Missing pieces

OK, I realize that my first post leaves you hanging in March 2008, but it's a daunting task to recap all the events of the past 11 months, so in the words of Inigo Montoya, "let me sum up..."

We spent about 6 months working with Marta on the plans for our house, which gradually evolved from trying to preserve as much of the existing floor plan as possible to making several major changes to improve the room sizes and flow without completely gutting the house or rearranging all the rooms.

When we were happy with the plans, we had to hire structural and geotechnical engineers to assess the house and foundation, and a surveyor to draw up a plat of our lot. Then Marta had to integrate the results into the plans.

Once we had a good set of working drawings, we started meeting with builders to get estimates. I won't go into the gory details of that endeavor, but we soon realized that we were going to need to invest a significant amount of money into this project to get what we wanted. We bid the project out to 3 'green' builders as well as Paige's guy, 'John,' who didn't have any green building experience but was interested to work on a green project. In the end, we decided to go with SAI Contractors. They were recommended by a rep from Nature Neutral, a green building supply company, and all the references I called were positively gushing about what a great job they did for them. SAI invited us to tour a house they were working on, and the homeowner later told me that one of them came over and cooked dinner for them the night they moved back in. Wow. We signed a contract with them on Jan 4.

Meanwhile, we submitted our plans to the county for a building permit on Oct 31. Because it is a green project, the county was supposed to speed our plans through the process, and sure enough, we got our first set of comments back the following week. The major issue is that our house is only 4 feet from the property line on one side, which means that -- according to the building codes -- we have to have a 1-hour fire-rated wall on that side of the house. Trying to integrate that with the green aspects of the project has been a big challenge for our architect! Our permit was finally approved last week, and I just picked it up today. Now it's official...