newburg and it's only a 20 minute drive to our place. We won't be able fit the helium filled balloons in our car, so will have to hang it outside the sunroof.

The foundation walls were erected this week. Concrete not yet poured in them. Septic trench was dug this week and the electrical junction box is finally up on our site.

Footers : Week 4

We began officially September 1st. As of today, we are at end of Week # 4.
Inspection of foundation and Footers were done this week. Passed the inspection with flying colors. The Well drilling guy didn't show up this past Thursday as scheduled. Hopefully it will happen the coming week.
Central Hudson & Verizon was on site the past week to bring in the phone and electrical service...finally after 6 months of delay.
We also found a cheaper porcelain alternative to marble bathroom tiles. The price is at $12.95/ sq feet, just a small fraction of what marble costs. The Kitchen Bath company is located next to Ikea Paramus, and as expected, it's much more cost effective than looking in Manhattan.
Our LVL/LVM/LVC kit has been rescheduled to deliver on October 12th instead. We decided to push it back 2 weeks due to the rainy whether this summer. The cost of just changing the delivery schedule is $250 admin fee + $200 of storage charges for the month. So just be careful on the scheduling.
Our Fire Orb is schedule for delivery mid coming week (Week #5). The owner of the FireOrb company is really nice and helpful. Love hands on people and especially small business owners who have pride in their product.

The Foundation

What a difference 2 weeks make. Today we visited our site and the foundation has been dug the past week. Almost ready for foundation pouring scheduled for next Wednesday.
2 old shipping containers are on site for storage of equipment and supplies. Our land in the front side of the house is now tiered. Reminds me of Bali's rice patty tiers. We hope that no retaining walls are needed hopefully, but we do have plenty of rocks that was found during the digging. Our contractor may buy a sifter of some sort to get out all the usable rocks.
We have also received the finalize plumbing bid for the project, much costlier than expected...much much more...

Sofa Sofa

We found our sofa this past weekend. Settled on Vitra's new Place Sofa by Jasper Morrison. This is a splurge by all means. Luckily we won't have to purchase this until a year later, that would give us some time to save up for it. Color would be cream or ivory, should look great against the grey concrete floors.
But the price tag really hurts...ouch!

The leveling...

1st Week of September, 2009. Our land was leveled to get ready for foundation digging. We've been using the garden cam to record weekly events at the site. Our contractor is super fast, within 3 days, most of the site was ready for the foundation and the layout of the drive way is already defined. Interestingly, we also get a glimpse of the site at all hours of the day and also wind conditions during the day.
Our land is a little sloped, about 10 feet per 20 to 30 feet of land. We might have to build a small retaining wall somewhere to prevent soil erosion.

Meeting of the Minds

On Friday, August 28th, 2009, we finally met the entire team working on our project.

Plumber Devan

Electrician Frank

General Contractor Matthew (whom we way back)

Very excited about the entire team as everyone is very experience and truly dedicated to their craft. We've couldn't have asked for a better team of people.

We've also just received and paid for the final Kit cost balance to Rocio, luckily the final kit price did not exceed what we expected.

However we just found a wall height mistake on the LVL

Our freight for LVM + LVC + LVL is $3600 + another $500 deposit.

Delivery expected date is 9/28/09 Monday at 9:00 AM

Finally things are taking off and we're so excited about breaking ground.

In the mean time, we're ordered and received some supplies

- Grohe rain shower system

- Starck Tub Filler + Rough In valve (don't forget this part if you ever need to order the tub filler)

- Recessed lighting housing.

- Lutron light switches + switch plates

Ordering more supplies this week.

We have compiled a list of items we need to purchase for the house and it really helped everyone in planning. We highly recommend doing this before getting started, it makes the process go much faster and smoother.

Mini WaWa House

Officially, the name of the house will be WaWa House, named after our 13 year old dog and queen of the castle.
A miniature of our house was made in plexiglass. It's long...longer than expected.

Also, this past weekend we visited our general contractor and another couple's finalized LVL in Elizaville, NY. Stepping into a real LVL was exciting since we're never seen a finished interior other than websites.

We've also begun ordering some fixtures like shower heads, etc, just to get a head start. We had also proceed with Kynar drawings with Rocio Romero. Just received another design fee bill and our total design fee costs tops over $11,000.00 now. Hard to imagine how we got to this point, honestly we made no changes from our original plan, hardly emailed her or the project manager, was precise as possible. Seems that Rocio is sticking to a % of kit cost for her design fee. I wrote her a email stating our concern over these high design fees, but to our surprise, our email was ignored, not even a response at all. This kind of client service was probably the most frustrating part of this process.

Next steps, pay for the balance of the kit, get home owners construction insurance. It's not required, but a good thing to have in case the site gets burglarized. At least the insurance will cover items you've purchased.

The Cost

On Saturday 7/25/09, we finally had the meeting with our contractor to review costs and layout the house at our land. Boy, it takes a while for the cost to set in to our heads. It's much more than we have anticipated. This is no longer a pre-fab home. It's a full fledged house with real costs involved.

We only received the site preparation, foundation and exterior finishing cost and already we are $100000 over budget. It's incredible to see today's building costs, I don't know how old houses can be sold for $200000 or less.

Would we have gone into this if we had known??? Maybe....
It's not for the faint of heart. We are basically putting everything we have into this house and essentially starting again with no savings, after more than 10 years of working. It's a bit unsettling...

On a positive note, we did get our building permit last week (finally!). There was a bit of a scare because initially the building inspector had told our contractor that he would not approve our plans. He hated the look of our house and the modern aspect of it that really made it look like a trailer home on paper. Luckily our contractor was able to win him over by patiently explaining the house in detail.

One hickup we had was that Rocio's project manager that was working on our plans had neglected to pass along the local residential code to the engineer that stamped the plans. At the last minute, the building inspector requested the engineer to stamp off on the residential code and the engineer refused due to technicalities. Basically they had to redo the calculations and then stamp off on it. I bet Rocio is going to charge us for this even though this is not our oversight.

We should be breaking ground in 2 weeks and hopefully all goes well.

Waiting...waiting...more waiting...

Seems like ground breaking is so close yet so far. We've learned in the past week that our local building department HATES the look our house. We were on the verge of being declined a building permit. Luckily our contractor was able to convince them otherwise and now the only thing standing in our way is a stamp from the engineer that originally stamped our plans.

Apparently, there was an oversight by the project manager at Rocio Romero. I had specifically passed along the local building code requirements to the project manager before we started this whole project. However this little bit of detail was not passed to the engineer. It has do to with the seismic requirement of the plans. We've just chosen the easy way out and asked the engineer to redo the calculations and get 1 peice of paper stamped for the local building department.

Whatever it is, we're pretty sure that Rocio Romero is going to try to bill us for the recalculation fees which then we will have to argue about.

Just remember, even though you've hired "professionals" to do the job, it doesn't mean that they are looking at all the details. One thing we learned is to be as paranoid as possible. The bottom line is that we have to pay more and more delays...

Off the grid....Almost

In an effort to be more environmentally conscious, we've decided to put up a 6kW PV system on our roof. Since our home faces perfectly due South without any obstructions, we should not have any major issues with the install. The initial cost is quite high, but hopefully it will pay back in 15-20 years. More importantly, we want to do our part in reducing our independence on cruel oil. In the future, once we install the batteries, we will be able to live completely off the grid. But for now, we will have to live with net-metering.....

This is a picture of an install from the company that we will be working with. Looks great!

The Stake...

Saturday, May 9th, 2009
We staked the property and approx location of the house. It's really really long. Didn't realize it until we saw it in person.

Another worry surfaced while we were up there...ticks!!! Our land is not fenced and the area has not fully developed yet with houses, apparently deer have been grazing on the wild flowers. We noticed a tick crawling up my leg!

Living in a large city, you forget about nature from time to time. Now we have to look into deer fencing systems to control the deer population. The costs keep going up!

15 pages...

We received the finalized construction documents from Rocio Romero today. The process has taken several months. We submitted our 1st payment of 15% deposit for the kit + 1st of many $1000 design fee deposit on Dec 19th, 2008. Today is April 28th, 2009. It's taken a full 4 months, much longer than anticipated. Also costlier than expected, to date, we have paid about 10% of the kit fees just for design process.

We'll see how fast the kit can be built and shipped. At least now we can go ahead to apply for the building permit. In order to beat the winter season, we should be assembling the kit no later than August/September.

Mystery Solved...

After 2 months of waiting for our BOH approval, we finally found out the letter was mailed to our old address. Not sure how this could have happened since nothing on our application indicated the address. In any case, glad that's finally over with. The magical letter has arrived in our hands...finally.

3 Seasons

Pictures of our land from fall 2008, Winter 2008/2009, and Spring 2009.
it's been 3 out of 4 seasons since we initially saw and started this process.
only missing picture of Summer now. will post it in 2 months.

The land looks beautiful in all seasons!

Hooray! BOH Approval

After 2 months of waiting for the Ulster County Board of Health approval on our home site, we finally got word that it was approved more than a month ago! Due to some paperwork oversight, we never received the permit letter.

We hired an engineer (which also happens to be the owner who sold us the lot) to design the septic system with a pump. Our home is going to be located downhill from the septic reserve area, so a pump is required.

At least this first step is over, now onto the building permit process, which hopefully is a bit quicker. We have to start on the foundation soon, if we need to finish the roof before the winter hits.

$7,115.15 later...

The design fees are adding up really quickly. We have already paid $ 7,115.15 as of today for our "design". We thought for sure that our design fee was going to be $4000 or lower given that we pretty much designed the entire layout by ourselves before going into this whole thing. We keep getting invoices from Rocio, seems like a lot of time is being spent on our project, but we still have not seen the final product yet, which is just a bunch of drawings needed for the building permit process. We really made only 1 minor change that was suggested by Rocio from our original google sketchup layout. Seriously, this getting out of hand. Our first phone meeting with Rocio, she even said herself that with our detailed plan and layout, this project would be "very straight foward". Not sure what changed from the time of that conversation till now.

We've been comparing some old projects that people have posted up and their design fees are not nearly as much. I'm beginning to wonder if it's because Rocio is on maternity leave and due to this, a lot of delays and extra fees have been accessed. This really puts a damper on building an affordable prefab home.

We should be in the home stretch now, only expecting 1 more invoice and that's it! I hope...and with each design invoice, we have to give up on something else.

Still waiting for final plans.....

It has been 2 months since we started the process but we are still waiting for the final structural plans. The latest update is another 2 weeks. Then we can finally submit the plans to the county for a building permit. I guess this has given us more time to save some $.

Meeting at another LVL

Jan 17, 2009
Today we were fortunate enough to visit another LVL project currently in construction. It really helps to see things in person to finalize some more details previously not thought of.

We also had our first design meeting with Rocio last week. The process went pretty quick and smooth. We sent a packet of paperwork and files before the meeting to help facilitate the meeting.
A couple of tips before the meeting:
- Try to make some decisions of your own layout. We used Google Sketch Up to finalize our layout. Having the layout in actual measurements helped us a lot with the plan.
- Decide what type of heating and ventilation you'll most likely be installing
- Decide the kitchen cabinetry, this is really critical if you are not going to shell out big buck for a custom made kitchen. We went with Ikea, the size of the cabinet widths ultimately decided our Kitchen layout and width.
- If you have any special items like fireplace or range tops, that location needs to be decided and incorporated into the construction plan.

We did most of our homework before hand and listed all the fixtures and cabinetry materials we were going to purchase. This not only helps Rocio finalize the construction plan, but also gives you a good idea how much total cost you need to prepare to pay for.

Next steps : Design of our Septic system. Our septic is going to be on a higher elevation than our house, so a pump design is needed. Will have to hire an engineer to design it and get it approved by the town. Fingers crossed, hope this is not going to cost too much.

Our land deal was finally signed on Dec 18th, 2008. At the same time, the contract and deposit was also sent to Rocio Romero.
Signing the land deal definately sealed the decision to go ahead with the process. We've put in a desposit for LVL+LVM+LVC. Attached is our design idea, we haven't seen any other projects with our linear aesthetic yet.
Hoping to save some money by having the foundation of all 3 sections done at the same time as well as the roof installation.

Google Sketchup has been really helpful for us making decision on the layout. We want to fanalize the details before having to meet to Rocio. From all the blogs, seems that the design fees for just talking or asking questions can really add up. The more specific we are, the less design fees at the end (hopefully). Knowing that the house resell value would probably not be higher than the cost to build in this market really puts some pressure to make smart decisions and compromise on certain aspects of 'needs' versus 'wants'.

Additional miscellaneous costs of purchasing the land also was unexpected for us since this is first time we bought just the land.

Title Fees Approx $1000

Soil Condition report Approx $ 1000 (we had to do this since the land was used previously as an orchard, high levels of Arsenic is harmful to live on)

School and Town taxes Approx $200 for the year, this is very minimal for land. After the house is built , the taxes will go up significantly for sure.

Overall, this has been a great learning experience.