The Birth of a House
Those of you who are regular readers or have managed to figure out where the "archive" is, will recall that at about this time last year I wrote about my impending foray into the creation of a house, from scratch. At that time, plans were finalized, a builder was chosen, and the only hurdle left between me and new housedom was the "okay" from the bank.
It doesn't take a year to build the average house, and I don't have a new house, so using deductive reasoning, you can easily conclude that things didn't go well with the bank. But the reason for the rejection from the bank is not the obvious one. My credit worthiness was never in question (well, actually, with a bank one's credit worthiness is always in question - - guilty until proven innocent). The problem, rather, came at the very last possible moment, in the form of the house appraisal. The bank hired an appraiser to study the plans, and in her humble opinion the house I was about to build was worth about $40,000 less than it would cost to build it. I was furious, the bank was adamant, and the dream that was so close suddenly became impossible. I hired an independent appraiser in hopes of exposing the bank's scam, but, much to my chagrin, this appraiser, too, concluded that the cost of building the house would be more than its fair market value, although his estimate was more in the range of a $25,000 cost overrun.
Defeated and demoralized, I weighed my options. My first inclination was to abandon the house building plan altogether. Renting seemed like a far less mentally taxing alternative. But, over time, I decided that I would not be defeated. I must admit that the jury is still out on whether that was the right decision, but it was a decision and I'll have to live with it.
My new strategy was to start again from scratch. Whereas before I had chosen a builder and developed a plan with them, this time I hired an architect to design my "dream" home. In this way, I was no longer tied to a single source for producing the house - I could shop the plans to a number of builders and chose from among them. Good old American competition. That was the idea, anyway.
My first task was to find an architect. I don't any people locally that have ever used an architect, so getting a recommendation was not an option. Instead, I decided that I would find a recently built house that I liked and ask the owner who designed it. Finding the house was easy - I had had my eyes on a few in the area for several years. Getting up the courage to knock on the door of an absolute stranger and ask to look at their house was another story. Suffice it to say it took many weeks before "the timing was right" and I knocked on the door of the chosen house. The owner was pleasant, although he gave clear indications that I was intruding on his regular Saturday monring routine. But he was more than happy to recommend his architect, so my super-sleuth experiment paid off.
The meeting with the architect went well. Perhaps most suprising was that despite the fact he typically designed large, expensive homes and his work has been featured in several magazines, he was willing to take on my "small" project and he was within my budget. His only downfall was that he was very busy, so I would have to be patient. The first meeting wtih him was in April. I hoped to build in the summer. Obviously, I underestimated what "patient" meant.
Having already gone through the design process twice, I pretty well knew my likes and dislikes at this point. That, coupled with the architect's expertise and design sense, would deliver me my dream house in record time, I surmised. And while it is true that the house plan pretty much met my expectations from the first draft, nothing about getting the plans finalized has gone quickly. I am a small fish in a big pond, so I have found that I have to be a vocal fish in order to get things done. Sometimes even that isn't enough - I still don't have the "final" plans, although I have begun to build anyway.
So, what am I building this time? A Maine shingle-sided cottage of sorts. Basement and garage on the bottom floor, great room, kitchen, and master bedroom on the first floor, and two more bedrooms and my office on the second floor. It is 2,200 square feet of living space, which seems like a lot when you have to pay for it, but doesn't seem like much when you're trying to cram everything you want into it.
My innovation in dealing with the design of the house extends to how I am going about building the house. No "builder" this time. Instead, I am serving as the general contractor, which means I get to coordinate all of the building schedules, come up with a collection of subcontractors to do the work, order materials, and so on. In case you are wondering, this is a learning experience - all I know is what I've read, and while that's been helpful, it falls short in real-world circumstances. Where it falls the shortest is in dealing with the various egos and personalities of the subcontractors. This can perhaps be best illustrated in my dealings with the excavation and foundation people.
Before I get into my little excavation story, a bit more background on the state of the "building game" is in order. First off, it must be noted that in the northern part of the country, October is an extremely busy month for building activity. This is because everyone who had hoped to build during the summer and couldn't because of the inherent delays in getting anything done is now scrambling to get at least the shell of a structure up and weather-tight before the snow files. When you couple this fact with the fact that building of all sorts is booming, you then come face-to-face with the good old economic factor of supply and demand. Put simply, good help is hard to find, and the "help" know it.
So how does one find good help under these circumstances? First off, you make an "A" list of contractors that have been recommended or that you've worked with in the past and know are good. Then you start calling them. You soon find that they are all very busy. Very, very busy. "Booked until next summer" busy. So then you start calling those on your "B" list - capable, but no one you know has worked with them before. Again - busy. Busy, busy, busy.
There is no "C" list, there is merely a "panic and call anyone who bills themselves as a contractor" list. Busy. Or if they're not, you start wondering why they aren't. But at least you have a few "maybes" and with that comes hope.
Through the combination of the "A," "B,", and "panic" lists I did manage to get enough leads to get some bids together, check out references, and the like. My goal is to have at least three bids for every aspect of the project. With the excavation, I was able to come up with four, although one of the contractors gave a bid and quickly followed it with the statement that they were too busy to do it this year. The foundation work was another story. As you may have guessed, the foundation is a critical part of building, so making sure you get a good one is paramount in the building process. I was only able to find two foundation contractors who could do the work this fall. One gave a bid based soley on the foundation plan and never even met with me. The other is a well-know and respected contractor who I had talked with in the past and who is highly recommended by just about anyone you talk to. When this second contractor came in with a bid that was lower than the "faceless" contractor, the decision became quite easy.
The excavation decision was a bit more difficult. I really liked and trusted the first guy I met with, but his price was nearly double the next lowest bid. I'm always leary of the lowest bidder, but in this case I had spent nearly five hours on site with them going over the plans, making measurements, and coming up with a plan of attack. In the end, I felt they had earned the right to do my excavation work - not only because they were the lowest bidder, but because they took the time to really understand the job and what needed to be done to complete it to my satisfaction.
So, I had an excavator and a foundation contractor. All I needed to do was coordinate their schedules so that they could get the work done. This, dear readers, is when all hell broke loose. The foundation guy wanted to do the work in the next couple of weeks before the weather got so cold that expensive additives would have to be added to the concrete to help it set. The excavation guy had no problem with that schedule. But when I told the foundation guy the name of the excavation guy I was going to use, he hit the roof. He started muttering something about "anybody who smokes five packs of cigarettes a day has to have something wrong with his head" and adamantly refused to do the foundation work if I used this excavation contractor. Suddenly, the fragile building schedule that I had been crafting for weeks had crumbled in the course of a single phone call.
My options were few. I could see if the other foundation company could do the work and tell the "opinionated" foundation guy to hit the road. Or, I could work with the very expensive excavation guy and keep my chosen foundation guy (he already said he would work with this other excavation guy), or I could try to find yet another excavation guy that bridged the gap - not as expensive as the expensive guy, but one who met the approval of the foundation guy.
In the end, I decided to give up on the whole idea of building a house. Well, okay, this decision only lasted a few hours, but I'm not exaggerating when I say the frustration level really had risen to this point.
A carpenter I had talked to a week before had recommended an excavation guy that he had worked with, so I decided to give this guy a try. This excavation guy had recently branched out on his own after working for another guy for 27 years, so he wasn't lacking in experience, but at the same time not a lot of people know about him. This turned out to be fortuitous. He was available, his price was a lot more reasonable than the expensive guy, and he had worked with the foundation guy before and the foundation guy liked him. Incredibly, in the course of 24 hours, things went from everything falling apart to everything coming back together. And thus, my house was born. I am now the proud owner of a rather costly hole in the ground.
They were supposed to pour the footings this past Thursday, but, as luck would have it, some monsoon rains zipped through the area the night before and my hole is now a nice big mud puddle. So the concrete trucks have to wait for things to dry out a bit before they attempt the "virgin" ground. In the mean time, I just keep telling myself that in six months this will all be behind me. I certainly hope that statement turns out to be true.
Copyright ©1999 by Greg Closter (closter@acadia.net)