And then, the tears

Several trusted friends reviewed the latest set of architectural drawings. We got some good advice:

• David suggested we retain the architect’s window scheme downstairs, which went down to the floor (our sketch didn’t), because we’d appreciate the view and light—especially when doing yoga.
• Bob told us not to limit the useful space of the screened porch by adding a door to the deck. There is plenty of outdoor access from the nearby great room.

Yet the more people I talked to, the more I thought: This is just a ranch house! What the hell did I hire an architect for? Why did I spend these big bucks?

Friday, October 19, heavy winds scattered heavy rains and rivulets ran through the skylights and down my wall. (As the above photo of the great room shows, the unwanted water feature returned the morning of Saturday, October 27.)

These weren’t the only waterworks. I couldn’t get the original drawings out of my mind. The roof deck. The curved roof. So I looked up with teary eyes and threw out a trial balloon: how about a curved roof over the screened porch?

My poor husband gave me a look of, “Oh no! Not more follies by the wife! These ‘big ideas’ are why the so-called ‘dream house’ project is in month 13—with nothing to show for it!”

Folly avoidance was one of the key reasons we choose Jimmy Dumas Architecture. He explained that his firm had build capabilities, so his drawings wouldn’t only serve in the role of artwork, they’d be workable. His literature entitled, “Benefits in the Use of Design-Build,” states:

Early Knowledge of First Costs — Because the entity responsible for design is simultaneously estimating construction costs and can accurately conceptualize the completed project at an early stage, guaranteed construction costs are known far sooner than is otherwise possible. This … avoids the possibility of committing substantial time and money for design, only to learn that the cost of the project is prohibitive.

This paragraph describes the level of service we had expected—and details the opposite of what we have experienced. Not once did Jimmy or his subordinate push back and say, “Great idea. Here are the resulting cost and logistical implications. We suggest doing ‘X’ instead.” So we believed the drawings they presented to us were precursers to the home we would live in. Instead, after two design concepts and “committing substantial time and money,” we “learn that the cost of the project is prohibitive.”

We shared the architect’s drawings of our scaled-back project with Local Guy, currently our top choice for general contractor. He said, “Looking at these drawings, I cannot begin to guess at what your architect is intending. There is no information here. Even the floor plans are vague” because they lacked even the bare minimum in details, such as a scale. So Matt and I got on the phone with Jimmy: When would we get “real” drawings? He stated in a subsequent e-mail, “I want to have the final sealed bid/permit drawings by Monday, November 5th.”

Epilogue to the deadline drama

This chapter of the deadline drama which began on Friday ended about 21.5 hours later.

Jimmy called yesterday while I was showering; he’d be here in five-plus minutes. I decided to shampoo slowly and let Matt and Jimmy meet mano-a-mano. He hadn’t yet heard Matt’s voicemail, so my husband gave him a heads-up.

The drawings he delivered followed our direction and, thus, are very close-to-final. And the shell-only estimate was closer to our idea of an appropriate budget.

Relieved, we headed off to our 10 a.m. play date at Rockaway Lanes with Karen and George. And I’d never before knocked over so many pins! Could it be due to the relief of making progress on our project?

Later we were dining al fresco on the deck, sitting on furniture they helped us assemble seven years ago. Taking in our view, I spied something odd in the lake. A deer—swimming! Another quirky reminder why we love it here, and why this home is worth preserving and improving.

20 hours past the deadline

My husband just left Jimmy a message. A clear message. A message of frustration. Why was this necessary?

Jimmy called me at work just before 5 p.m. to say he isn't bringing the plans to my office, but dropping then instead at our home.

At 7:30 p.m., the sliding glass door to the deck (one of two) decided to never open again. Not with jiggling, brute force nor with the skillful application of a screwdriver. The house continues to decompose right before our eyes.

Given we were expecting a visitor, I didn't dare get out of my stiff work clothes and into my cozy Lanz of Salzburg until 10 p.m. At midnight, two hours past my bedtime and 12 hours past deadline, we did lights off.

Up until this time, I spent the night looking out the kitchen window and up towards street level, hoping to see a shiny red pick-up truck pull in. Every time I heard a car, I looked up with the same nervous twitch that made me check my e-mail over and over again, hoping Jimmy would live up to his word. At 3 a.m., I peaked out the front door and, seeing nothing, turned off the exterior lights. At 5 a.m., my husband woke up and checked, finding exactly what I found: nothing. It was not a restful night.

So, either A) Jimmy is playing us, or B) at some point after 4:45 p.m., Jimmy was kidnapped by aliens. Now B may seem plausible to some, although this crowd tends to wear aluminum foil hats so that Homeland Security cannot read their thoughts... Trust me, you would not want to bug my brain right now...

Yes, I do feel let down, even swindled. All I was thinking about Friday—hell, all I've been thinking about since our last face-to-face meeting here at Casa de Roo on September 18—was to see a list of costs and a set of drawings for a house we can afford to build. A house much like the one we sketched in these lower-level floor plans. (By the way, here is how the previous plans looked.)

It is now past noon on Friday…

Jimmy missed the noon deadline. At eight minutes past the hour, he called to say he will give us drawings later today, including the architectural rendering of the upper-level floor plan we redrew on my laptop (above).

All I can say is that he is luckly he at least reached out to me... I have been hitting the “refresh” button on my personal e-mail account every quarter hour since 8:15 a.m. in hope that I would hear from him. I kept wondering, “What happened to the Jimmy I knew and loved in September 2006?”

Last night, as torrential rain tapered off to relentless rain and a wind that kept Smilin’ Mike’s un-neighborly wind bell from hell a-clangin’, the real soundtrack to my dreams was “MacArthur Park.”

But instead of “all the sweet, green icing flowing down,” I envisioned the further deterioration of the dry wall surrounding our leaky skylights.

An thus begins month 13 of the alleged modern dream house project—a project that becomes more necessary with each passing storm.

We cannot continue to leave the cake out in the rain...

Getting bids from builders

In July, we thought the drawings were finally at the point where we could put the job out for bid. Even though the bid set wasn’t 100 percent complete, we were beyond ready to experience some progress on this project.

Would there still be time to get the house ready for Thanksgiving 2007, our original completion deadline?

July 26 — We met with Local Guy. We see his truck and his signs everywhere. He’s the neighborhood builder and his worksites always look pristine. His projects seem to get completed at a reasonable pace. He left me with a strongly positive impression. He epitomized the mental image I had of a competent contractor.

July 27 — Tall Guy, who looks Dutch to me, is another local with a design/build firm. We’d observed his work, too. A tad pompous, he seemed to know his stuff.

July 31 — Steve-O’s Guy was builder number three. Steve-O is an electrician extraordinaire. We figured that if anyone knew a good builder, he would. And his guy was a viable candidate.

August 4 — Jimmy and Guy #1 met with us. Unlike the other three builders, John seemed unfazed by the site. He’d built in places like Colorado. He showed me pictures of his wife and of his beautiful daughter, who works with him. We bonded. I thought he was also a good candidate for our project.

September 18 — Jimmy and Guy #2 met with us. Why was there a #2? Well, it seems that #1 disappeared. Poof. Gone. Never to be heard from again. Weird, huh? But Paul seemed OK, even though we didn’t get a good sense of his background.

No matter who we picked, we’d need to check references and get a full understanding of how the builder worked with his trades (for example, did his subs get paid on time?) and how long he worked with the members of his crew. We’d want to visit a live work site (was it neat? Or a disaster area?). We’d need to know his insurance checked out. And all the other issues we learned about by being devotees of Mike Holmes’ show, Holmes on Homes.

The main thing was that we were making progress. Or so we thought.

Still more than double

Since I hadn’t added to this site for 111 days, I began rereading this blog… and it seems our current situation is, as Yogi Berra says, “déjà vu all over again.”

On March 9, we learned that the house the architecture firm had sketched for us was more than double the stated budget. So we scaled back from the original vision. A lot. And it was making me feel both stupid and cheated.

On September 11, we “celebrated” the first anniversary of sending a retainer check to the architecture firm. The day before this, we got the cost estimate from Jimmy. It was $150,000 over budget. Interestingly, all three of the other builders came in higher—at double our budget. Which seems to indicate that the original design was more than triple our budget.

Tall Guy had lambasted the drawings as being impractical and idiotic; that the glazing was out of control and that the structure made no sense. Steve-O’s guy said he really wanted his estimate to come in on budget, but it wouldn’t be possible because of the windows and the way the engineering had been established.

Local Guy was more specific. He had some observations and some theories:

• All of the windows were custom sizes; the architect priced this at $37,500 for windows alone. All Pella. We’ve heard terrible things about Pella quality. Two of the builders we interviewed called the brand crap.
• And Jimmy had estimated another $37,000 for the operable glass wall to open up the hot tub room. I went online and found several competitors to the NanaWall. Using the specs the architects had on the drawing, the La Cantina version was $16,866. By choosing a standard versus a custom size, the price became $10,331. I learned this via two e-mails after looking up an advertiser in dwell magazine. Just like that, I saved $26,669.
• The siding was a mystery to him. Later, we investigated. Parklex® is from Finland. Swisspearl Rainscreen is, you guessed it, Swiss. And a rainscreen façade system wasn’t something the local builder was familiar with. So, from a carbon footprint perspective, these two products—which we never approved—were an environmentally burdensome choice due to shipping. From a weak U.S. dollar perspective, they were a costly choice. And from a how-the-hell-do-you-install-it perspective, they were an unworkable choice.
• He assumed the guy with his name on the door wasn’t managing his subordinate.
  Postscript: The underling is off our project. Jimmy says he is now taking charge.
• Noting there was a ridiculous amount of steel being specified, he thought the engineering was better suited for commercial than residential.
  Funny story #1: When we mentioned to Jimmy that the other three builders cited the structure as being overblown for the use, he quipped that we must be talking to residential builders. To which we replied: This is a residence!
  Funny story #2: The underling specialized in footings for buildings in Manhattan. So skyscraper infrastructure is his background. No wonder we could build the Freedom Tower on our site.

East elevation

It was clear we needed to take matters into our own hands. Matt reconceived the project to ensure we would finally be on budget. I provided Jimmy with our drawings, done in Photoshop, on September 25 and 30. Jimmy promised to get back to us with revised elevation and floor plan drawings by noon on Friday, October 12 (13 months into the project). Above is the lake side of the house.

• The four-season porch becomes a screen porch. The operable glass wall now separates the expanded dining area from the porch.


• The windows in the enlarged great room are no longer 14 foot high walls of glass. I never understood the scale of the drawings until Matt took out his tape measure and showed me. Yikes! These extra-tall windows facing the sun will not solve the glare problem this room currently suffers from.


• The lake-view bedroom doesn’t change in size; it just gets a door to the deck.


• The hot tub room is eliminated. The hot tub moves up to the deck and sits outside the lake-view bedroom.


• What I’m calling a lanai—because I like the word—now sits outside the expanded flex space, which will be designed for yoga and partying.


• The downstairs bedroom grows from a space without a closet and barely big enough for a nursery into a proper master bedroom.


• Here’s how it looked before.

West elevation

This is the front of the house.

• Dormer is removed. Local Guy explained to us the damage this structure would do to parts of the house we never planned to change, namely the bathroom and the kitchen.
• Unwanted new window in the bathroom is eliminated; the existing skylight is replaced.
• Location of the door is moved to the left of what it is on the existing house.
• Glass awning over door replaces the structure Jimmy’s subordinate had championed.
• Kitchen window is replaced from a bay style to something we won’t brain ourselves on when we walk by.
• Once and for all, we eliminate any reference to asphalt shingles.

Here’s how it looked before.

South elevation

The right side of the house (when facing the front)

• There is no longer a flat roof over the front door.


• The useless parapet is removed from the area above the dining room. This feature was meant to make the house look more “modern” when the neighbors view it from their deck. The other purpose it presumably served was to trap leaves.


• The screen porch becomes a more useful size, as does the flex / yoga / party space.


• The stairs are completely replaced, not repaired the way the subordinate specified. They are barely salvageable now; imagine how trashed they’ll be as a result of the construction process—which will utilize this side of our house as the main point of access to the back yard.


• The hot tub room becomes the lanai (yes, I do love to use that word and no, I do not care that we’re nowhere near Hawaii).


• Here’s how it looked before.

North elevation

The left side of the house (when facing the front)

• The front bedroom continues to remain unchanged.


• Steps are added to make access better for the oil delivery guy.


• A downstairs bathroom is added, using existing storage space.


• Master bedroom “holds up” the deck where the hot tub will go.


• Instead of an “art screen” the subordinate designed to delight our next door neighbors, who would be the only ones who can see it, we’re simply adding a privacy wall.


• Here’s how it looked before.