Update on the House

As many of you know, I am building a house in the mountains. I say that because the subject of "how the house is coming", is usually what people ask about when they meet me. I am not a chatty guy and I suspect that most people struggle with what to talk about when they meet me in a situation where conversation is required. The truth is I struggle with what to talk about too. The well known pitfalls of building houses is a safe topic for both sides.

Safe at least conversationally. In other respects it is a perilous course indeed. As with any project, you don't know what you don't know, at least until you know it. And then, you knock yourself on the side of the head for not seeing the obvious. But then I am used to being thumped for missing the obvious. Not only have I been married for 34 years, but I have long acquaintance with clients.

The latest drama revolves around where the house is located. We have it located with precision on the drawing, to multiple decimal points in fact. We have designed it around the topography of the site. It is one with the land. On paper.

Actually the house will go on a spot of land that until late last fall was trackless forest. Of course being a professional with years of engineering under my belt, I brought in a surveyor to create a drawing of the site and its topography. Locating the shapeless box of the undesigned house on the created drawing, I engaged a contractor to cut down the trees for the driveway as well as the house site last October. Desiring to pour concrete for the house foundations as early as possible the next spring, the trees needed to come down last fall to accommodate our expected schedule. We needed to move fast to get this house built.

Over the winter months, design did not proceed with the dispatch assumed. And the footprint did change. Needless to say, we didn't pour concrete early this spring. Virtually all the assumptions about time and money driving my decisions last fall were wrong.

Since my wife is not an engineer, it often helps her to see things rather than just look at them on paper. In an effort to make the house more real to her, I took her and the drawings to the site in late May. We marked off the location of the house with stakes and string. To my surprise, the house was not exactly where I thought it was. To my surprise, there were a fair number of trees that need to be cut down.

But it seemed a fairly manageable number of trees to be removed. Since I anticipated construction to begin in a few weeks, we needed a contractor to begin work removing the trees in short order. As an engineer I know that only foolish general contractors do not require hard dollar subcontracts but not having the time to define the work scope exactly, I engaged a willing contractor to remove the trees on a $/tree basis. Since I had estimated the number of trees to be removed at around 30-40, I agreed on a generous figure per tree with the contractor. It also helped that he was my youngest son earning money for his last semester in college.

But remembering how the last contractor had mistakenly cut down trees that were marked to remain standing, I determined this time that I would mark all trees to be cut down with a large orange "X" spray painted on the trunk. Surprisingly enough, when I did this I found that I needed to cut down 85 trees rather than the estimated 30-40. My budget had just doubled. The contractor was very unwilling to renegotiate the rate. After all, he anticipated no repeat business from me.

About halfway through the work, a design change occurred, necessitating a small reroute of the driveway. With trepidation in my heart, I took my can of orange spray paint and the revised drawing to the site. Some time later the number of trees to be removed had grown to 180. Again the contractor proved unreceptive to renegotiation on the basic rate per tree. When I proposed that we withhold payment for the work already done to encourage our reluctant contractor's price discounting, my wife didn't think that would be nice. Telling her that my client's did it all the time in similar situations had little effect on her, and thus my, position.

Yesterday my son finished the job. As I sit here writing this I am anticipating his arrival and request for final payment. He is of course quite happy about the 450% overrun. Contemplating the resulting negative variance in my budget, I simply hit myself on the side of the head for missing the obvious.