On building.

It's been a tiring few months. We spend multiple hours everyday working on the house/ and or making decisions and usually come back to our apartment and collapse in a heap. I thought I would be able to keep a daily account of the process but the fact is it's just too exhausting. But I guess doing work ourselves and saving thousands of dollars is more important in the long run than tracking my day-to-day thoughts and feelings.



But for the record. Some days I love the house, some days - the ones when we have stayed until 3 am (like last night) I'd rather not see it for a few days and I'd almost prefer to just stay in our apartment. Other days, when I see the kids riding bikes on our driveway or exploring the neighborhood I know we did the right thing. It is way nicer than we had ever planned. The bones are the same, the overall vision for exterior and the lot are the same, but the inside is so much fancier than we ever thought we would have. Maybe fancy is not the right word...maybe it is...It seems awful fancy to me. In general I still don't believe that it is our house. I don't know who I would be doing all this work for but the thought of us actually living in that house doesn't seem possible.

Lien on me.

This could be a very long entry, but I'm drained from dealing with the problem at hand so I"ll keep it brief.

This morning I got a call from Ben who got a call from our builder who got a call from the framers...they want their money. And if they don't get their money TODAY, they will put a lien on the house.

Why haven't they been paid? Well first of all, they just barely finished framing yesterday but that's beside the point. We wrote checks out for everyone over a week ago (1/6). They just couldn't be released because our draw funds hadn't come in yet. But everyone was supposed to have a check in hand for work completed on Jan 10. Our draw sheet was submitted on Jan 7. , the bank inspected the work done the next day and in many situations the funds would have been wired the next day. Well our bank (Chase) takes 4-5 business days to process the draw. That's also fine, as long as we are working with these lead times in mind. From now on we will be. The problem is we are now on business day number 7. The problem? An inept account manager. Harsh, but I don't know what else to call someone whose primary role is to be an interface/client relationship manager between us and the bank and make sure we can get our funds when needed. She doesn't return phone calls or emails and if you do get through to her she doesn't give you any real information she just says 4-5 business days...

So we had to call our loan officer who helped us get into the construction loan. He was on VACATION skiiing AND it's not his job to manage our loan. But guess what, he took the time to help us figure out what the hold up was. Peter McNally knows customer service.

So back to noodlehead client relationship manager. What she had not told us was that we had been credited $2,000 too much at closing and they wouldn't release the funds until they got it back. They had 6 weeks to figure this out between closing and now and it's like someone hadn't even opened our file to see if we were ready to roll.

What she had told us we were missing: 1) A building permit. Wrong. We submitted it to Chase before we closed. 2) Cancelled checks for the pre-paids we got credited for at closing. Wrong. Also submitted before closing. 3) Proper building insurance. Wrong. Again, they wouldn't have let us close without it.

Three strikes she's out. We asked to get a new CRM. Peter said he wished that was the first time he had heard that about her. Hundreds of thousands of bright, capable people are out of jobs and this chick still has one? (I don't want her to get fired, I just don't want her touching our account).

So back to the lien. Bob, the builder, fronted $5000 of his own money a few days before to buy us time. Now we had to do the same to protect ourselves from potential legal troubles. We will all get reimbursed when the draw comes through. We are already waiting for a hefty sum we had to spend on the fence and wall we built.

Moral of the story. If you don't have cash reserves of your own or a builder willing to front you cash or someone to borrow money from or you don't mind not paying off a large credit card bill on time then building a house can be financially straining, if not crippling.

That's it?!

Dr. Westbrook checking out his new kitchen.

So the crawl-space foundation is complete and even though we were warned that it would look small, both Ben and I had the same initial reaction when we saw it for the first time - That's it? That's what 2700 feet plus an 870 ft garage looks like? I know that there is another story to go but it really looks small. I even had to get the tape measure out to verify that the house was plotted correctly. I already knew that in my head/dreams that each room was way more gargantuan than what we can afford and what we actually decided was the perfect size for us, but I really hope that the flow and the openess that we designed in it is there once it's complete.

As Ben so wisely told me as I examined our place with a critical eye - "This ain't Cribs" Indeed. And I am not Master P.

The good news is that the yard is going to be waaayyy bigger than I thought it was going to be - probably because our mansion has shrunk.