26. Waiting for a house, part 2

Jamey is of medium height and medium build, with an honest-to-god waxed and curled handlebar mustache, and bright blue eyes. His speech is measured and steady with a pronounced Oklahoma drawl. He wears plaid shirts and boots, and I’ve never seen him without a baseball cap. He’s the kind of guy that would take the toothpick out of his mouth to chew and spit, then say, “yes, ma’am” with a sly grin (although I’ve never seen him actually chew, spit, or use a toothpick). He likes to tell stories about his farm, the neighbors, and his family—especially his grandfather. His simple, easygoing nature, however, belies both an immense knowledge of construction ins-and-outs, and a shrewd instinct for what customers want. He listens, which we’ve found to be a both highly-desirable and rare quality in a builder. We liked him instantly.

Jamey, in turn, led us to Kevin, the designer. Tall and lanky with a quick wit and wry sense of humor, Kevin is a wizard with his 3-D drafting program. He loves our plan, and swears he doesn’t say that to everyone. He tells us he does his best work on his couch at home with a beer in front of him, and I believe him. It is invaluable to work directly with the person making our plans instead of through an intermediary. Updates fairly flew back and forth. His suggestions for improvements in layout were spot-on. He included our salvaged mantel in the mock-up, using a photo I had sent him, so we could see what it would look like in the house.

But the bid/estimate process is painstaking. Meetings were held at Freddy Paul’s, a local steak house offering a lunch buffet and salad bar, discussing business after the plates were cleared. Meeting after meeting was spent hashing out details:  what finish do you want on your drywall? What kind of roof do you want (and what kind does your insurance agent recommend)? Cased or un-cased windows? Double- or single-hung? What kind of door knobs? How high are your ceilings? Do you want tile, hardwood, polished concrete? What kind of appliances do you want (and can you really afford them)? Do you want the attic finished out, or will you do it yourself later? And things I never even thought about—spray-in insulation vs. foam. French drains in a laundry room. What is a quoin, and how it affects the look of your house. The lists were endless. I kept all my notes and lists in a notebook, and the pages started to fill up quickly. I spent every spare moment on building websites, Pinterest, Houzz; I read about the advantages and disadvantages of hardwood in a kitchen, whether white kitchens will soon go out of style, and what kind of paint was best, R-values, T-values, Q-values (OK, I made that one up). I dreamed about the house, the lot. I lay awake at 3:00 a.m., wondering if I’d remembered to tell Kevin to eliminate the bench by the entryway or ask him to change the orientation of the laundry sink.

My husband and I pride ourselves on having a unique style, but unfortunately, that unique style seemed to be ratcheting up the bid, bit by bit. For example, we wanted a brick exterior, which seemed to be a reasonable price point. But I had seen a house in Oklahoma City clad in black brick with black mortar, and loved the look; alas, black brick is more than twice the price of your standard terra cotta-colored brick. 

We wanted high ceilings, but the cost of 10’ ceilings downstairs and 9’ upstairs increased the costs substantially due to the extra wood and labor costs (i.e., scaffolding rental and time spent climbing up and down said scaffolding). We wanted cabinetry to the ceiling, which not only pushed up the total kitchen costs, but necessitated an expensive (but cool!) library ladder with rail. The first bid Jamey brought us was another slap in the face, but by this time I was almost expecting it. Bit by bit, uniqueness fell away. Wood floors became wood-look tile. Ceilings lowered. Brick gave way to siding on the back side of the house. Crown molding was eliminated. Double-hung became single-hung, and my dreams of a 48-inch Thermador range disappeared in a puff of smoke. We whittled the bid down to something approaching an affordable house, a grueling process.

BUT, we were still building a beautiful house on a beautiful lot, and it would be uniquely ours. When we saw the finished product, we were beyond thrilled. 

So we hung in there. More than five months had passed since the first desperate phone call to our realtor, Becky. Every step seemed to take forever, but we were assured by those that know that we wouldn’t have been able to start breaking ground in spring due to the unusually large amount of rain. We had hoped to be in a new house by Christmas; Jamey told us with a sympathetic nod that we’d better expect April or May instead. We signed a new lease for our rental house until summer 2020. We were going to build this house!

We hung in there for the final set of plans and application of building permit. We turned in the equivalent of a tree’s worth of paperwork to the bank. We wrote checks to Kevin the designer--big, fat ones. The bank ordered title work and an appraisal. We wrote more fat checks. Everything was in place to begin! We were on tenterhooks, waiting. Only one step left, and then we would get our money to pay our builder! We crossed our fingers that:  1. The appraisal would come in close to the actual building costs so we didn’t have to put a lot more of our own money into building, and 2. That the weather would hold so we could begin right away. 

After all this waiting, my husband and I needed a break. He had a conference in Washington, DC; I had a friend doing a renovation project in Seattle who was happy to have my offer of unskilled labor. We decided to take the dog to the kennel and go to opposite ends of the country to clear our heads and focus on something else, and hopefully when we returned, we would have our answers. We kissed each other goodbye and tried to forget about building a house for a few days.