The Passavants Remodeling

Welcome, and a little histrory...

Hi folks, I created this blog to have a simple/central place to keep track of the progress on our whole house remodeling project and other things in our life.

To give you a bit of background, we started planning this project more than two years ago. Carrie spent many, many hours doodling and noodling her way through some preliminary plans, and then we spent many more hours arguing and wrangling over them ourselves before we turned them over to the architect. We originally planned on tearing the whole house down, but soon found out that was WAY expensive because we were spending 20% of our budget just on demolition. So, we scratched that and re-designed the plans to accomodate a giant remodel of the existing house, saving as much of the structure as we could. We finally came to an agreement on a set of remodeling plans, got all the variances approved and were ready to start at the end of the summer '05.

Then I got cold feet - I "ran the numbers" one final time and couldn't figure out how we could afford to live in the house we had, let alone put all the money into remodeling it. After many hours of fighting and threats of divorce Carrie and I settled on doing a portion of the project that covered the "public" spaces of the house that we use to entertain, basically the first floor. We figured out where to draw the line, and then got pricing from the builder. Everything was OK, until we got closer to summer and through some good fortune Carrie figured we could afford to do a little more and asked me to "run the numbers" again to see if we could do the Master bedroom too.

I sat down and re-crunched and re-crunched, making sure that I didn't miss anything from the monthly budget - once again, I was amazed that we could afford to live in the house as it is, let alone remodel it. Carrie was of course, ahh shall we say, frustrated? So I had to sit down and go through the acconting I had done to come up with the monthly budget, and everything looked straight forward and simple. I explained to Carrie how I categorize all purchases (i/e - clothing, groceries, subscriptions, etc...) so I know where all the money goes, and I show all the payments to the credit cards to make sure they are in budget. I even categorize things we put on the cards when we splurge and pay off those items right away, like school shopping - get the miles, but pay them off right away. As I was explaining everything to Carrie she started asking - whats this, and where does this come from, and how did you get to this number? Soon I began to wonder about a couple of things myself - I stared at the numbers, flipping from page to page... Then it dawned on me - I had been double dipping every time I ran the reports! Because I categorize everything in Quicken, and run the budget against the categories I ALREADY had all the money I was paying to the credit cards on those splurge purchases, and THEN some! I had been double dipping on the budget each time I ran the numbers and found that we could afford to do the project and not dip into our retirement savings budget at all!

We then engaged the builder and got started, planning on begining the project in early August right after the builder was done with our friends house - we let Gregg go first so it would be done by the time his second wedding ceremony was scheduled. But things just kept getting delayed at every turn - until it was September and the builder was finally ready! Just need to pick up the permit and go! Uhh, did I mention there was a huge turnover at the city planning commission and practically none of the people we worked with during the variance process are still there? Did I mention that the people our builder was tight with that expedited his permits were gone too? We ended up having to go through a month long permit review process to get approvals to do the plans we had been approved for a year ago! No changes, and I had to pay the $2500 for the priviledge of adding a bathroom because of a new "Water Service Unit Fee" that the new building commissioner put in place - I am sure to get developers that build subdivisions... There goes my new TV! :-(

Well, all that is behind us, and the permit arrived on Friday along with Mark's (the builder) trailer and a committment to start Monday.

posted by Richard @ 12:50 PM