A clean start

We moved into this house on June 30, 2000. Our dishwasher and clothes dryer moved in soon thereafter. It took several days for the stove and washing machine to be delivered. Which is why Karl’s Appliances is, as Stephen Colbert would say, “dead to me.” As dead as three of those four Maytag Appliances.

The dishwasher suffered several recalls and began making the glasses increasingly opaque. The dryer selected its own heat setting. The washing machine began losing interested in the spin-dry cycle. The Maytag Repair Man? Also dead to me. So is the Maytag brand, given the perfect timing of their planned obsolescence.

So on New Year’s Day we headed to Sears. We knew a store featuring the décor of despair wouldn’t provide a great shopping experience. We were unprepared for how bad it actually was. (Don’t get me started!) Nonetheless, we are the proud owners of three new high efficiency appliances, a Kenmore dishwasher and two LGs for clothes. It is nice to have clean things again. The photo shows just one of the hurdles workers must traverse before bringing heavy items into our home.

It seems we also need a clean start with the design of our home renovation. We met with “Local Guy,” the builder we thought we were going to hire, on January 11. His new estimate for our scaled-back design was tens of thousands of dollars over budget. While this is an improvement, given the project had been hundreds of thousands over budget, this number didn’t include some key line items, like carpeting, flooring, lighting and other finishes we haven’t yet selected. And he wanted to downgrade our siding to vinyl, our decking to pressure treated, and called everything near-and-dear to our hearts, “cost accelerators.” So we’d be basically living in a plastic box, in the dark, on bare sub-flooring, with a crappy deck. And we’d still be over budget.

A Plan B, um, a Plan W, was in order. So I called Steve Wasko, the guy who provided the concrete pad for our shed. On January 19, he arrived with Alex, his building partner. Turns out, it was Steve’s third trip to the house for this project.

Our architect, Jimmy, consulted with him on the foundation. He didn’t listen to Steve’s concerns about digging full footings and underpinning the existing house. Instead of conforming the drawings to the conditions of the site, Jimmy wanted it the other way around. Then Local Guy brought Steve in to figure out the cost of the foundation, trying to find a way to do it for less, while still sticking with the directions provided by the architect. Our site poses a double dilemma. We cannot get the needed heavy equipment down into the back yard. If we could, there would still be no way to get the broken concrete and rock up out of the site.

A roofing specialist I spoke with expressed concern over the pitch of the addition. Could be done, of course, but it would cost more to keep the rain out because the slope wasn’t sufficiently steep. He added that, from what he could tell, the architect hadn’t specified any additional waterproofing steps to make up for the roof design. Alex said basically the same thing.

So, let me get this straight… the foundation to hold up the house is designed in a way that is complicated, not cost-effective. And our main reason for doing the project—keeping the rain out—wasn’t ensured given the roof design. Perhaps it is time the architect was dead to me, too.

We can no longer rethink the existing design. We need to erase it from our minds and start with a clean slate.