Back when we were in the design stage of our house, and before I was pregnant with the little tyrant who, with his big sister, has been running my life for the last 15+ months, I had visions of blogging about every step of the build process. I’d do weekly posts about the progress we made, decisions we’d finalized, and lessons we’d learned.
As it happens, baby boys and toddler girls demand a lot of attention, and it’s not nearly as much fun to write about the trials and tribulations of building a house as I thought it would be.
But now that we’re in the home stretch, I do want to share some of the process. We’ve definitely made some mistakes along the way, and I’d love to save others from similar troubles if I can. I’m also pretty damn proud of some of the things we’ve done, and I want to show those off too. So without further ado, here’s a high-level overview of the process of building a house.
Based on my email records, my very first contact with our architect happened on July 26rd, 2013. So we’re talking almost 3 years from very very beginning to end.
To go back even further, we bought our home at the very end of 2011. In fact, our closing date was 12/31. Allie was born 26 days later. I’ve mentioned before that we knew from the time we put the offer on the house that we’d eventually renovate and add on. By the time we’d lived in the place 18 months we had pretty thoroughly fallen in love with our neighborhood, and we thought we had a solid idea of what we wanted out of the house. We talked to some friends and got a handful of referrals for architects and designers. After reviewing a whole lot of Houzz accounts and web pages, we narrowed it down to 3 companies meet in person.
After those meetings, my husband and I quickly agreed that Sam Sinnott of Sinnott and Company was our guy. That was probably the last “quick” part of the process. We met again with Sam that August to discuss our thoughts in more detail, and then he got started with a preliminary design.
We went through 4 significant revisions over a period of about 9 months. If we’d been really motivated, we probably could have shortened this part of the process significantly. Each new set of drawings probably took Sam 2 weeks to a month to complete. Then we sat on them for 6-8 weeks at a time. With every revision there was something we weren’t sure about, or outright hated, and it just took us time to work through each of them. Looking back the first draft of the plan is almost unrecognizable. We were so excited about this plan…and then we changed almost all of it.
Part of the reason for our indecision was our dishonesty with ourselves at the scope of the project. We started out saying we’d just put a “small” addition on the back of the house and update the kitchen. We had this silly idea that we’d just do enough to get us through a few more years there, then we’d move to something larger. When we realized just how much time, energy, and money was going to go in to building something passable, we switched gears and decided to make this a home that we’d be comfortable in for a long time.
That meant that a couple of areas we’d decided to hold back on–like a separate laundry room and a craft room–got put back on the table. It also meant redoing the front of the house, which we’d originally planned to basically leave alone.
Somewhere in between revisions 2 and 3 we decided to hire an interior designer. Tara Dobrec is a friend, and after a couple of extremely valuable casual conversations with her about our ideas, we decided we needed her to keep us on-task and help us make decisions. She’s been invaluable, though I’m pretty sure we’ve driven her completely insane.
With Tara’s help, by early summer of 2014 we had a set of plans that we were mostly thrilled with, and were ready to move forward with permitting. Permitting is awful. It really deserves its own post, but I don’t know that I can write one that doesn’t just turn into a long angry rant.
Suffice it to say, we wasted about 6 months on this part. We took a calculated risk in opting for a full design review, and we calculated wrong.
Our optimistic timeline had been to submit for permits in May, get approved by September, and start construction mid-Fall. Instead, our review wasn’t even scheduled until October, and then we got rejected and had to re-submit right around Thanksgiving.
By this point I was very pregnant with Theo, and got it into my head that we needed to move out of the house before he was born, rather than after. The house agreed. I am not kidding when I say that EVERYTHING started breaking between October and November.
So we rented a little house a couple miles away, and moved out Thanksgiving weekend. That was also around the time of our second design review meeting, which went significantly better than the first.
Things finally seemed to be moving along. Now we needed a builder. The fact that Sam is an architect and general contractor is one of the things that really appealed to us from the very beginning. We really liked the idea of having one company own the project from start to finish, as we figured it would cut down on communication lag times and other issues. Still, we decided to solicit bids from a handful of other contractors, mostly as a sanity check to make sure everyone came in at around the same price range. They did, and we went with our original plan and hired Sam for the build.
Loan time. This is another area that deserves it’s own ranty post. Loans are worse than permits. Once we had our contractor hired and a solid bid for the work, I finalized our loan application, naively thinking it would take about 2 weeks to close. HA. I applied for the loan at the end of January, and we didn’t close until May 8. With a construction loan, you absolutely cannot start work until the loan is closed, so we just sat in limbo for 3 months, waiting.
Demolition began on May 11, 2015. So there you go, 1 year, 9 months, and 16 days from “let’s do some construction” to actually doing construction.
And now, we’re 16 days out from the 1-year mark on construction, and (fingers crossed!) 26 days out from moving. The construction process was it’s own set of adventures, which I’ll write about in Part 2, coming soon!
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