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.

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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:

• Lenders
• Contractors for an “Oversight Contract”
• Bids from subcontractors (Subs) for all the different parts of the house (You have to have all your bids in before you can get financed)
• Insurance people for “Course of Construction” insurance
• Walla Walla County for Mechanical, Plumbing, Driveway and Building permits.
• The City of Walla Walla for a permit for the trees I “have to plant” for the “Green Space” by my sidewalk and for Water and Sewer permits
• A swimming pool permit
• A copy of my CCR’s from the Title Company
• Tons more crap…

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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:

• It costs 40% less to build in the Tri-Cities, than it does in Walla Walla.
• Most of the construction over there is slab concrete foundations, with ICF concrete walls and stucco finish.
• Most of the builders in Walla Walla build on a foundation and joist system with stick framed walls.
• Most painters can’t paint a straight line to save their lives. There were a ton of houses with walls painted different colors, where the line between the two colors was really bad. The one thing that stood out, from the multimillion dollar house, was that if you mask the light paint and run over a little with the dark, that it fools your eye and looks really good, even if it’s off.
• Most cabinet guys either suck, or the owner doesn’t pay them enough to finish the bottom of the cabinets in the kitchen. Only 3 out of the 30 houses had a finished bottom on their cabinets. What I mean by that is that if you look up, from the counter top, you don’t see raspy wood flakes, peeling veneer, lose hanging wires or anything else that looks like it was done in high school shop.
• Lumberman’s can get you almost everything you need to build a house. I didn’t know this, but now I do. There were 5000-6000 sq. ft. houses built almost solely by stuff delivered from the local Lumberman’s Warehouse.
• Lumberman’s also has the cabinets we want. Wow it was cool to find the cabinets, in the color and with the right hardware. We were really dreading trying to find the right cabinets, and now we don’t have to any more.
• The color we like on stucco is dark sage green, almost a grayish green, with chocolate brown trim. If you leave the window trim white, it really stands out and looks cool.
• The windows we like are half rounds instead of the ones with the gradual curve. It makes everything look taller.
• You can build a stucco wall around your property with ICF, which is a Styrofoam brick filled with concrete. The only problem is that if you need to build 300 feet of fence, 6 feet high, you have to pour 300 feet of foundation and then pay a stucco guy for 3900 feet of stucco. (1800′ per side and at least another 300′ on the top of the wall.)
• A 300′ concrete wall costs almost $30,000.00.
• My wall will end up being 300′ of dog eared cedar fencing that I will most likely put up by myself over 200-300 weekends…
• Real Estate agents stink, they wear way the hell too much cologne/perfume. They make the whole world stink and make normal people break out in hives.
• What you think you like, isn’t always what you really like once you see it.
• As long as the construction is sound, you can always change crappy colors and coverings.
• If you’re not a visual person, you need to get yourself to a parade of homes to really find out what you like and don’t like.
• I’m not afraid of the dark anymore. I used to be afraid of using dark colors in a house, but they really add a richness that can’t be matched by light colors… In most instances, lighter looks cheaper.
• There’s more, but I’m tired.

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