Obviously I haven’t kept up on this, since the house is almost done and I haven’t posted anything in months. Mayby I’ll start next wek and just blow through this thing and lay it all out, including pictures. You’ve got to see my dang house; man it rocks!
The foundation was put in by Marino Nelson, which is the guy everybody in town says to use if you have a foundation with any angles in it. My foundation had a total of 30 corners with only 14 of them being 90’s. The Marino Nelson guys came in and built their forms, but it took a little longer than everyone figured because it got really cold for a couple of days while they were trying to get it done. They ended up having to put chemicals in the concrete and puting blanks over the foundation to make sure it set up right.
I’ll tell you what, after they poured the foundation, the footprint of the house was so small it looked like I would have a hard time getting one bed and maybe a table into it. The contractors wandering around the site laughed at me and said that it was massive and you could never tell until the walls are up and the sheetrock is on. Until then, all houses look like dog houses. LOL
After talking at the site prep guys, and getting my bids, I decided to use Zaco. I like Kenny Ziegele, who owns Zaco Construction, and he does a good job. He is also one of those guys who will stand behind his work and give just a little bit more than necessary to get the job done right.
He came out and looked at the plans, shot the property with his laser level, and then started digging. His dad was running the backhoe and did a good job leveling the property and getting it ready for the foundation guys. Overall they did a good job and I’m happy with their work.
If you want to contact Kenny at Zaco to get a bid for prep or concrete work, visit his web page above or call him at (509) 529-7515.
Since I have all the bids for the house, which took me a full three months to get, I’m just going to move right into the site prep and foundation stages.
My wife and I took almost 6 months to find the right house plan for us. During that time, we weren’t looking 24/7, but we would look in the house plans they put in the Sunday paper, go to open houses and spend time each week looking at websites that list house plans. Some of the websites are quite informative, and you can get some good ideas of what you want and don’t want by looking at them and going to open houses on the weekends.
After about three months of looking, we decided that we needed around 3000 square feet, the kids needed real bedrooms, not the 11′x12′ crap they put in houses nowadays, and we wanted a bonus room by the kid’s room so we wouldn’t have to listen to them yelling and screaming all the time. I’ll tell you right now, there aren’t any houses that have bedrooms bigger than 12′x13′, that aren’t master suites, and that sucks.
What we ended up having to do was find a design we liked that was about 2200′, then make the areas we wanted bigger, bigger. The house plan that we settled on had a separate office and formal dining room, with the great room, breakfast nook and kitchen all in the same area. The kid’s bedrooms were 11′x12′ with a jack and jill bathroom between them, the laundry room was tiny and the master was OK sized.
What we ended up with after messing with the plans for about a month was that we left the separate office as the office, turned the formal dinning room into a library and raised all the main floor ceilings to 12′, including the great room/kitchen/breakfast nook area. The kid’s rooms were added on to to make them 11′x16′ with the jack and jill bathroom. We put a 25′x12′ bonus room in over the garage, and added a 12′x12′ room at the back of the garage for all the mechanicals. In the master bedroom, we took out the master tub and put in a 4′x6′ tile shower with a seat and added a couple of showerheads. We then took out one of the two walk in closets, and with the room saved by getting rid of the stupid garden tub, we ended up with a master bedroom that is 16′x19′ with an additional 7′x8′ sitting room off of it…. Can you say cool?
We then took all of our scribbled on papers down to Earl, who has an office above Land Title in Walla Walla, and he turned them into 8 sets of plans for around $700.00. While the whole thing was a huge pain in the ass, I’m pretty sure that this house is going to be a kick in the pants to live in, and is just what we need for the way we live.
I’ll be posting more really fast over the next few days, because I have almost a month’s worth of posts sitting here waiting to be uploaded.
Building My Own House…. Yahoo!
I kind of need to start over with this so that it makes more sense. I think I will divide it up into the different sections and processes required to get your house built, so that if you are building your own house, you can sort of just follow along.
OK, I know that it’s been weeks since I posted last, but getting bids is a huge pain in the ass. The more bids you get, the more that you realize that none of the bids are for the same stuff, and that bids for the same thing, offering all the same services, can vary by 20,000.00 fricken dollars.
I started the bidding process by contacting the best drywall guy in town and asking him who he likes to hang rock on. In other words, who’s a good framer, that builds a good straight house. He gave me a couple of names to call, and I was on my way.
I called the two framers he told me about, and the first one said that he couldn’t even look at the job for at least 5 months, which put me into February, just for the framing. I asked him for a couple of names, and added them to my “good framer” list. I then called the second name on the list and repeated the process. Every time I hit a dead end, I asked for the name of the guy that they would have do the work if they couldn’t do it themselves. By doing this, I ended up with a list of 5 good framers, and took each of them a copy of my house plans for them to do a bid on.
While talking to the framers, I asked them who they would suggest to use for a good foundation and site prep. They didn’t really care much about the prep guy, but they all pointed me towards the same three companies for the foundation work. They explained that since they had to build a straight wall on the foundation, it was best if the foundation started out straight. LOL
I also asked a couple of friends of mine who’ve had houses built lately who they used for painting, plumbing and electrician. Come to find out, all you need to do is drop off plans with plumbers, and they can pretty much give you a rough in bid without much input. I then told my plumbers that I would supply the fixtures, and would give them a list of plumbing fixtures that they would need to install as soon as I knew what I was getting.
The electrician’s work was way harder, and I would do my homework before I asked an electrician to give you your first bid. What I mean by that is that the first electrician whose sees your plans needs to sit down with you and draw all the lights and wiring on the blueprints before he can bid it. We sat with our electrician from 7pm to 10pm one night while he took notes and made suggestions. He then took a set of blueprints home with him. A week later he had his bid ready, and I also got the blueprints back with all the wiring and lights drawn in. It must have taken hours to do.
I then made a copy of those drawings, and gave a copy to a couple of more electricians to bid. I’m glad that they came in substantially higher, because I would hate to have had a couple of guys come in way lower and have to take that job away from the electrician who did all the initial paper work.
Now lets get to the sore spot in this miserable bidding saga…. Painters. The problem is that there aren’t any painters in Washington state that can paint a straight line between colors. I have an obsessive compulsive disorder, and if the paint on a wall is crooked, I fixate on it and can’t get anything done. I mean it’s not really that bad, but it’s close. If there is a line that is sloppy or uneven, it keeps drawing my eye and pisses me off. I really, really need to find a good painter, or I won’t be able to work and will go broke and lose my house…
When I was growing up, I learned to work at a young age, and learned to take pride in my work. So now, all these years later, I still expect people, and especially professionals, to take pride in their work and to do near perfect work, or go back and do it until they get it right. Well, the painting that I saw in the Tri-Cities when I went on the tour of homes, and the houses that I’ve seen in Walla Walla going to open houses each week, has shown me there aren’t any good painters left in this part of the world.
I think that I’m going to have to end up painting my house one color on the inside, then having the trim painted, nailed on and touched up afterwards, so that the fricken lines between paint colors in my house end up being straight. I haven’t asked anyone yet how they do the trim thing, but I think that they are going to have to paint it and put it on after the house is painted, or I will spend my time staring at the wavy lines and trying not to vomit. You would at least think that guys who paint would own a big wide putty knife that they could use in the corners to keep the paint that’s suppose to be on the walls, off of the ceiling.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
On Friday, we got a call that our blueprints were done. Of course, they would have been done 2 days, and $300.00, sooner if my wife and I hadn’t spent so many hours waffling over the windows. When we started on the house, we wanted tall, half round, windows because we thought they looked cool. After we went to the Tri-Cities and saw all the Stucco homes with slightly curved windows, we decide that we liked them more. But, after having the drafting company change the windows to the slightly curved ones, and trying a bunch of different sizes, we decided we liked the original windows more, and went with them. What a waste of time.
After I picked up the plans, I went across the street to Sterling Savings Bank and met with one of their loan people. It was easier, and went quicker, than the meeting with Baker Boyer, and they had better rates and let me roll my loan directly into a 30 year fixed without additional fees. That was a big selling point with me since I don’t like the idea of having to pay closing costs twice, with the same bank, on the same piece of property.
I then went to Lumberman’s and talked to John about doing a takeoff list for me from my blueprints. What that entails is someone going over my plans and putting together a list of parts that you will need to build your house. From that they do a bid for supplying everything that they carry, from floor joists and windows, to cupboards and rafters. As a matter of fact, John said that he would also take a copy of my plans and send them to Boise Cascade for them to put together an engineered floor joist system for my house. It will be really interesting to see what they come back with, since it looks like they can supply almost everything I need to get my house built.
I then went over to the Walla Walla County Community Development Office and tried to turn in my permits. Well, maybe I should have filled them out first. Come to find out, the 2 papers that I had printed off their website and filled out were only a small fraction of what I needed to finish the process. I needed to count all of the sinks, toilets, showers, tubs, garbage disposals, hot water heater systems, heating and air conditioning units and their size, how many square feet my house was going to be, how many feet were in the garage, how many feet were under covered porches and how much insulation I was going to put in the walls, ceilings and floors…. yea, I got wore out and confused too. LOL
This is actually the point at which I also found out that I had to get a permit from the City of Walla Walla because they were supplying my water and sewer. I went down to the City and they gave me a list of questions that looked pretty much the same as the ones that the County had just sent me home with. Since their permit looked pretty much the same as the Counties, I decided to stick them in the stack with the others and call it quits for the day.
So, I went home, had a drink and decided to see if I could put together the answers to all of the paperwork I needed to turn in on Monday.
I’m getting behind in the posting, due to everything that my wife and I have been doing over the past week to get this house project moving forward, so I’m going to start where I left off last week.
After we saw all the houses on the Tri-Cities Parade of Homes, we came home and Brenda loaded all the pictures that we had taken to Snapfish.com so that she could sort through them and print the ones we wanted to keep. When we looked at all the pictures, there were a bunch that were junk, but we did come up with about 75 that were good. When I say good, it means that they had something we either loved or hated in them. (We are trying to keep the two piles separate.)
On Thursday, the 13th of September, we didn’t do anything except sit down and make lists of stuff to do and who we needed to talk to, just to get to the financing part. The list consisted of:
We went to the Tri-Cities all day Saturday, Sunday and 7 hours on Wednesday evening to go through their parade of homes. They have 30 homes that you can walk through this year, and the $7.00 that it costs you to get in also gets you a complete list of builders and their subs. By the time we were done last night, we wanted to shoot each other and live in a cardboard box.
While the whole thing was hot, sweaty, stinky and tiring, it was well worth the 3 trips. We saw some really, really nice houses, with some really cool stuff in them. The one thing that really surprised me though, was that it gets hot in the Tri-Cities, and there was only one house with a pool. The only house that had a pool was like 9,000+ sq. ft. and was in the million or two or three range. (I didn’t ask how much it was, and once you get past the million mark, it’s all the same to me.)
Here are the things that we found out: