Somehow I can’t picture this guy shopping at Home Depot…it’s not pricey enough.
PROGRESS UPDATE
We have finished everything in the kitchen except we are missing one panel that needs to get installed underneath the island. I am going to say that I have official refrigerator envy. The refrigerator interior bells and whistles blow me away. There is a wood look full appetizer tray in the refrigerator that you can pull out and serve from! And it makes the cutest small rounded ice cubes 
We have finished building out the fireplace to get ready for the complicated wavy panel install. Of course the wavy panels aren’t here yet and that will be a last minute rush.
Floors are installed and stairs are finished. It took 4 weeks to try to get estimates from 3 local glass companies to build a glass staircase railing. One of the companies came out to measure and then 2 weeks later declined to estimate. The other 2 companies came in at $17,000 for glass railings! And another $4,000 to put up a short rail on the upper master bedroom balcony!!! Double yikes. I finally found a small local company that is g oing to do the steam shower enclosure, short railing on master bedroom ledge and full glass railings for 2 flights of stairs for $9,000. I’m very proud of myself for persevering and getting a lot of companies in to look at the job. But, of course, it is all going to get installed at the last minute.
Speaking of the last minute, I told the owner many times that we will be done about March 1st. Well, he decided he needed to move all his furniture in this weekend and now we have furniture scattered everywhere. He told me yesterday that he may move in and start trying to stay in the house before we even have any doors.
So, the doors are now our biggest issue. Most of the doors are brand new cut outs which means we cannot even build the door jambs until the doors arrive to measure correctly. Not to mention they all have to be painted with 2 coats before we can even start installing them! The Masonite Berkley doors were custom ordered in December and we were promised a Feb 1 delivery. Suddenly on Feb 1 I get an email that they are going to be delivered Feb 12. I get on the phone to find out that the slabs have not even arrived to the local factory to get bored and mounted. I follow up on Feb 12 and I am promised that all of the doors will be delivered on Feb 18. Last week I get suspicious because Feb 18 is a holiday and I find out that the doors have supposedly shipped from the factory in San Bernardino and are at the Home Depot main distribution center. OK, I get everyone all the way up to the local Store Manager to start trying to find these doors and get them down to the local Home Depot so I can pick them up. This is where we are right now… supposedly a trailer left the Home Depot Distribution Center on Saturday with my doors and they show it delivered to the local Home Depot. Well, they aren’t there and no truck ever arrived from the distribution center. Calls all the way up to Manager at Distribution Center who tells us that $300,000 worth of materials were on that truck and the truck is now missing!!! Can you believe this??? I’ll keep you posted on our missing doors
All kinds of other small issues that are driving us crazy right now. Parts still trickling in from the owner’s last minute purchases. But, I don’t think there is any way that the owner is going to move in since we don’t have baseboards installed yet and there aren’t any doors on the bathrooms
I loaded some photos, but I keep forgetting to take photos and nothing ever stays clean long enough to take a photo. Any horizontal surface immediately gets covered with tools, trash and crap. It’s a never ending battle
Looks gorgeous, CB! I will have to steal your guest bath shower design idea for our guest bath remodel.
OMG the door saga! The missing truck!!! Yikes. That Masonite door style looks like what everybody puts into new construction here. No wonder they can’t make enough of them fast.
The fridge he got is a newer version of what we got for House1. Good choice. Love the bells and whistles added to the inside.
How come he didn’t order self cleaning glass for that shower?. I mean it looks absolutely gorgeous, but it will look pretty crummy with soap scum…and I just can’t picture this guy…cleaning.
Kitchen appliances are really nice looking. Wonder if he will ever use them!?
Each time I see your posts @coralbrook it’s with the hope you will say you are all done with this guy…and have a tidy sum in YOUR bank account.
@thumper1 I bet this guy will have a cleaning service.
The shower is beautiful.
Hope he has a cleaning service…betting the shower gets a lot more use than the swanky kitchen things. ?
We needed a new bathroom fan because ours got so loud we could not hear the water splashing while we were showering… it was on its last legs after daily use of 20+ years. We went to HD, and saw this beauty which instantly reminded me of this project! LED lights! We passed. Got a not so sexy one. 
What’s the expression? “Your failure to plan does not create my emergency.” Careful, CB! You told him when the house would be ready – around March 1. If you don’t have doors yet and he wants to move his furniture in, that’s not your problem!
Doors mysteriously showed up Monday night on a completely different truck. I rush over on Tuesday morning to find one of the doors damaged and 2 missing from the order. I forced them to give me the damaged door for free and we will fix it ourselves. I raised holy heck and my door guy at Home Depot went in the back storage yard and found the missing doors, which I picked up today. So now we are in a mad rush to bore door knob holes, mortise out the hinges and build door jambs. We have to do all that before we can even install the casing around the doors. Casing has to be around the doors before we can install baseboards!!
And, it has been raining for days and we can no longer cut, plane or sand anything inside the house anymore or outside in the rain. The entire garage has been turned into a painting booth and there’s nowhere to cut wood. There was practically a fist fight in the garage today because my carpenter just set up his table saw and started going to town cutting stuff all over the place while the painter had 16ft baseboards spread everywhere with fresh paint. They are all feeling the stress and it’s not a happy scene.
Oh my gosh, cb. What a stressful and high-pressure situation for everyone.
This client seems to be the worst of the worst, completely without regard for how his choices and actions impact anyone else. I am so sorry you and your wonderful crew are having to deal with him and the repercussions of his decisions. The client reminds me of my mother-in-law, who ticks all the boxes for narcissistic personality disorder.
I can’t wait until you are done with this project (which is beautiful and skillful, as are all of your projects) and can move on to your next project.
Hang in there!
Well…it’s March 1! Hoping you are either done…or totally close to being done with this project!
And another rainy day! Not sure if you’re looking at properties at all, but just sent you a PM with a house that’s just your style - totally filled with junk and falling apart but in a good location.
DONE!! Well, kind of
We worked major overtime this week to keep our promise to be done by March 1st. At 7:30 last night we were still clearing out the garage, loading trucks and trying to clean ourselves out of the place. I honestly think his final spend was about $220k. He has been flopping on a mattress on the floor in the middle of the living room amidst all the chaos. Mostly because he hasn’t purchased a bed yet. He did purchase an IKEA bed and headboard for one of the daughters. It was in pieces and parts all over one of the bedrooms for days. He’d spend about an hour a night getting nowhere. We finally pitched in and 3 of us stayed and built and mounted the bed and headboard and hauled mattress up from the garage for him.
Why ‘kind of’?
Because we went to install master fancy toilet and he had purchased the wrong connecting bidet spray seat thing. Hours of contortion moves and we finally determined that Wall Toilet mechanics + toilet + bidet seat do not work together. Back into box and, because he purchased on Amazon, I have no way to return it and purchase the correct item. He bought the bidet seat that mounts onto regular toilets, not the wall toilet.
Because he purchased fancy pocket door handles that did not arrive until Wednesday and they are wrong. We need two right hands and he purchased 1 left and 1 right. Once again he has to return and purchase correct item. There is now a gaping cut hole in bathroom door directly facing front door.
Because he still hasn’t decided on master bath countertop where samples have been laid out for weeks. Obviously no countertops and sinks to connect up the plumbing!! And no faucets purchased.
Because he didn’t pull the trigger for all of the glass he wants everywhere because it was sticker shock to both of us. I had 3 companies out and they all wanted 15k for glass staircase railings (2 flights), 4K for glass on master bedroom loft ledge and 2k for small steam shower. We finally got a hold of the contractor who did the townhouse at the end and I negotiated 9k for the whole shebang. Of course they are taking their sweet time finishing the staircase but all the other parts are installed.
I’ll get some photos up soon.
P.S that other townhouse went up for sale about 2 months ago. It was a flip that a local real estate agent talked a wealthy out of town New York lawyer into buying. She managed the project and they took a year to do it and a ton of money. They are asking a ridiculous amount of money and no bites.
Oh god. If the dude is stuck with an IKEA bed… I guess, as my grandfather used to say, his arms are growing out of his ass. That project sounds like it had a negative NPV… hope you did not lose too much on it.
Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I think cb did not quote a fixed price, it was weekly or T+M or something.
I hope so! It sounded that at one point CB had to cut her fee a bit became the dude was digging himself into a hole… plus the opportunity cost… Hope I am wrong!
It was time and materials. I wouldn’t even know how to begin a fixed bid. We would have been on change orders by Week 1. I did two detailed walkthroughs and gave an estimate of 12 weeks and a general cost of about $150,000. That went out the window by Week 2 when we found so much significant damage in the walls and discovered that many things were not vented properly. I can guarantee we spent at least 5k trying to route venting through the house trying to match up to existing openings through the roof. Normally we would just put new vents through the roof and pay a couple hundred dollars to fix it up on the roof. No way anyone could get up on the roof so we had to sphaghetti all over the house.
Remember the dryer vent just spewing into attic? That was a whole other routing nightmare. We couldn’t vent straight out because the front door was right under that location. Had to vent upward, over bathroom ceiling and down through kitchen wall before popping hole in stucco.
Another huge cost was rerouting several heating ducts. We could not see inside the dropped ceiling in kitchen but there were heating ducts that we had to eliminate in order to put in the huge beams and probably another 3k spent rerouting everything and owner had us reroute all the ducting under house because he’s going to turn that into a media room in the future
Huge cost for the steam shower. But he did call me and said he thinks the cost was worth it because he was able to take first long steam last night.
In the end it was 15 weeks (16 weeks if you count all the work we need to complete). And a ton of money because I don’t even have records of all the crazy things he bought like the wall toilets, steam shower, fancy faucets, fireplace wavy tile, etc. Our crew time and materials came to $180k
"Our crew time and materials came to $180k "
Holy Moly!!
Well, that will teach him [ and hopefully others] that it pays to plan ahead in the future.
So CB – what’s next? (After your long vaca in Maui --)