Flashback
The End of Plan A
After about a week of depression, we called the builder and
asked if there were areas that could be eliminated and that we could save money
on. He said he would check. Following up with him a week later, the answer came
back as a basic, no, it didn’t look like we could really save anywhere and
still have the house that we wanted. We thanked him and told him that this
project was dead in the water and we appreciated his time. He was a great guy
and we really wanted to work with him. But at this point in time, it wasn’t
going to happen.
At the end of the day, it all added up. Like going to Best
Buy for a new TV, if you want more, you’ve got to pay more. It’s just the way
it is. Everything added up. It wasn’t the builder’s fault that we designed it
the way we did. We just should have stayed on top of pricing reviews instead of
doing them infrequently. Additionally, while having an architect was great,
they can only give you general costs, not what a builder might necessarily
charge. And admittedly, he did warn us with every change that the costs were
increasing and we were going beyond our target. We should have been listening
closer.
So we sat and looked that plans that we had paid so much for
and had spent so much time on and recognized that even with the amount of money
that it was going to cost, the house was still not what we really wanted.
Maybe we were thinking that because we were so discouraged,
who knows? But when we looked closer, we knew that with the kind of money that
it was going to cost, the floor plan, while workable was not ideal. And we both
love having sun come through the windows but the garage was going to be on the
south side blocking most of it. The house itself was still shoved up against
one side of the lot when we had so much room on the other side of the property.
We had a house that needed a great deal of work, a great lot and a perfect
neighborhood. Talk about being shoved into a corner.
In retrospect, I’m not sure if we could have or would have done
it any different. We let the budget grow for things that made sense. After all,
we didn’t want half a house.
So where do we go from here? And what will it cost to frame
old plans?
