Today we are frantically trying to finish the drywall/mudding/texture in the bathroom. My tile guy stopped by to give an estimate and he said he only has this week to do the job. Starting next week he is going to be putting 2,800 sq ft of travertine tile on a pool deck in Rancho Santa Fe (big buck neighborhood). He says it is semi polished stone. Who the heck puts polished travertine outside around a pool??? Someone who is never going to walk on the surface with wet feet??
Anyways, I am now scrambling to get tile and materials so he can do the job, but we still have to wait until drywall is ready with at least one coat of primer on it.
Fingers crossed that you really will be able to go to the City next week! You have tons more patience than I have. I hope it all pays off. Maybe during the delay prices will rise across the board and you’ll reap some benefit from being slowed down.
Got an email at midnight last night that the floor plans are ready for my review. They are putting a set out for me to pick up this morning. I am going to go through them with a fine tooth comb because I have an inventory of slightly used perfectly good vinyl dual pane windows that we have pulled out in various places on the main floor and I want to make sure they get used somewhere else in the house. I am putting the vinyl windows on the yard side of the house (mostly bathroom windows) so they are not so obvious to the eye. Front and back of house is getting the nice aluminum clad windows. Also, I noted that the door sizes were not correct on the plans so they have to be corrected also. Planning to have those plans back to them by tonight.
He is finalizing structural engineering today and we should be able to get all the other small details done this week!!!
Meanwhile, prices have gone through the roof in Point Loma. Properties are selling very fast for ridiculous prices. I’m worried that I might have missed an incredible window to sell.
Here’s an example of a crazy sell, on same street as my property but down in the ‘flats’ by the ocean
4644 Del Monte 92107
440 sq ft!!! 1bd/1ba
Lot size is the standard small 3,500 sq ft lot
Someone paid $649,000 for it in minutes after it went for sale which is $1,475 sq/ft!!!
Guessing someone bought it for the lot and is going to build on it
P.S. Newell Street still for sale and they dropped their price a whopping $1,000 yesterday to $995,000. Kitchen design and cliffside in back yard killed it. My agent always warned me not to buy anything that has a steep slope hovering over the house in the back
I did a detailed review of the plans and marked up a lot of window and door changes. Mostly because I am pretty particular to try and make doors at least 32" to help move furniture and appliances around, and to accommodate walkers or wheelchairs, if needed. The draftsman just put in 28" and 30" doors everywhere, so I needed to go through every door and analyze. Also analyzed every single window and added a lot of detail.
We also finalized the deck size and shape in order to utilize the existing tempered glass panels. They will be standing tall on the northern side of the deck and then be turned sideways for about 44" high railings around the view portion of the deck
I took some pictures of finalized plans (I keep saying finalized!) and loaded to Flickr
Engineer just sent me an email and wants to have a ‘meeting’ to review structural plans on Wednesday. So, I’m going into the office on Wednesday. I’m guessing he is going to give me bad news that I can’t vault the kitchen ceiling, have to tear down entire existing garage, etc. Who knows it’s not going to be good news. He is very conservative and there’s going to be a lot of steel, strapping and major beams involved all over the place.
Please please leave the sink in the laundry room. I miss our old laundry room sink so much; hate having to take hand washables et al to the bathroom to wash, or using a bathtub to soak larger items. Instead of a traditional broom closet, could you fit a pull out closet or one of these other ideas in the cabinets in the landing? http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/34930163/list/get-your-broom-closet-just-right
Sink will probably stay in laundry room. Going to try to find a way to get broom closet to fit into landing area.
I have no idea why the draftsman dropped the linen closet in the master bedroom but I’m just going to leave it alone because City doesn’t care about linen closets. Also, the counter length in master bath is 10’ long. There’s plenty of room for a linen cabinet in the bath.
Structural engineer has staircase turning before end of house where outside deck is. Also the bedroom is pushing 2 ft into the old bedroom causing the leftover space. I just hate wasted space so I asked him to put in an outside door so it can be used as storage.
Finally got to look at the flikr group again. The square windows on either side of the FP look great with the new grids! A good thing that you didn’t listen to the doubters, myself among them.
Just got back from engineering office. I thought I was going in to finalize everything. At this moment I am just speechless and feel helpless. Instead of finalizing, I was given a speech about what a mess this is and how complex my project is, how nothing lines up and I’m going to need a bunch of posts in my basement… They still have to finalize framing plans before he can do engineering.
Almost started crying. Pleaded my case as diplomatically as possible. He wouldn’t promise any dates. He said if I insist on a date his answer is ‘one more month’. Truth came out that they are swamped.
At this point its time to have another deep discussion with my agent. Tomorrow I’m going up on the roof again to make sure this is all worth it.
I think chatting with the agent and seeing what the fix it up without the second floor valuation would be. It may be that the holding costs outweigh the extra value that would be created…
That engineering office sounds like they should have been more honest with you up front about how busy they were and how long they would take. I’m so sorry you are having so much unneeded stress!
Wow, so sorry to hear about the stress from the engineering firm. I don’t understand how this suddenly took this turn, weren’t they saying they were going to be done by the end of the week? Was it all because you changed the door sizes?
They sound like they are using the old “the best defense is a good offense”. Giving you a speech about the complexity of the project, trying to make it your fault that they are slow, acting as if they just found out about the complexity.
If you haven’t paid them, I’d shop around for someone else to work with, pronto. Take the framing plans and visit some other engineering firms, maybe someone can pick up where they left off (not sure if that’s possible, but worth a try). I’m not sure I’d trust these guys to do a good job in the long run.
so I asked him to put in an outside door so it can be used as storage.