More progress. We've signed a contract with our builder. It doesn't sound like much I know. But it is the culmination of months of 'shopping', weeks of discussions, and hours modeling different spending and borrowing scenarios.
For a brief time the wine room was in jeopardy. As I had first suspected, it costs way more than $30k, once you allow for shoring on all four sides, an extra flight of stairs, then putting in drywall, flooring oh and shelves to put the wine bottles on. But our clever builder thought of a way to make it much bigger - creating an extra room in the basement for a couple of grand more. And without it, the appraised value of the home we are building would be lower.
So, that's the sort of rollercoaster discussion we've been having. One minute we can't afford a wine room, the next we're not only building one, we're throwing in an extra room while we're at it. Now the wine room is back in the budget. We might try to save a little money on things like light fixtures and tiles. We might even ditch the raised seam metal we'd planned for some of the exterior and just do a batten board siding instead. These are the options we've been kicking around with the builder while we try to arrive at a price that will give us the house we want and also the loan repayments we can handle.
In the end we've gone with the builder who's attached to our architect - Lane, which is a 'Design Build' firm. He had a huge advantage in the bidding process, having sat with us in meetings with all the big sub contractors, and giving us really good advice along the way about how to build this house well. We did bid it out to two other local firms. One didn't get back to us. The other came back with a very similar price to Lane, but once we'd unpacked it a bit we felt more confident in Lane's costs.
This is a significant milestone because it allows us to move on with the borrowing process. Assuming that can take a couple of months, we're on track to move out and starting tearing down at the end of the summer.
For a brief time the wine room was in jeopardy. As I had first suspected, it costs way more than $30k, once you allow for shoring on all four sides, an extra flight of stairs, then putting in drywall, flooring oh and shelves to put the wine bottles on. But our clever builder thought of a way to make it much bigger - creating an extra room in the basement for a couple of grand more. And without it, the appraised value of the home we are building would be lower.
So, that's the sort of rollercoaster discussion we've been having. One minute we can't afford a wine room, the next we're not only building one, we're throwing in an extra room while we're at it. Now the wine room is back in the budget. We might try to save a little money on things like light fixtures and tiles. We might even ditch the raised seam metal we'd planned for some of the exterior and just do a batten board siding instead. These are the options we've been kicking around with the builder while we try to arrive at a price that will give us the house we want and also the loan repayments we can handle.
In the end we've gone with the builder who's attached to our architect - Lane, which is a 'Design Build' firm. He had a huge advantage in the bidding process, having sat with us in meetings with all the big sub contractors, and giving us really good advice along the way about how to build this house well. We did bid it out to two other local firms. One didn't get back to us. The other came back with a very similar price to Lane, but once we'd unpacked it a bit we felt more confident in Lane's costs.
This is a significant milestone because it allows us to move on with the borrowing process. Assuming that can take a couple of months, we're on track to move out and starting tearing down at the end of the summer.
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