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.