Appraisal

Our builder had no problems with our contract edits!  We signed on April 16th without ceremony.  Or fanfare.  Seems like there should have been a fanfare.

On the loan front, I found two lenders that had a “one time closing” to lock in an interest rate up front on both the construction loan, and the permanent mortgage it rolls into.  (Today’s rates will only go up.)  I let them know they were in competition.  One lender is a good acquaintance and gave his best offer first and I thought we were done!  When I told the other bank thanks but no thanks, they decided to play ball and managed to beat the other offer.  3.5% is pretty amazing!

The lender is attempting to expedite the closing by request. (Our builder has had the subcontractor quotes for a while.  Those expire.)  So a little over a week later our APPRAISAL comes in and it’s LOW.  Lenders will only finance the amount for which a 3rd party appraiser thinks they can sell it in case the buyer defaults.

Predetermining a specific dollar amount for what a house will sell involves, in my father’s terms, smoke and mirrors.  And to further paraphrase him, the appraisal is likely influenced on whether the appraiser got any action the night before.  I’m inclined to agree.  Without a suitable comparison property within our neighborhood (probably the largest factor on value), the nearest comp given was a town home 4 1/2 miles away.  The second comp was another town home in the same neighborhood, and the third is 14 miles away.  Adjustment factors are given to make up for differences between those homes and ours to make it all seem wonderfully mathematical (i.e. indisputable).

Our house was listed as ‘traditional‘ as were the comps.  Wait. What!?  And with a detached garage.  What? WHAT!?  And their postage stamp lots (think town homes) were determined as equal in value to ours because they are in a gated community.  Furthermore, items such as landscape features, thicker/better insulated exterior walls, and hardwood/bamboo throughout aren’t even factored.  (The market is incurably hung up on square feet, number of rooms, lot size, and basics like a fire place, but not quality, design features, performance, or uniqueness.  That’s changing as evidenced by the downsizing trend, but Indiana is always the last to these things.)  Sales in our immediate area have varied wildly between $120,000 and $425,000 telling me that a definitive prediction of market value is flushable.  But it’s part of the system and the game we have to play.

Our two options with a low appraisal, I was told, are to dispute it (and the banker has never won an appraisal dispute) or to come up with more cash.  We are not happy, but after scrounging and digging deep, we were fortunate to come up with more cash.  We’ll see how smoothly closing goes.

Massive Mulching

I had the entire weekend blocked out, and a 9″ chipper reserved at Hoosier Tool Rental.  Amazingly, and still to my astonishment, five friends chipped in help and polished it off in LESS THAN 4 HOURS.  (A pro quoted $2k using 5 guys for 5 hours.)  HUGE thanks to Paul S., Kyle B., Scott C., Ben C., and Stephen T.!  I owed my neighbor for help moving firewood so we chipped a pile he had to boot!

          
Beginning the pile^                                                             All done!^

There’s something to be said for having the right tool for the job, and I think everyone secretly enjoyed throwing the larger branches / logs in to watch the chipper do her work.  BrRrRrRRAAACCKKK!  What a hoss.

Next step: get the timbers consolidated and ready for milling while the builder does his prep work.  By the way, I also found that one of the big hardware stores sells lumber by the gallon!

The Ball Starts Rolling

We thought dirt would be moving by now, but we’re not far off:

We’re negotiating terms of the contract with our builder, who has a boilerplate agreement morphed for each project over his 35 years of work.  The AIA (American Institute of Architects) produces industry standard contracts with some provisions I’m trying to get into his agreement.  And there is the question of incorporating owner-performance that is risky to the builder and lender.  I’ll divulge more after the papers are signed, and a loan secured.  Sounds like financing alone is a month long process, so ground breaking is still at least that far off.

In the mean time, we’ve been clearing the lot.  We’ve had some spectacular help from some friends and family.  Huge thanks to our lumberjacks, Kyle B., Brian O., Jim H., Nate H., Josh W. & Dan W.!  I’ve put in several half days (I found the poison ivy!), and we had pros come tackle the trees that were too tall, near houses or power lines, and highly risky to an amateur.  Their high wire monkey work was pretty phenomenal!

        
TIMBER! (The pro actually yelled “HEADACHE!” instead.)

         
Brush pile growing like Sea Monkeys.

We’ve got a mountain of a brush pile to chip, a LOT of firewood to relocate to the back, several logs of black cherry that we’ll mill into lumber for stair treads, and the surprise find is the gorgeous red elm that will become our dining room table, if not additional furniture.

Red Elm ^      Prepped for milling: the paint slows vapor loss that contributes to splits and warping ^

Mental notes from clearing; always have at least two chainsaws and rope on site (really helps get things done .  And just because a vine is as thick as your wrist doesn’t mean it’s a branch; Popeye arms, meet cortisone shot!

Bad formatting = WordPress interface changes.  Sorry!

Winter Wonderland

Happy New Year!  Golly, it’s been that long!?  We’re surviving winter (we even had a “blizzard,”) and we have several irons in the fire.

First: when we finalized the design, the contractor providing ballpark pricing said ground breaking would wait until Spring.  Since we had the time, we decided to shop around to make sure we have the right builder.  We’ve talked to 3 and their estimates have been coming in.  The most responsive one is the likely candidate.  We’ll iron that out in the coming weeks.

Several weeks ago Melissa’s dad introduced me to his sawmill, a Wood-Mizer LT15.  There is something just MANLY about turning trees into lumber!  Her dad is excited to provide logs from his yard and mill the wood to use for our interior trim. He had some logs in the queue ahead of ours, and it was a good chance to learn how it works.

   

I e-mailed pictures of trees on our lot to our state district Forester, and he ID’d them.  We plan to mill the ones that have to come down for bits like stair parts – and it looks like those will be Black Cherry.

We are in the midst of choosing light fixtures and floor finishes.  The floor finishes (wood/bamboo and tile) have been easy (tile candidates above, burgeoning finish palette below).  It has NOT been so easy to reconcile our different tastes in lighting.  We bought a Loomi Light (competitive with Ikea’s KNAPPA) to check out for fun, but we’ve made no decisions.

   

From the estimates we’ve seen so far, we can save some hard cost by purchasing cabinets direct (with trade discounts) and installing them ourselves.  The options are endless and worthy of a separate post, but after pursuing a few online retailers with frameless box construction, unfinished, delivered RTA (ready to assemble), we’ve found that the local off-the-shelf product is most competitive. Below: a sample of Rift Sawn Red Oak that does not pass, frameless box construction, and a cabinet line we’ll likely use.

    

We’re also considering Richlite counter tops made from recycled paper, purchased direct to fabricate ourselves (top left in the palette pic).  The concept is enthralling and price is right, but the colors are a bit lackluster.  We may still spring for granite.

I was raised on garage sales and classifieds, so naturally I’ve kept my eye on Craigslist.  We scored some brand new Western Red Cedar for less than half of retail cost to use for our trellis and stair screen wall, and have some left over.  I’ve always got my eye out for other odds and ends.

    

I have a heath-care client from my day job with a renovation project from which we  hoped to reclaim the existing doors.  After realizing the amount of modifying (trimming, etc) required to fit our needs, we abandoned that idea.

All in all, we’re moving forward and expecting the shovel to hit the dirt in late March!

I will post again when the contractor is selected and we’re working through the numbers.

Finalized

Voila!  The goal for this round of downsizing, was to cut 8′ off the width.  But after sketching and 3d modeling (we discovered a futon in one spot worked better adding a foot back in, and a leaf in the dining room table worked better with another two, etc) we cut 4′ off.  The first and second floor footprint is now 28′ x 38′ with a couple bump-outs.  The original design intent is still intact too.

     

I’ve also worked out the landscape steps up to the front door.  There’s a good chance the retaining walls are ‘value engineered’ to something cheaper, but the concept should hold.

We’re wrapping up some last details while waiting for a friend to determine structural beam sizes and another working on retaining wall footing sizes. We’ll talk to our builder at the end of the week and find out whether we can still break ground this Fall, or whether we wait until Spring.

Stairs And Screens Oh My!

Stairs are an ENORMOUS opportunity for clever, sexy design.  Don’t believe it?  Go hang out at Stair Porn and lose yourself in the visual delights of their collection of dynamic, clever, and gorgeous stairs.  Just don’t let your ol’ carpet-over-2x-framed stairs catch you looking.

We decided early on that our design should pack a punch in a couple key places.  One is the exposed joists in the living room (inspiration here), and the other is obviously where this post is going… the stairs.  Two main components to play with regarding stairs are the steps and the code-required guardrail (never mind the ultra-cool minimalist ones you see in High Design rags with no rail at all!)  Production homes frequently feature drywall at stair walls, providing cheap fall protection. Many designers meet the guardrail requirement with a beautiful screen wall.  Here are a few favorites I’ve seen recently:

  

   

We’re particularly fond of the wood slat screen wall look, and after considering what to do, we decided that vertical slats are the way to go (no dusting!) and that using the dimensions of a 2×4 would allow us the option of cheap framing lumber if a nicer hardwood proves too expensive.

|from our previous design – view from the kitchen showing stairs (and exposed L.R. joists)|

Furthermore, when we moved the stairs to the middle of the house we decided the upper flight should have “open” risers so that more light could come through.  The chunky steps could be milled from the trees we take down on the lot (there is a sawmill in the family!!), or from a couple local sources we have.  From the nearly complete Construction Documents:

The lower flight will have closed risers to provide storage space underneath, but the tread will have a nosing that matches the upper flight for continuity.  I have a few ideas for some dramatic but cheap lighting with rope LEDs, and wa-lah.  Pretty sexy, right?

Overhaul

STOP THE PRESS.

We’ve been crawling out of our skin to get this totally awesome house up and moved into, to get out of our rental, and to take advantage of ridiculously low interest rates.  I’ve been working on the Construction Documents during lunch, evenings, and other in-between times, reporting each night on progress.

I’m nearly done.  Only a couple things still need thought through, and Monday evening my client had some news for me…  though she’s been pushing for the larger rooms and amenities, the budget was suddenly VERY INTIMIDATING.  (Having a new family rearranges priorities.)

We crunched the numbers. We can afford the current design, but with very little wiggle room.  We prefer living well below our means.  And we originally set out to build a modest modern home.

The good news is that we have a lot of details thought out that can carry over to a reworked design, so things should come together quickly once the plan is settled.  (I’ll share the stair design in another post.)

     

(Wall Base Detail   |  2×12 “Timber” Beam Detail  |  Ceiling Fan Mount Detail  |  Joist Bridging Detail)

But here we are back at the drawing board. We are targeting a footprint of 24′ x 40′.  We can get there with our design if we pull in both sides 4′, and use the linear kitchen/dining/living room layout typical of efficient modern homes.  (Though this kills the “shotgun” views out the front AND back.)

1st   2nd

Another strategy is to turn the footprint sideways and group the K/D/L in a block, allowing for the desired views of our long lot.

1st    2nd

We’re going to give ourselves a couple days to explore and consider both options, and then move forward.  If we can move quickly enough we may still get to break ground this fall.