Home Shows & Parade Of Homes
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.