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?