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.