Forgive me for not posting my "wrap-up" construction blogs until about two months after we moved into the house, but moving is a little hectic, even if you're only moving 50 yards, and it's especially hectic once football season starts and you're on the road most weekends.
Anyway, YES, we finished the house! We got our certificate of occupancy on September 15, and I immediately started moving stuff in. I started with the kitchen because (1) we hadn't cooked anything in weeks anyway; and (2) Ben was traveling a lot for work and wasn't home to help me move furniture, etc. With the help of my Mom, my aunt Pat, and Devon, I did get the living room and dining room furniture arranged (it was all new or newly-refinished, and the stores had delivered it prior to us getting our certificate of occupancy, but it was all kind of in a clump at the center of the room) before Ben came home. After he got home and while I was in Auburn, Ben moved most of our bedroom furniture, and we've been slowly bringing stuff over from the garage ever since then. We've had all the "essentials" in the house for about 5-6 weeks now, and it's hard to find the time and motivation to move the rest of the stuff, but we'll get there eventually.
So to recap, we've gone from this:
To this:
To this:
To this:
To this:
To this, which is pretty much the finished product (with the exception of some landscaping, etc. - I haven't taken a picture since it's really been finished because the time change makes it so dang dark before I get home from work, and I'm hardly ever here on the weekends):
How'd we do? Well, the builder told us it would take 10 months to build, and we got our certificate of occupancy 10 months and 10 days after we originally broke ground. Budget-wise, we are currently at about HALF A PERCENT over budget. I say "currently" only because there are some little things they're going to have to come back and do at some point (we're making a list as we "shake down" the house), and that will cost us a little more money, but nothing significant. At half a percent over budget (maybe one percent after it's all said and done), I consider us ON BUDGET. I'm not sure there's ever been a construction project that finished so close to budget. We and our builder all worked together really well in making the budget work, and I greatly appreciate him being so careful with our money. I'm not going to pretend we didn't go grossly over budget in certain areas (light fixtures being one of them, as the big living room fan was about 80% of my light fixture budget by itself), but we were pretty good about knowing that we had to take money from other areas of the budget to fix those over-budget areas, which were more important to us than some other areas. There were splurges (some of them not by choice, like the front door, although we do love the front door), but there were also compromises and tons of "shopping around" to find nice finishes in the most cost-effective way. I'm pretty proud of us, actually.
People have asked, "Have you found anything yet that you wish you had done differently?" Really, no. I did realize that the thermostats our HVAC company installed weren't the new ones that switch automatically from heat to air based on the temperature (instead, you had to manually flip a switch to go from heat to air - I know; such a first world problem). Well, in East Tennessee, you may need to switch from heat, to air, and back to heat within a 24-hour period, so that wasn't going to work. So we've already had them come back and replace the thermostats with automatic ones, but they didn't ask us what kind of thermostat we wanted before they put them in, so I don't consider that "something we wish we had done differently." It's just something they did that we didn't like and we asked them to fix. I even ended up being okay with the window configuration in the living room vault, which was a budget-saving compromise that I was a little wary about.
This post is already really long, so I'll stop now, but I'm going to do a couple more posts in the (hopefully near) future discussing our various subcontractors and posting some pics of the interior finished product. Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment