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)

Our house was build in early 50s and although we remodeled somewhat a few years back, many factors contributed to our decision of tearing down the house and rebuilding a new one. In this series of posts I will talk about each step as we take it and while it will be a good read 20 years from now when all the details will be long gone from the memory, hopefully it will help any readers out there in similar situation to take advantage of our learning during this process as well as maybe soliciting feedback & tips that will lead us to make better decisions.

So let’s get started on the steps taken so far. Here is a summary in bullet points

• Custom plan vs. stock plan – after much going back and forth on this, we started by looking at stock plans sold by variuos firms and since we found a plan that had pretty much 90% of what we wanted, we decided to go with a stock plan and modify it rather than do a fully custom plan which would have cost probably 5-7X the amount for a stock plan.
• Permits - once the modification was done with the stock plan and we were happy with everything which took about 3-4 months (tips: do not rush into finalizing the plan, sleep on it, then sleep some more on it as something that may sound great for a day or two a week later may sound blah) you submit it to the city and wait for request for revisions and clarifications etc. That’s all part of the process and there is no way you can get your plan approved in one shot. With the semi slow market thankfully this has gone pretty smoothly so far. and that’s where we still are to get the permit finalized. The plan itself includes multiple dimensions of the house from draining plan, structural plan, foundation plan, the house itself (layout) and a few others and each go through a review and approval through various experts within the housing department of the city.
• Moving out – this is going to take a while as for some reason we humans are good at collecting junk over time and not getting rid of it, so moving once in a while a good thing as it allows to get rid of the junk.
• Salvaging the house – being environmentally conscious we didn’t want to have the entire house to waste so we called several companies that salvage parts of the house (anything from light/bathroom switches/fixtures to the floors, doors, windows and some parts of the exterior of the house. Benefit of this primarly is the fact that there will be less junk produced as most of the salvaged parts get resold/reused by other people and we get some sort of tax deduction as you are donating that material. We called three companies available in our area
  
  • Re Store – never got back to us despite several calls
  • Earthwise  – came and assessed and we went with them.
  • Second use – came and assessed and felt it was not worth their effort.
• Old appliances, computers and other stuff - our appliances were all from early 70s and worked so so, along with a couple of old desktops, laptops, cables, vases, chairs and other items that was no longer any use to us. Craigslist.org was invaluable as anything we put on there as free to be picked up, were gone in less than 24 hrs! I also put the house to be salvaged further after the company above came and there people that are interested in salvage more items from the house! This was a great surprise and since others find this useful, it’s win win as far as I am concerned.
• Paying the costs – From the blogsphere I came across this credit card from Schwab that according to them : “You earn 2% cash back on all retail purchases, including purchases for services and recurring payments. This excludes transactions relating to refunds or returns, balance transfers, cash advance transactions (including the purchase of money orders or other cash equivalents), out-of-network payments made through FIA Card Services’ Bill Pay Choice® service, purchases made by or for a business or for a business purpose, fees, finance charges, unauthorized/fraudulent transactions and other charges.” Hey, that’s better than any other useless credit card out there that gives you 1% cashback on selected transactions or lots of air milage or other crap that end up never using. And while I won’t be able to pay for the entire house using this card of course, whatever I gain back can be used for other purposes at least.

Once we have the permit ready, next step will be to getting contractors to tear down the house and excavate…and that will the topic of the next post.