It’s been a while since the last post on this topic, reason being not enough hrs in a day but here are random updates:

• Networking – This was one of the few decisions that I was solely in charge of and debated much with myself, asked around, and read even more but finally what I went with was a very simple solution. For the den, the family room (area where the entertainment devices will be),  a corner in the garage (for the family backup/server) and a couple of strategic points in the house I had CAT6 wires drawn. The rest of the house will be wireless and given that I have those strategic points where I can have the wireless routers placed to ensure maximum coverage I think this will be enough as there is really no place where wired network is a must have and the areas that do need it will have it. And I chose CAT 6 because it is more reliable for transmission of data than the traditional CAT 5E. For Cable, we have two sets of coax running to most areas. This way we can have internet through cable company and say TV through satellite.
• Light switches – Trivial matter yes, but a couple useful points: for bathroom fans we got timer switches instead of regular ones, that way the fan does not have be on for hrs. Also we have dimmers for most rooms which is far more useful than what you would think.
• Decisions – People ask, would you build a house again? Truthfully it has been very exhausting to make decisions on everything and anything that goes into building a house. And apparently spouses tend to get into tense situations as tastes differ, but aside from the energy and time spend on researching and deciding on things, it has been very smooth and a great learning experience. And as a side note, I notice details about other people’s house that I had never noticed in going to these houses for years, be it the color or material of window blinds to cabinet knobs etc.

Like any other project, it did feel like the last 20% of the work took 80% of the time and it did. But we are very happy with the results. Next post:  cost breakdown.

I needed to turn an image into an .ico (icon) format and did not have access to any image editing software.

for online editing of images : pixlr.com is pretty handy.
for image file format conversion I came across this site which seems to work:
converthub.com

Not sure about the source (often misattributed to Nelson Mandela):

“Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Since the last post a lot has happened. On one hand getting the foundation related items out of the way took a while, from rain detention tank, to rebars, to many inspections, then came the concrete pouring followed by layering the drainage pipes and whole lot of other visually boring items. But once all these were done, the more visual part and apparently the most exciting part of the building started, the framing.

Framing went at an unbelievable pace, 3 weeks in total. From one day to the next you have nothing but a foundation to the next day where outer walls and floors are in place. and within a week you actually see the shape of the rooms which is an amazing experience after months and months of planning and adjusting and moving this wall over there and that room over here, seeing it take form day over day is pretty exciting. You go from thinking, this is smaller than I thought untill the walls come up and then you realize its actually bigger than you thought and I am told once everything is finished before furniture is moved in, the feeling of everything is smaller than we thought will be back but then go away once moved in. We did make some very minor changes from the original plan on the fly as we saw the shape of the rooms and windows.

So here is a chronological order of things once foundation has been laid (including drainage pipes):

• Framing
• Roofing & Windows/External doors
• plumbing and electrical
• HVAC/Exterior stone & paint/Gutters
• Insulation
• Drywall
• Trim work
• Tiles and cabinet
• Interior doors
• Hardwood floors
• Interior paint
• Plumbing and lighting fixtures

Fixtures are the last on the list, before framing started we started deciding on cabinetry, plumbing fixtures, counter tops and appliances and are now done, we think. Deciding can take a while though; you see something you like, but you may not feel that way tomorrow or in a week, so you have to make sure what you choose as part of your finalists are real keepers.

Some thoughts on different areas:

• Appliances – pretty straight forward, the only thing that took time was fridge in deciding between french doors, side-by-side or single door and french door won finally as everything is in convenient height (since freezer is at the bottom)and it can fit big platters. The drawback could be that you forget which side an item is on opening both doors, but that’s minor.
• Kitchen Countertop – Still TBD as we are still deciding between lime stone(not durable), granite (comes in matt, aka honed and glossy), soap stone (40% more than granite and same durability) and concrete(not as durable). We want a unique look rather than typical glossy granite but given all the factors including price we will see what we end up with.
• Heating/Cooling – Important realization here was to go with multizone control (ie since you only have one unit for AC or heating, the ability to control without manual work how certain parts of the house will get more heat/cool than others). Saves energy and better for the environment. We dropped the option of going with radiant heating which we initially really wanted for environmental reasons, but that would have meant buying, installing, and operating two completely different systems.
• Other – I also briefly looked into things like motorized painting to cover the TV as well as home automation control, and cool as the result may be, given the costs and what you get out of it, we dropped it simply wasn’t worth it. The one luxury that I am very much looking forward to is the rain head shower.
• Networking – will do a separate post on this as I geeked out a little, at least on paper.

Building a House – preperations for teardown (Part I)

One of the things I really dislike is the idea of buying a new car. Scratch that, I just really dislike dealing with car salesmen because with the exception of one or two, you are surely going to get suckered, you just don’t know how much and most likely you will never find out. It’s different from buying anything else in my opinion (even a house) as it can be researched a lot easier and you can arm yourself with all the needed information before going into a store.

With cars there are just too many unknowns that you simply cannot find out (for mortal people at least) before starting the process, hence that uneasy feeling of “wonder where I rank in the list of people this guy suckered” feeling just won’t go away. The car industry would sure benefit from more transparency as I don’t mind dealerships making a living/profit as long as I am paying very similar to what the other 20 people who bought the same car and that just is not the case.

Anyways, we needed a car for the next many years that we can use as the kids grow up, so we decided to go with a mini-van (which is another post by itself) and Honda Odyssey seemed the natural choice. Next came the buying part. We decided to not trade-in to give the sales person one less parameter they can milk more profit from. This is the story of how we tried our best to minimize the risk of overpaying for the car.

In short, it came down to the following steps (we happened to get our car right towards the tail end of this year’s model and in fact only teen nr of odysseys of the model we wanted remained in our vicinity as one dealer looked it up):

1. Know the EXACT car you want, brand, model, down to options, exterior and interior colors.
2. Find out how much the MSRP price & invoice price (e.g. from truecar.com), how much the holdback is (usually 2 or 3%) and if there are (marketing) incentives offered to dealers/consumer by the manufacturer (typical ahead of next year’s model to get rid of last inventory of the current year)
3. Calculate what price you should be paying based on this info e.g. invoice price minus holdback minus incentives (this is as far as you can get with arming yoruself with the info)
4. Get a list of quotes from internet (e.g. from InvoiceDealers, Cars.com, Yahoo!Autos, Autos.com, Edmunds.com, MyRide.com and CarsDirect)
5. Get a list of all dealers within a readius of X miles from your house (ie as far as you are comfortable to drive to get the car if you get a good deal) from yellowpages.com
6. Start calling the farthest one.
7. Important! Ask for the fleet manager or internet sales (fleet manager is someone who is on a fixed salary vs sales people that get commission based on how much they sell)
8. Tell the person you are looking to buy a car today (don’t lie if you are not planing on this) and are calling a few places to get the best price and go in and close the deal. Then ask them what they can offer if they have the car in stock.  If they are savvy they will ask what price you currently have and you can share the lowest price you have and ask if they can beat it. Here is where it gets tricky. When I did this, a lot of them would just say thats a good deal, you should order it from the internet then. Don’t waste time and move on to the next one as if you want to wait, you can always order it from the internet site.
9. Make sure to confirm that this is the *bottom* line price (usually including everything but tax) as otherwise you will be surprised how much other fees they will try and insert in there. Some will refuse to give a bottom line price over the phone saying you will use it to call the next guy for a lower price. Again, don’t waste time, you started by telling him/her you are looking to buy a car today and if he is not trying to work a deal, chances of getting a good deal from this person are next to none.
10. If they do, ask to call back, call the next dealership closer to you and repeat the process until you get the price closest in step 3.
11. Go and buy the car!

Common comment from sales person : I am giving you the car at invoice and not making any money. Well, they may have paid the price of invoice to manifacturer yes, but then they get different rebates and holdback, so in reality that is not how much they paid. Example: if you buy a watch for $20 and you get a mail-in rebate for $8, your invoice was $20 yes, but you actually paid only $12.

How did we do? After buying the car, it turned out one of the parents whose kids are in the same age group as our daughter and we have seen each other a few times works at a dealership and when I told him about the price we paid for the car, he said he would look into it and told us later that we got a really good deal, as good as it pretty much can get for this area.

and here is a very comprehensive site about buying a new car.

I thought I had heard/seen most traditions and customs in the Persian culture, at least the common ones, but here is one that caught me off guard. The other night at a dinner party with some very well educated people, one being a well versed scholar in Persian history and culture, as my wife came in with our new born son of two months, the gentleman looked at him and then with a smiling face looked at my wife saying : he is very ugly!….long silence…. My wife and looked at each other very puzzled but managed somehow to not show it smiling back in silence, thinking “what da?!?”.

Later on we found out, this phrase is said to ward off the evil spirits, for those who believe in it I guess. So I guess you learn something new every day and if this happens to you (at least when someone Persian says it), they don’t really mean it; you can hope.