Well, it is October. If it started construction now, it would soon be winter and the weather may be too cold for strong concrete. This may interrupt construction. Since the terms of my construction mortgage motivate me to complete the task in 12 months, I think we are at the point where I need to decide not to build this year.
The fact that I am not really ready to start construction now anyway just makes the decision to wait for spring even easier. I am obstructed by crazy bids and some of my own missing tasks.
One crazy bid was for heating. I had already got 2 bids for geothermal and radiant floor heating. The lower of which came to about $20k after a 30% federal tax rebate. I knew that these were expensive systems, and also required a lot of excavation and hundreds of feet of ground tubes to collect the energy from the earth. They are 4 or 5 times more efficient than electric-resistance systems, but many people claim that the initial cost is so high that the savings never pay off the initial investment. Mean while, I had seen a sleek/simple system using an “Electro mini boiler“.
This is the same idea as an on-demand water heater, but with a lot more BTUs. It is heated with simple electrical resistance, which can be expensive. However, if I went with natural gas, I would need to run gas lines, etc. When it is not in use, it doesn’t use any electricity (unlike something with a hotwater tank or a pilot light). It also gains efficiency from the radiant floor distribution and can help to store/redistribute my passive solar gain. I could even add a heat exchanger connected to my solar hot water tank, so it should be pretty good overall.
The Electro system would have the same radiant floor as the geothermal system, but would replace the expensive geothermal heat-exchanger hardware with a simple $1200 unit that I could bolt to the wall and hook up easily (one inlet, one outlet and plug it in to a 240 socket) without any excavation, etc. I found a distributor/installer in my area and asked for a quote. After 4 weeks, I managed to meet with the guy. We went thru everything and then he told me that it would cost 550$ for a proper design/bid. I told him I thought that was fair for a detailed design, but I just wanted some rough budget numbers for now. A couple weeks, and several pestering emails and phone calls later and I got the “rough” bid… $50,000! No details. Wow. I told him I didn’t think that could be right and asked him what it included. He checked the numbers and got back to me a week later with a bid for $29,500. Again, no details, just a single number. I asked twice more for details and eventually got them. His quote covered similar components to the geothermal quote (except he didn’t tell me the size of the mini-boiler).
The other company I asked for a quote on this sort of system has yet to get back to me after several emails and calls. Since I have endless patience, I will call again this next week.
And the fence guy from a few weeks ago… The original guy I spoke with is “no longer with them”, so my request got passed to someone else. I have called him twice, still no quote. It really should take 5 minutes. Maybe next time I will just stay on the phone until he does it.
Anyway, I have quotes for almost everything, but if I take them at their face value, the house is un-affordable. We will need to find better quotes and/or do more of the job ourselves to make this work. I had planned on making the rib forms and doing the ceilings, closets and stairwell shroud, but now I am looking at doing more of the rebar work, steel stud work, etc.
I also have not made some of the detail designs for things like the elliptical arch forms… so I will try to take care of that over the next few months and be ready to build in the spring. It should also be easier to get quotes over the winter when the contractors are hungrier.
As you know, I had found out about an earth sheltered home going up last year and visited a couple times to help out and learn what I can. They got their occupancy in mid summer this year after 13 straight months of construction. I called Scott to ask him how it had gone and if he would recommend the shotcrete guy he had worked with… He invited my family out for dinner instead. There were some scheduling hiccups, but we eventually got out there this past weekend. The visit actually happened just as I was getting depressed about the quotes I had got, so it provided encouragement just when I needed it.
Duct mounted heater
Scott and I talked about the stages I had missed, from the waterproofing to final details like plaster and concrete stain. They also showed me a nice slide presentation they had put together.
The heating system was tiny. He used a small inline ducted heater (I think it was only 1000W). The system just fits into the duct system and plugs into a regular 110 volt outlet. These units are meant for adding a little incremental heat to rooms at the ends of long duct runs, certainly not intended to heat a whole home. Scott worked out (mathematically) that his passive solar house doesn’t need a heater at all, so he expects this little heater is all bonus. I will call him in winter to see if it has worked out as planned. He did show me his calculation (prediction) graphed along with his actual measurements. So far, the house looks to be performing perfectly, but he has not gone thru a winter yet. Personally, I would feel comfortable with a bit more heating capacity (calculation insurance), but if Scott needs a bigger furnace, he has the room to add it later.
Update: I called Scott on the first day of spring to ask how his little inline duct heater worked out… Keep in mind that this was the coldest winter we have had in over 100 years. He said the earth around his home (Scott did not use an umbrella) is already 10 degrees warmer then in the fall. He thinks he is on track for a 3 year ramp up to a stable room temperature. He said the little duct mounted heater did not have enough pressure (axial fan) to blow air properly through the ducts, so he used electric heaters during the day (powered by his large solar array) and a small propane heater on the coldest nights.
When I told him about my trouble getting reasonable bids, Scott seemed to recognize the problem. At one point, he talked about trying to find a general contractor, but quickly realizing that they were all going to make the project un-affordable. He ended up following the same tactic for a number of the trades. When bids came in much higher than they should be (based on the cost of materials and skill/labor required), he took on the jobs himself.
This is what is know as FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt combine to increase the cost of a bid in order to cover the contractors risk. One way around this is to pay the contractors “time and materials”. This puts all the risk on the homeowner if it turns out to be a harder job than expected. But there is an old GC saying that says, “if you want a job to cost more and take longer, pay by the hour…” For “risky” earth sheltered construction, I suggest a balance. Pay “time and materials” on straight forward jobs where the person will steadily move to completion (shotcrete work is driven by the speed of the concrete pump), or where their reputation is important enough to their livelihood that you can trust them to work quickly. Get a “fixed bid” when you don’t have as much trust and/or expect they could expertly “fiddle around” for hours (fancy stone work). Even with “time and materials” deal, you will still need a best guess on the cost to budget, but the contractor will be more comfortable guessing reasonably if you can’t hold them to it.
For the water proofing, Scott decided against the expensive bentonite system that Formworks wanted to include with their kit. Instead he planned to use a rubber membrane sprayed directly on the concrete. This is the “blue stuff” often used inside concrete swimming pools. The quote he got for the work was in the $50,000 range, aka un-affordable. He found he could buy a top-of-the-line sprayer and all the waterproofing liquid he would need for a small fraction of that… So he did it himself. He mentioned that his straight extension ladder could not properly reach certain parts of the large (50ft diameter) domes, so he got the sides and the tops, but had to leave a strip between (at the shoulders of the domes) until after he had back-filled half way up and had better access. He also put a layer of that drain board that quickly guides any water down to the perimeter drains.
Any waterproofing applied directly to the concrete can fail if the concrete cracks (although the rubber membrane can span small cracks). It also doesn’t shield the soil near the house. My plan calls for using an underground umbrella made of at least 3 layers of plastic sandwiching rigid insulation that should keep the house, plus many tons of dirt around it, dry and warm. If the plastic is punctured, the water should run along the underside and continue away from the house…
Scott hired some young men (high school/college) to help with some of the tedious tasks, such as tying rebar. I asked how that went and he said that they were affordable and hard working, but you had to be on site all the time to tell them what to do every little step of the way. I definitely think this might be an affordable way for me to power thru several of the tedious but “low skill” tasks on my build.
His garage is wider than mine (in a 40ft wide dome), but only had two doors. I am wondering about my plan to fit 3 doors in my 30 ft wide Quonset hut. The doors will fit, but it may be really tight in there. I may decide to go with 2.
He showed me his temporary saftey rail made of barrels filled with sand and connected by ropes. This was enough to keep anyone from falling off the roof by accident and satisfied the inspectors.
Another interesting aspect of Scotts home was his solar electric system. He said he was “not a survivalist, but” his house is set a long way back from the road and the cost of running electricity out there (included 4 poles, etc.) was going to be high. He crunched the numbers and decided to set up his own solar system instead. I forget all the numbers, but his array is quite large and should be more than enough, even during our cloudy Michigan winters. He will have tons of extra electricity during the sunny summers. He expects the pay back (if electricity prices don’t go up at all) should be about 20 years.
Mean while, my wife was talking with Scotts wife about topics such as “resolving conflict” (I wonder why that came up ;^) or nosy visitors sneaking on to the property. Apparently the answer to the first question was “divide and conquer”. Apparently they both had to compromise on some details. The answer to the second was that they have had nosy guests sneak all the way back there and look around. That can be a real problem with so many things to steal and places to hurt yourself on the job site. They put up some serious looking “NO TRESPASSING” signs and have not had many troubles since.
We chatted for about 4 hours while walking around, having burgers, etc. A very pleasant evening.
And now the part most people tell me they prefer. The eye candy.
If you want to sign a petition to save Charlies earth sheltered house (due to be torn down at the end of October 2013, for not getting permits before hand), check out this link.
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This is a shot from Natural Homes. The owner is a young guy with a young family… They built it without any permits and are fighting an order to tare it down.
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This is a shot from a Popular Science issue from 1925 predicting 1950. Note the earth sheltering.
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Another more recent view of the future. I read some article that these “exposed” trees would probably experience stunted wind-guided growth like you often see on the side of exposed mountains with thin earth, or maybe not.
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I liked the look of this hall and would like to achieve a similar effect…
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I thought this was charming. In this case, Cooke is the families last name.
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I liked this juxtaposition of materials and scales and shapes
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Cool, but sparse. Maybe not finished yet.
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Just liked it… Maybe this was in Houzz.
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Concrete is great for casting interesting shapes with rubber molds…
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Just liked this… Imagine it in tile or stain?
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Now this is a cool dad.
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Steel grate for the 6ft dia hole in the storm room floor. The first quote came to about 70$/sqft… almost the same cost per sqft as a plasma TV. Ouch. I will keep shopping around.
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I love old abandoned homes, especially cool looking ones like this.
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This is an “Earth Filled” house in the Namib Desert. Google “Kolmanskop” OK, so it is totally unrelated, but cool.
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Abandoned concrete dome houses in SW Florida. Too bad this plan failed (probably a lesson there). If these were made of wood, they would have fallen apart long ago.
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Another earth covered bus.
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Like this a lot.
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This is a wind chime bridge in Denmark. It probably sounds better than it looks.
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Another view of the bridge.
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I love stained glass like this.
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Just a nice looking “Natural house”. You can google “seagull house” for more info.
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Saw this on 9gag… No info, but it is clearly a green building.
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This is some crazy underground bunker made to survive a nuclear war without making the occupants feel like they are trapped underground.
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This is an earth sheltered reception hall on the East side of England. Google “Pines Calyx”
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Weddings are held there regularly, and this one included a drawing of the site…
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This firepit, made from scrap wood, was built by a school in northern Europe… I forget where, but I liked it.
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This is a firepit made of scrap wood screwed together like an igloo…
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Like shotctrete, COB is pretty flexible.
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This “tree house” is obviously not in a real tree. Probably a shotcrete tree. It is amazing what you can do with the stuff. maybe my chimney could look like a stump on the hill?
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This is a traditional earth sheltered home found in Indonesia. Google search “Toraja.”
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This chandelier makes shadows that look like a scary forest. But I guess it wouldn’t be so scary because the light is on 😉
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I thought this was a fun chandelier made of bicycle gears welded in a sphere.
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This is a “mouse door” that someone built into their house using doll house parts… Seemed fun to me, although I would have to go with a round top door. It may be the only round top door I could afford.
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A more traditional mouse door detail
Well, it is September already and I am starting to seriously doubt that I will get this house started this year. Trying to get quotes has just been so frustrating. I have many quotes in, but not enough to be confident that I can get the house built for what I want to pay . Obviously, I don’t want to get started before I am sure I can afford to finish (Luke 14:28). During September, I will get back to pushing for quotes.
In August, my grandmother died, which resulted in a trip to the old country. I always enjoy the old stone and concrete architecture often found in Europe where many people live in homes older than the United States (the country)… I even found several modern earth sheltered buildings and, during a layover in Madrid on the way home, I attended a green architecture expo focused on earth sheltering and green walls (featuring the work of Emilio Ambasz).
Found this earth sheltered building (mall with several coffee shops and a sports club) covering a whole block just north of the Torre dos Clerigos in Porto… I took this photo from the tower. Later we had coffee “underground”
But this post is not about that…
I use Chrome and tend to accumulate “tabs” over time. These are interesting pages that I see. Once you get interested in something like this, you start to see it everywhere; Google may also be helping. I always plan to get this material into a post at some point. For instance, I thought I could do a whole post on Michael Hill or a whole post on how earth sheltering affects insurance rates, but some of these tabs have been open for 6 weeks, so lets just get them down here and you can check them out if you are interested…
1) Michael Hill’s invisible Houses; First, I think its funny that his name is “Hill” and he wants to build a neighborhood of earth sheltered homes in NewZealand (hobbit land). I don’t think he started out with an interest in earth sheltered homes, but rather earth sheltering was a solution to his problem of a city council ban on urban sprawl that wouldn’t let him build homes around his rural golf course. The homes will come with lots of restrictions to prevent them from looking like a suburban neighborhood, such as no swimming pools or trampolines.
2) This is a link to a shallow article on “27 Absolutely Stunning Underground Homes“. I am not sure all qualify as “Earth sheltered” by my definition, but some were new to me and it did become a good starting point for further searches.
3) This next one is a link to an article about the Traditional Turf Houses of Iceland… In Iceland, earth sheltering became the norm due to the harsh climate and limited lumber resources. I thought it was funny that the article bothered mentioning that people there went to the toilet in groups. Most of the homes use stone to cover the side of the sod, so I thought the picture showing the “herring bone” stacking of the turf was very interesting.
This article doesn’t hint at a downside, but I once read an article written by an Icelandic woman who said the happiest day of her childhood was moving out of the turf house and into a “real wooden house”. While they may have been great at moderating temperature, they lacked modern insulation, waterproofing, heating, etc. I expect they were a bit damp also had more than their fair share of bugs.
4) Houzz also had another article about Earth sheltered homes recently… This one had some detail, plus Houzz provides the ability to link to more photos of each home, get info on the architects, etc. We have already talked about some of these homes in other posts, but there are some new ones.
5) This next link is a short Weather Channel article about how earth-sheltered homes save energy and money, as well as offer “ultimate protection from extreme weather”. The article cites the Formworks stat that earth sheltered homes use “80 to 90% less energy to heat and cool”. It also talks about how insurance companies charge less to insure earth sheltered homes.
Personally, I talked to my State Farm insurance agent and found it would save about 1/3rd of the cost (relative to a similar cost wood home with shingled roof) due to a “safe home rating”. In my case, with a $2000 deductible, that is about a 500$ savings per year. I don’t think they are taking the full protection of earth sheltered housing into account, but it is at least some savings. By comparison, a high end alarm system with active monitoring would save an additional 100$ per year (1/15th) in insurance, but cost much more in fees.
6) Another article on “Underground Houses are Energy efficient, low maintenance and low impact“. I suspect the people at Formworks are starting to push the media a bit. Good for them.
7) This last one came from a l
ink on a Popular Science article that caught my eye… Earth Sheltered buses? They provided a link to this other site with a lot more information. Basically, a landscape artist, Marc Grañén, has setup several vehicles (such as the PhytoKinetic bus) with green roofs. In addition to the somewhat theoretical idea that these green roofs function as CO2 sinks, the garden naturally cools the interior of the bus by 3.5°C giving the air conditioning a break…
The site also shows a large trailer and small white van with similar green roofs. I have also seen a transit train.
Here is a close up of the bus…
Thats it for now… Maybe some eye candy later…
Well, August is here and still no hole in the ground. I didn’t post anything in July at all. Mostly, I blame work. There were a few weeks there where things got really crazy because I took on a big project that I should have declined. I spent my evening computer time preparing “packets” to make it easier for contractors to work out their bids and that didn’t leave much time for the website.
I submitted my construction drawings (emailed pdfs) to my neighborhood’s architectural committee on June 24th (just before my last post). I expected they would setup some sort of meeting so I could explain the drawings, so I offered to bring in the full size prints (one member of the committee told me he wanted prints instead of pdfs). Instead of inviting me to a meeting, they just sent me some questions by email.
I expected questions about the direction the garage is facing. The rules say the garage shouldn’t face the road, but because the road wraps around my property, it would have been difficult for me to face the garage away from the road, but I at least made sure it wasn’t facing the “circle” that my driveway comes off. Unfortunately, you could still see the garage doors from the circle. I talked about planting arborvitae to block the view and they were willing to accept that.
Rough landscape plan that we sent to the architectural committee
They did ask some questions about our landscaping plans. They didn’t give much detail about the green roof and I think they were concerned that we planned to leave everything “natural” on the roof ;^). Our answer of “park-like” seemed to satisfy. They also expressed some concern about the back of the garage, which I admit is not the most attractive side of the house. I promised to hide it as best as I could with trees and a bougainvillea vine.
The guardrail is drawn with straight lines, like wires, but I hope to use curved steel or aluminum tubes
The thing they were most concerned about was the safety rail. Admittedly, the architect did make it look like stretched wires (very nautical), but I explained that my intent was more for horizontal steel rails that could be bent to follow the contours of the land. They seemed to prefer horizontal rails to a vertical fence which may have appeared a bit like a palisade. In the end, “safety rails” made it past the neighborhood association’s fence restrictions, but meant the building inspector would be much more interested in them. They said that “before” they would approve, I would need to make sure those “guardrails” would pass inspection.
I contacted the inspector (who got back to me very quickly) and said that there was a rule for guard rails along a walking path next to a drop of more than 30 inches. It is basically a 4 inch ball test. Not sure how I missed it, but my wife found the exact wording of the rule on-line.
R 312 Guardrails are required on any exterior walking surface over 30in. from floor or grade. Openings in guards shall be designed such that a 4 in. ball will not pass through the guard at any point including open treads. Residential guards shall be 36 in. in height minimum from the finished floor or stairway nosing.
Horizontal rail, I would like this in black, but the relaxed openings would fail the 4 inch ball test for guard rails next to a walking surface.
If this rule is applied to my project, it means that I will actually need to go with a safety rail designed to meet that rule rather than the much cheaper and more open horizontal steel or aluminum fence that I liked.
On the other hand, the rule was intended for stair or balcony railings, so I am looking into if I could make a couple changes so the rule does not apply. For instance, perhaps it will not apply if I move the rail back a couple feet from the edge. I could plant bushes between the fence and the edge. Or perhaps putting a flower bed along the fence, instead of a walking path would change things.
Getting bids in summer (construction season) is no easy task. It gets a lot harder when the house is complicated. And the beautiful building weather we have had the past month has only made it harder. I keep hoping for some really hot days so that these guys will want to be inside, even if it means filling out a quote.
I am sure I will put in a page about what I have learned, but I am not done learning yet. Instead, I will give you my strategy and a few stories…
My strategy was to first put together a packet of information, and then phone each potential contractor for a conversation. Many contractors ruled themselves out right away because they are not interested in new construction.
One told me that new construction requires you to work fast, but he would rather do a good job. I have heard that line before and personally believe that a real pro can do both, but lets get back to the topic…
If they were interested, I could answer questions during the call with the information I had collected in the prepared packet (such as how many square feet of wall or how many fixtures). I could also write down their questions and add the info to the packet. For instance, the electrical packet included the electrical sheets from the construction drawings, as well as a spreadsheet where I had already gone thru and summed up the number of electrical outlets, light switches, 3 way switches, etc. so the contractor wouldn’t have to.
The strategy behind the packets was that contractors would get back to me more quickly if I made it easier for them. It would also make the bids easier to compare if I provided the counts and areas.
But once I had a contractor (such as an electrician) on the phone, they often asked questions I had not thought of; such as which rooms should have switches controlling the bottom half of the outlets, or who my electricity supplier was (because one of the suppliers requires a separate meter for the electric HVAC stuff). I then added this information to the packet so that all the bidders would have the same info. After talking to 3 available contractors, collecting questions and polishing up my packet, I emailed the information out to each.
Then I made a mistake, I gave the contractors a couple weeks of “space”. I think this may have sent a bad signal. After the couple weeks, I emailed. Again, too little too late. A couple weeks after that, I called them again… After a month of not responding to my emails, they mostly acted like the ball had been in my court the whole time. Sure, they got my packet, sure they were interested. Why did I wait a month to call and when did I want to get together to discuss it?
A couple of contractors have bothered to call me back and tell me that my project is too big for them. I appreciate that because I can just move on to another contractor. I know of at least one contractor who changed his mind and decided he was not up for it, but didn’t bother to tell me (I heard it thru the grape vine). I want contractors who find it interesting and actually want to be a part of the project.
In one case, I did get a quote and filed it away while I waited for others. After a few weeks, I took a closer look at it and compared it with the others. I realized that it was totally inadequate in terms of detail. It didn’t include the equipment rental costs and labor components that the other similar quotes had. I called them up and they said they could give a more detailed quote if I was actually interested. I said I was, which was why I had asked for the first quote, and they agreed to give it another try. So now I wait again because they didn’t take my first request for a quote seriously.
In another case, I drove an hour to meet with the contractor (who made himself available after hours) to discuss what I needed. I didn’t provide any information I had not already included in the email or phone calls. He showed me some brochures that I had already seen on line. After a while it became clear to me that it would be very easy for him to prepare the quote because he only had a few components to choose from and my needs made the final assembly pretty obvious. So, I said something like, “I guess this quote should be pretty easy for you to put together, you didn’t need me to come in after all”, and he let slip “Yea, but I like to have people come in before I bother. It shows me who is serious.”
In another case, during the initial phone call, I found the contractor did not have email. Instead, he wanted me to drive out to the property (1 hour each way) to meet with him and “walk the site” with me before he could quote it. His references were good, so I drove out and I spent over an hour with him. I also gave him some print outs. A couple weeks later when I called, he said he had sent the quote. I checked and said he hadn’t. I called again the next week and he said he was working 100 hrs a week, and hadn’t had time to quote it. I said I would have to find someone else who had time for my project. He said he did have time for working, just not for quoting. I told him I needed the quote before I could hire him, so he said he would get it done that weekend… Then a couple weeks after that I called him again (now six weeks since we had met) and he admitted that he had forgotten most of the details, could I come out and meet him again to “refresh his memory” and bring more print outs… I called a few other contractors to start the bidding process with them instead.
In another case, after wasting a month, I started calling a particular ICF distributor every day for a while. I left 7 messages over two weeks and got no replies. I realized that I had not got a reply to anything (email or phone) in 2 months. I did get a reply from him months earlier after meeting him at a trade show, so I know I had the right email and phone number. I decided to contact the main company and told them I couldn’t get a hold of their exclusive distributor in my region. They confirmed the contact info was correct and said they would follow up. Two weeks later, they called to say they tried and tried, but couldn’t get a hold of him either and put me in contact with the next closest distributor. Actually, this other distributor was much closer to my building site even though I was technically out of their region, and with corporate watching, they got me a good quote in a day or so.
In another case, the office person responsible for quotes kept acting like she was just about to send me a quote. I kept missing her because she had gone to lunch or was in the shop. She never called me back. Eventually she sent me a scan of a hand written quote. I couldn’t read it (it was too faint to make out her handwriting), but I could see that it was only a few lines long and couldn’t possibly be complete, so I called again and this time I got her. After 5 weeks, she told me that the drawings in the packet I sent were not sufficient and I would need to get shop drawings made before she could quote accurately. I thought the drawings were good enough, so I asked her what she would like to see. We opened the excel doc that I sent here at the same time so were were looking at the same thing. She started saying how it didn’t give enough info to bid… I asked her if we could go thru a row together. We started on the first row, and it was clear that she had not got past the 5th column. Once she saw that, it started to click for her. Then I got her to pan over even further to the right where I had inserted the drawings in the sheet (I had also sent them separately as PDFs which she had not noticed). The lights went on (I heard a little gasp) and she said she would get me a proper quote right away. That was 10 days ago, I guess I should call her again.
In another case, I had met a contractor who had impressed me by already printing out the drawings I had sent him so I didn’t need to give him my set. We were going thru the plans and he said that he guessed most contractors would take one look at these plans and decide that it would be easier to bid on a more standard job. But he thought it was cool and he give me the name of a contractor for another part of the project who he though would also think my project was cool enough to want to be involved…
My main shotcrete contractor has not yet been able to meet with me or talk to me since I started the bidding process. He is just too busy and I am starting to get concerned. I will call him again this week and try to set something up.
A number of the contractors I have spoken to have said they would need to bid “time and materials” for such an uncertain job. For a contractor to make a bid, he is betting that he can get a job done to your satisfaction for less cost than the bid. He needs to estimate carefully so that he makes his bet correctly. If he bids too high, you will choose someone else, if he bids too low, he may end up losing money (worse than you choosing someone else). All the contractors make sure to guess a bit high to protect themselves. You are paying a bit more than they really think it will cost because you are paying them for the risk of the fixed price bid. On the other hand, if they can send in a “time and materials” bid, they are passing the risk over to you. You should expect to pay less if all goes well, but pay more if it doesn’t. The problem with “time and materials” is a lack of motivation for the contractor to get things done efficiently. If you want things to go as slowly as possible, pay by the hour. However, if you trust the contractor to work at a reasonable speed, “time and materials” gives a lot of flexibility. You can ask them to add something without needing to renegotiate. It will just add to the time and materials cost.
After a number of weeks, one of my steel stud contractors got back to me with a quote that was about 10 times what I was expecting (well over $100k for just the vertical steel stud work). So that was shocking… I thought maybe he had mistyped, so I wrote him back and asked him to separate it into Labor and Materials. I thought he would catch his mistake, but he just confirmed that it was more than $30k for materials and more than $80k for labor, for just the steel studs… Ouch.
But then I got talking to another steel stud contractor who told me that I would probably need specific drawings of how all the steel studs went together. He said it would be helpful for his quote, but probably required by the county building inspector. I asked the inspector about it and he gave some cryptic answer about how I should want the drawings so I would have a better record of what was hidden behind the walls. I wrote back and asked if he could be more clear about if I need those drawings or not. My architectural drawings just have one wall detail cross section with a note that says something something basic and generic like “STEEL STUDS, 24″ ON CENTER”. My steel stud work is very basic, with no load bearing walls or connections with floors or roofing assemblies… I can always take a photo before the walls are closed if I wanted good records. I am still waiting to here if I need these, but if I do, it will be more expense.
And on and on it goes. I should be making a bunch of calls this next week. But I also need to keep my job ;^). My plan is to make an hour of calls in the morning and another in the afternoon each day, and then to just extend my work day by a couple hours… I am very glad that my job is flexible enough to get away with that kind of time management so I can save my vacation days for actual construction.
One of my pet peeves is how secretive the contractors are about where the costs come from. The GeoThermal guys are the worst because they have big chunky components that should be the easiest to quote. They want to make it seem like they need to do this big fancy energy audit before they can possibly work on the quote. But in actual fact, they only have 3 hydronic units (for radiant floor) and I want the small one. Then they start to say that the load requirements determine the feet of pipe they need to bury, but later admit that hardly changes the price at all so they always put in more than they need… 
Still, the price is a mystery. This is particularly annoying when I am trying to decide if I need an add-on. For instance, I am not sure I need AC, but wanted to check the cost of adding the air handler. They only have one model that would be compatible with the rest of the system I need, so I asked for the price… They gave me a range that was so wide that the high number was double the low number… As I have said before, I find informational asymmetry frustrating.
I had planned to avoid spending money as long as possible, so I was going to wait on the permits until after I got the bids in. Also, many of bids I had already received included that they would file for the permits. This is probably right for some of the permits (well, pluming, electrical, mechanical), but the septic field size needs to be set by the county based on some formula that takes the number of bathrooms and bedrooms into account. Apparently this size is specified in the permit, which the excavator needs before it can be accurately estimated… So we need to take care of that sooner rather than later.
Fortunately, my wife has taken over the permit stuff. She recently spent a couple hours following the daisy chain of permits and printing them out as she goes. I will let her explain it better in her own post if she ever finds the time, but it doesn’t seem like a nice clear set of paperwork. Instead, it is more like a branching tree. Each permit needs several other permits filled out first and she is following it to the bottom. We joked that our county is very “liberal” which is why there is so many restrictions and complicated paperwork is required to do anything. She has already covered a large desk in forms organized into some sort of hierarchy. Now to fill them all out. ;^)
Sorry, none today. This post is already too long. But I will come back soon and do a special Eye Candy edition this coming week.
