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...