I know, it's been a while!

Hello Blog Friends….
Okay, I know it’s been FOREVER since you heard from me, no excuse, I know I suck….any who, I haven’t had too much to say especially since Brad is so very much better at telling stories but here I go…

I had hoped my next blog that I was going to write was going to be positive…unfortunately I am a little frustrated with our electrician….He got started pretty fast, oh wait no he didn’t…he was half an hour late to our first meeting, and then when we was supposed to begin work, his car broke down and his generator broke….wait let me step back and say our electrician is really a nice guy, once he finally showed up to our walk through, he was nice and entertaining to talk to. He kept telling us that every upgrade w

ould cost 1 million dollars. He is even throwing in an extra plug, so over all he is NOT a bad guy, but let me continue. So now it’s been weeks since he started, rough electrical has even been approved, but he still has a bunch of other outlets and such to put in, and they are not being put in and we are not sure why. Our realtor told us that he would finish the Thursday before Christmas, nope. I called him that day and it went right to his voicemail telling me his mailbox was full. Called again 2 hours later on my drive over to the house, same thing. So I got smart and sent him a text….and voila he actually called me b

ack. He said he was not going over to the house (yes this day was Thursday, the day he was supposed to FINISH) and then corrected that he would be over in the afternoon, and he would definitely be finished by the following Monday. Funny when I went over at 2pm, he was not there and no new work had been completed. So I wait. I try to call him on Monday to discuss the under cabinet lighting, his mailbox is still full….I call and text on Tuesday, no answer, I stop over today, Wednesday, no new work, …so tomorrow is will be a week AFTER when our realtor said it would be done…. I am just ready to see it all done and am very excited to see it drywalled….if the electrical work ever gets done!

See NO new work done, anyone see any plugs that would be in the cabinets?

Oh Look a sign that says put a plug here...but no plug!

On a much more positive note, Topher and the kids went over to the house with me today. Jonah picked out his room, our walk in closet, and Amelia picked the office room as her bedroom. Jonah was also nice enough to not only label the bedrooms they picked, but also the fire place and wrote “Reey” (pronounced really) where someone had left their pop on a ledge!

While we were there today I noticed the support beams in the basement. Kinda weird that they are not lined up. I wonder if I can do some research and figure out if that is normal.

It is also pretty exciting to see house fully bricked (siding was supposed to be up by now too, but I don’t see any yet!)

I am really getting excited. I keep wanting to start packing things up, but then I realize I need them, or that I have NO WHERE to store boxes. We have already bought our microwave, ottoman and a leaning shelf for our house. We also got lots of things for our new house from our families from Christmas. I can’t wait to spend next Christmas in our new house!

Brick finished

The brick was finished up yesterday and Theresa was able to stop by and snap a picture. The siding should go on within the next week or so and that will complete the exterior of the structure.

The electrician is finishing up today, so hopefully we can get the insulation and drywall up soon and move on to the finishing stages.

Siding

Earlier I had posted about our siding dilemma.   Our builder had worked with the siding supplier to secure us an upgraded quality of siding, but we weren't happy with the color selections.

The color option we liked best in the upgraded siding was a bluish grey color, and we wanted a tan/brown siding similar to what the other house has.

Well... we went to the siding place today and the supplier put the tan/brown siding from the existing house right next to the blue/grey higher quality siding... and they are exactly the same color.  So it's not so blue/grey after all.  I'm not sure how that happened... but we felt REALLY dumb.

But, at the end of the day, we get a better quality siding and we get the color that we want.  So it worked out perfectly.

Brick!

Brick was installed on the back and the sides of house this week.

 

Previously I had mentioned that we weren't sure about the brick we chose and we hoped we would like it more on the house.  The good news is that we do.   It looks pretty sharp from afar, but it's very dark, it has a lot of deep purplish red and maroon in it, and personally, I think it's a little weird looking up close.  I'm sure it'll grow on me.

We had a significant snow storm over the past two days, and Theresa drove by the house this morning and she mentioned that the brick looks really great contrasted with the snow, so there's that.

The problem with all of this snow and cold is that it makes it difficult for the bricklayers to finish up the front of the house.  Mortar doesn't set up right when it's cold, if the water freezes before the mortar interlocks, the job is ruined.   Masonry contractors can use fast setting mortar, hot water and additives to lay brick in below freezing temperatures, but that's not exactly "recommended" and I'm not sure when they'll have a chance to finish up.

Other than the brick... not much is going on.   The rough plumbing looks done, but the electrical still isn't quite finished.  In other words, things are moving pretty slowly.

Exterior and Other Thoughts

They dropped the pallets of bricks off at the house last week... so that's some progress.  The only problem is... they don't look like we thought they would.  

The brick color we got is called Mulberry and we really liked it when we saw it on two or three completed houses.  But the bricks we have at the house don't seem to look like that.  We even went so far as to call the brickyard again to verify that the houses we looked at previously did, in fact, have Mulberry bricks on them.   They did.

Mulberry Brick on a completed house

As you can see, Mulberry is a deep red brick color with a few blackish bricks thrown in here and there... which is why I'm confused about why our bricks look purple???

At this point we're hoping that they look better once they're on the house... which they probably will.  It's hard to get an accurate sense when they're sitting on a pallet, plus bricks age and discolor and weather and so on...   No clue when they'll start laying the brick.

We're also having trouble picking siding.  We'd like a dark brown/tan siding (similar to the picture above), which is very similar to what the existing house next door has.  However, we're actually getting a slightly higher quality of siding than the existing house had, and it's not available in that color.  We can always downgrade our siding and get that exact color... but then it's a lower quality.  We're trying to see if there are any other color options for the better stuff, but we might be stuck deciding between the color we want or a better quality product.  :(

In other news... plumbing and HVAC are (mostly) in and the electrician is getting started.   Our final electrician bill came in about $500 over budget, so... eek!  We're getting some much needed lighting and outlets though, so there is definitely value in that expense.    I'm very comfortable working on residential electrical, so I can probably add a lot of this stuff after we move in a lot cheaper, but my motivation to fish wire through drywall in a 2 story house is somewhat lacking.  That being said, there are a few areas where we backed off of adding a light fixture or an outlet somewhere that we wanted, just because it will be fairly easy for me to add them in later.  

I keep worrying about money... because that's just a thing I do in my daily life, so naturally I'm going to do it when we're spending OMGREALLYYAREALY!!! amounts of money, but everything I've read, heard or seen about construction or major remodeling projects has indicated that most people reach a point where the budget is completely shot... we're not there and it doesn't look like we're going to get that out of control.  We probably are going over our bottom line numbers, but we'll be at least close.   So we win. 

Life ain't nothin but decisions and money

Bonus points for the title reference..

So we're finally hitting the period where we're starting to spend more money than we planned :-/  So far we're keeping our overrun pretty manageable, it's a lot of money in $'s, but it's only about 2% of our expected cash expenditure for building, buying and moving into this house (that includes appliances, furniture, etc...), so in terms of budget variance, we're actually doing pretty good.  As of now... we're pretty much out of things to we can possibly upgrade.   So hopefully we're done bleeding!

First up.... faucets!   Because we made a deal for an exact copy of the previous spec house, our "builder standard" for a lot of things is the upgraded versions of the "standards" for most contracted houses.  This is great, and is saving us some money and/or giving us a little bit nicer finishing materials in a lot of places.   Faucets is one area where this applies.  Our faucets are actually pretty nice.... the only problem is that they're polished chrome.

Our bathroom faucets - stainless steel finish

Polished chrome is a very popular finish,  it's classic, it works well in a lot of decorating styles and a lot of people really like it... we're just not those people.  We simply prefer the duller stainless steel finish.  The only problem is that it's going to cost us about $400 to upgrade all of hte bathroom fixtures (faucets, tub, showers) to that finish.  

Ouch.

We've also decided we wanted to go with a nicer Kitchen faucet.    (I blame Theresa for this one!) So we started looking at our upgrade options there.  We have a few very nice choices that would cost around $170 to upgrade.  But, of course, the one we really want is like $60 more, and that's probably the one we're going to get because hey, if you're already spending $170 what's another $60?  This is how budgets begin to die.

Our likely kitchen faucet choice

 

 

 

 

Our next big expense was electrical work.  I knew we would spend some money here, but I thought we'd get out for around $500.  However,  when we walked through with the electrician we somehow managed to rack up close to $1000 worth of work to:

• Add recessed lighting to our formal living room and library, neither of which have overhead lighting standard
• Add 2 more recessed lights to our family room
• Add 3 or 4 more misc recessed lights. 
• Run speaker wire from the library to the back patio
• Run speaker wire in the master bathroom and closet.
• Pre-wire the kitchen for under cabinet lighting
• Add a few misc outlets

Again... ouch.   And again... the decisions.  Having to decide where you wnat cable/data drops, where you're going to need plugs and switches, where to place the lights.... AAAAAAHHHHH.  I don't know 80% of the answers to those questions, and I'm not going to know the answers to those questions until I've lived there for a month.   But it all has to be decided now.  I'm already reconsidering or adding too a lot of stuff we decided in our walkthrough.  Luckily the electrician won't start until Monday, so I have all week to finalize my thoughts.  This is definitely the worst part about building a house.  Wondering if you've made decisions you're going to regret later.

About half of that cost is for the recessed lights (damn those things are expensive!) and we may just go with single overhead fixtures in the living room/library.  We're still thinking it over.   This expense in particular really bugs me.  I'm comfortable with residential electrical, I've worked with it a lot previously, I'm knowledgeable about most of the electrical codes, etc...  In short I could happily do all of that stuff myself for the cost of materials (which is.... not much).  But I'm not allowed to work on this house while it's under construction and most electrical work is extremely hard to do after drywall has been installed.   If I had to go in and add recessed lights after we close.. It'd take me an entire weekend, I'd have to hack the everloving hell out of my nice pretty drywall and I'd probably kill Theresa our of pure frustration.... and then I'd feel bad.   So it's just way easier to have it done for me now.

We're also getting to the point where we need to decide on a ceiling fan and a vent hood.  I found some cheap vent hoods on Amazon.  I have no idea what kind of quality we're going to be getting, but the price is right so we're going to give them a shot.  There isn't a whole hell  of a lot to a vent hood, it's a piece of ductwork with a blower attached to it, so I'm hopeful it will work out.  They have pretty much every style of hood available, and I can't decide if we want to go with the modern glass look, the transitional look with the thin horizontal shelf, or with the traditional canopy.  

For the ceiling fan... we need something that is 54-60 inches, has a light, is reversible, has a remote control and looks decent and modern, is under $400.  So far we're coming up completely blank and we need to get that figured out soon!

Stupid Tax

So we (read, I) decided that the windows in the master bedroom were just a little bit too close together.

If we get a king bed in the future (and we will) and we go with a wider headboard there would be a fair bit of space between the window and the wall and very little (just a few inches) between the window and the bed.    I keep thinking that it'd be too close.   In reality, it'd probably be fine.  But my OCD has somehow chosen this little issue to lock onto and I'd rather just move them now and make sure that everything will be spaced well enough than to leave it alone and not like it later.

The bad news is that the framing crew is going to charge $150 to re-frame them.  Since they put them exactly (to the inch) where I told them too the first time... having to pay to move them is just "stupid tax".  It's money I have to pay for the privilege of walking through life being obliviously idiotic.   :(  

But if $400 (this $150 + $250 for the garage door)  is the extent of our unexpected expenses, I'm going to be pretty satisfied with that.

However, it looks like that number might go a bit higher because we're probably going so spend a bit of money upgrading our faucets as well.   I didn't think about that when I was doing any of the budgeting, so hopefully we keep the costs on that pretty low.   We're actually on a pretty tight budget  here, we're getting a lot of things like kitchen cabinets, wood flooring and stairs, etc... and in doing that, we've spent pretty much everything we're willing to spend.   So even looking at a few $100 on unbudgeted expenses or upgrades is a big deal at this point.

In happier news, I wrote about all of our floorplan changes a few days ago and there were a few of them I wasn't quite sure I liked, but after walking through the house a few more times... I think I like pretty much all of them.  I'm really starting to dig the stairs in particular.   The one thing I'm not sure I love is the master bathroom.  Theresa doesn't really like it much either.  I like most of it, I'm just not crazy about the shower.  I don't like that it shares a wall with the bedroom, and it might not have enough room or wallspace to add a 2nd shower head.  It looked like it would work on paper, but now that we see it framed... we're not really sure.    So hopefully the plumber, or the builder, or someone can figure out a way to make it all work.

I have to walk through sometime this week with the electrician and low voltage contractors to pick the locations of all of the outlets and cable/data drops.   I don't know where I want all of these things, and I probably won't know until I've lived there for a month!  You have to do a lot of guessing on decisions like this when you build a house!