Building Our Custom Home – Part VI – Anecdotes

So we finally started construction. First they mark and put stakes on the ground. Then this big digger comes by and digs a huge hole in the ground. And after this I am not sure how they re-measure the corners of the house. They frame up and pour concrete for the foundations. All this proceeds along at a brisk pace and it is very exciting to see it develop. But then there is a long wait – 3 weeks as we wait for the cement to set strong.
While we were building this house, my father-in-law told me that it is customary to place a snake like object in the ground on which the house will be raised. I had a pair of earrings that were wiggly, and threw them in the part that would later become the basement.
After three weeks they started framing the house. I made it a point to stop by everyday to look at the progress. I just couldn’t resist. I am glad I did. Because before they had completed framing the main floor, I caught two windows that were framed to the wrong size. I pointed this out to the framers, at first they didn’t agree with me, I asked them to measure the windows and lo and behold, they had to reframe. Luckily they were early enough in the process that these changes happened quickly and without delaying the project. Upstairs in the master bath, I kept a watch and as they were framing it, reminded them that one of the windows will be raised higher than per the plan – same size window just raising a lower sill height to a regular sill height.
Then all the tradesmen came in. The HVAC (heating/cooling) systems were being installed, when I noticed that one of the wires for the thermostats was located in a place that would fall behind the door. At the time I was at site, so was the HVAC guy, I asked him if it was ok, to have it behind a door. He said, it had to be in a clear spot and moved it. How did I know to ask? I have no idea.
Another time, I was at site with our builder and we were in the master bath. The plumber had started work and had drilled holes in the floor for the various pipes. There was one hole in the shower area, but it was located in a spot that would come under the built-in bench. Apparently, no one wanted to tell the plumber he had made a mistake. So here we are standing there, the builder, a carpenter and me, wondering who would do the deed. The next day, I met with the plumber and told him about the misplaced hole. He totally disagreed with me. But the very next day, I saw he had patched up the hole and now it was located in a new correct place.
One major mistake I did not pick up until the drywall was up was the size of our walk-in closet. I know how the error happened. The closet width was supposed to be 7’11½”. However, there was line showing the measurement of the whole length running through one of the ones. So the framers read the dimension as 7’1½”. This was a huge difference, it meant; I could not have hanging shelves on either side, because of the positioning of the doorway. I asked with the builder to correct the dimensions. We went back and forth on it for 2 weeks. He asked me to meet with a closet designer who tried to tell me he could design a closet in it. I said, I know you can design a closet for this space, the question is can you design a closet with double hanging sides? Since the answer was an obvious no. I stuck to my position and asked the builder to make the change.
At about the same time the master bath was nearing its final tweaking of locating the shower, tub etc. And the shower was going to be a couple of inches shorter than the plan. I told the plumber in the builder’s presence, what is an inch or two. My builder said to me; keep that in mind for the closet. Anyhow, I insisted and one day when I came by to visit the site, the wall had been moved, including all electrical wiring to the correct position. This meant the lights and fan that had so carefully been centered to the old room dimensions were a little off. But we have a sloping roof, and the off-centered lights don’t stand out so we left them as they were.
There are so many decisions that are made during the construction, no matter how detailed the plans are. The day granite countertops were going in with the double sink, it so happened I was on site, and they were getting ready to drill the granite for the faucet and soap dispenser. Because I was there, the guy asked me which side I preferred the garbage disposal and soap dispenser. If I had not been there he would have made the decision for me.
When the tilers were ready to come in, I asked them several times to let me know the day they will start work. But they just didn’t give any regard to my request and started tiling. In the powder room, they were cutting the tiles to accommodate the cabinet. As luck would have it I found them when they had only cut a couple of tiles. I told them that the plans mention that the cabinets float and do not rest on the floor, so they will have to tile the whole floor. Same story with the location of the floor vent, it would not come from the baseboard of the cabinet since there would be none.
As the tillers continued their work, I asked them once again to call me when they were ready to work in the master bath. We had 3 different tile colors going in. I was going to match the off-white floor with a baseboard of white tiles, then our green tiles to frame our steam shower and backsplash for the bath tub and finally, a line of 2 colored tiles alternating across the whole wall. I had in mind the height I wanted the tiles to be. When I reached the site that day, they had started tiling (didn’t call me) and the alternating tile line was set. I would have liked it one more tile height higher. But they made that executive decision for me. Aagh. Then as they were building down from there to the shower floor, they had to cut a tile and they wanted to do a whole tile or something and so that one white tile height baseboard turned into this tile and half height. I mean, it looked so off, I am surprised the tilers wanted to do that. Didn’t they have any pride in how their work looks? I asked them to remove all the white tiles and just forget the baseboard idea in the shower and go all green. They were most unhappy with me for making them do more work.
But the wonderful part was the people who work for a longer period on the house, like the electricians and the carpenters. Once they realized I came by everyday, they would hold off on decisions that were different from the plan, like a floor joist where a light should be, or an unusual corner situation. They would even offer their suggestions to give me more ideas to consider and help make my final decision.
Another time, I caught the electricians installing light fixtures in our mudroom. Two of the light fixtures just above the window were to be smaller than the other lights. The electrician was starting to install the larger ones, I told him they had to be smaller. They checked the plans and placed the rights ones.
I decided on bamboo flooring in our whole house. Here in Wisconsin, there aren’t a whole lot of bamboo choices. I only had two colors to choose from. I decided to go with the lighter shade and put dark trim around the house. I also wanted bamboo treads. While we could find vendors for the flooring, no one carried treads. I finally found something online and asked my builder to order them. He had our floor vendor order them, but they didn’t warranty them. That was just fine with me.
When the treads were being installed, they had to be cut to size, which meant exposed sides. At first, the carpenters tried to cut a diagonal and place an edge to the sides. But bamboo is tricky to trim. I looked at the cut edge and saw that you can see the pattern of the bamboo construction and said, let’s leave the edges exposed. The carpenter noticed that not all the treads had the same pattern, so they opened all the boxes, counted each pattern (two kinds) and then alternated them on the main floor and since we didn’t have an equal number of both, let the jumble of treads be in the basement.
When I was picking out the fireplace, I so wanted a modern style and since we were putting in a gas fireplace, I would have liked something different inside than fake logs. But you simply couldn’t find anything, I even looked online. Everything really interesting was in Europe. I had to give up on that idea, as that would be too expensive for me to consider. And the only “modern” looking design I could find was one reflecting a southwestern pattern.
I was going to place the fireplace flush with the wall. But when the fireplace was installed I realized that wouldn’t work too well, because they are designed to be placed with tile or stone around the fireplace. So I had to do something to frame the fireplace. I told our kitchen/bath designer that I would like the frame to be made of stainless steel like the backsplash we had picked for the kitchen. He said, it could be done, but I would have to choose a thicker grade of stainless steel. He also warned me that I would have to pay for the whole sheet, even though I will only get the part after it was punched out. I agreed to that as well. Now the stainless steel vendors refused the job at first, said it couldn’t be done, wasn’t safe, and what not. My kitchen designer kept at them and they finally agreed to do it but didn’t want to warranty it.
Now, our kitchen window is this huge picture window. When the window first came, it was a foot shorter than the framing. That is how the original plans had shown it. But I had changed it to match the sill heights of the windows in our living room (all of them are in a straight line). I had told the door/window salesman about the change and insisted he note the change right in front of me. But still we got the wrong order. As usual they tried to convince me to keep the window, but I stood my ground and got the window I had wanted.
There are also things I didn’t notice until the house was done. There are electrical requirements that determine where the electric outlets must be placed and how many according to the dimensions of the room or wall. Our electrician was so good, he waited for me to be on site and walk through each room asking for preferred location. Now the silly thing is, our loft is only about 6’ x 10’ and we have four electrical outlets there.
In the mudroom, I asked for an outlet in the closet to charge cordless vacuums. My desk is also in the mud room, so I asked for extra outlets there, for computer, printer and whatnot. I just assumed the walls would have their outlets every 6 or so feet per regulations like the other rooms in the house. Now I don’t know if the electricians just missed that altogether, or the same regulations do not apply in the mudroom. I had this wonderful idea that the long countertop could act as an ironing spot right next to the washer/dryer and also for any sewing I might want to do. But guess what, no electrical outlets. If I want to use that counter I have to use an extension cord from the closet.
I knew I wanted a really colorful home. I had always lived in government house or rental property. Even when we bought our first home, we always knew we were going to be there only for a short while so we didn’t change anything in the house.
I hired an interior designer to help me pick the colors. The only color I was sure about was this bright green for our kitchen. We walked through the house and in less than an hour had the colors all picked out. She made the decision making so easy, she would offer me two maybe three colors to choose from after we had talked about which color to use to contrast or complement a color. We have 11 different colors in our house, including gold. When the bright colors were going up on the wall, our builder would tease me saying he has post-its in these colors on his desk.
Finally when the house was done we had to get the occupancy certificate. When the inspector walked through the house, he pointed out three things that had to be fixed, a couple of screws were missing (the builder knew about it, the crew had run short and had to get more from their shop), our porch needed a railing because it was more than a foot higher than the ground and our fireproof garage door didn’t have a sticker on it that identified its fire rating. The first two were no problem to fix, but the builder didn’t know what to do about the door. He thought to contact the manufacture or the vendor and see if we could get another sticker. As luck would have it, I was looking through the cabinets in the mudroom and guess what I found, the door stickers, which the painter had very safely placed while painting the door.
Which reminds me, when I were selecting the fireproof garage door, I looked through the catalog the door/window place gave me. Our fire door has a small window in it. At first, the salesman’s reaction was, it cannot be done, and fireproof doors cannot have windows in them. I showed him that the catalog said that it met all the fireproof requirements. He was most surprised and said, in 10 years of his working with doors and windows he hadn’t known of one like that.
Some freebies I got with my house – the window/door showroom said they would give me the exterior door from kitchen to porch at no cost. The screened porch was supposed to be bare concrete, but it got fine cracks in it. This meant the builder had re-pour the concrete at his own cost. So instead he offered me the choice to pick outdoor tiles. I picked the tiles and while he thought they were pricy, he stuck to his word and paid for them. I had not planned anything special for the porch. My builder thought cedar roofing would look good and gave me remnant cedar from another job at no cost to me.
Some moments of pride – our kitchen was featured in a magazine and our house on “What you get for your money” on HGTV. In addition, once in a while we spot our kitchen in local media when our kitchen/bath vendors are advertizing. I don’t think it is because we have the best kitchen in town, but because we probably have the brightest colored kitchen in town.
And so we had a new home.

THE END

Aside: Our home was featured on HGTV's What You Get For the Money. Episode #214
Our kitchen was featured in Signature Kitchens & Baths - Pages 24-25

Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009

Building Our Custom Home – Part V – Kitchen and Bath

Early on in the design process, when he had first gotten a plan together, I asked him to finalize two areas for me and keep them that size until the final plans - the kitchen and the master bath. While the architect was busy finalizing the floor plans, I took the kitchen and bath dimensions to various kitchen and bath places to finalize those details. (Pic 1-Kitchen)
Once again, I went with my magic number – 3. I first walked into a showroom and asked them to provide a set of plans and a price quote. I told them I had tall cabinets in mind with a plane solid look. The only plane set of cabinets this showroom had had rounded corners. No way. And let me tell you this is no shabby showroom. In fact, I know several houses in our neighborhood have used this showroom for their kitchen and bath designs. Not only were the cabinets not what I wanted (ugly), but they were expensive. The cabinets alone would have cost me $50k. The deal was that if I did not sign a contract with them, I could not get the plans. Ha! The one design idea I took away from here was the cut of the kitchen island. (Pic 2- Kitchen)

So off to the second showroom, their models looked promising. I met with a woman and told her my vision of a kitchen. I wanted an island with a small seating area. We planned a really large window on one wall and I planned to have two tall cabinets on either side with no countertop in between. Regarding the rest of the room, I did not want hung cabinets over my stove countertop – the whole length of that wall. I am not sure what she heard. When I went back to look at the design, it was like they picked up a generic kitchen and hadn’t listen to one thing I had said. In fact, I looked to see if they had accommodated anything I had asked for. Nope. So I restated my vision of the kitchen. The man (who had joined the meeting) said, you might not know this, but you are real cutting edge in design. So where are your cutting edge design ideas, my dears? Anyhow, this place was a no as well, if they weren’t listening to me first, what are the chances they will listen going forward. Did I walk away with anything from here? I liked their idea of the mudroom layout. At this point I had planned on buying a new washer and dryer set. But we ended up keeping our old ones so we couldn’t use their design idea. I can still recreate it if need to. I have it in the back of my mind and if my washer/dryer die, we can redo the laundry/mudroom. But being such a skinflint, I probably wont.

By this time we were getting close to the final plans with the architect. He suggested a builder. Long story short, we went with the builder the architect recommended. The builder gave me a list of vendors and people to contact to go over the design details and finishes. So the third place for kitchen and bath was recommended by the builder. What an amazing showroom, I loved half the kitchen models in there. The young man who worked with me to plan out the kitchen was thrilled that I had come to him so early and he could truly design a custom kitchen. We had nearly 6 months to work on the kitchen plans and I got the kitchen of my dreams. (Pic 3-Master Bath)
A funny thing with the kitchen designs – he emailed the very first set of plans and their 3-D visuals to me. The color on the walls was beige. My first reaction as soon as I opened the file was to close it right away. After a deep breath, I reopened them and paid closer attention to the plan itself. I was happy to note he had listened to a lot of my ideas and planned a pretty good kitchen for me. I emailed back letting him know my first reaction to the beige color. I had a lime green color in mind for my kitchen. So he promptly emailed the same plans and 3-Ds back to me in lime green. Lovely! From here it was just a matter of minor tweaking, picking out the details. Two additions we squeezed into the kitchen were a narrow spice rack cabinet and shelves along the side of kitchen wall for cookbooks, phone etc.
I also visited the lighting vendors and walked through the house and identified various kinds of lighting. I haven’t counted the different kinds of bulbs in our house. It seems as though every time a bulb goes out, it is not easily available in the stores and I end up getting it from their lighting showroom. It goes without saying the bulbs are expensive, but the fact that they seem to last so long seem quite promising. (Pic 4-Master Bath)
The only light fixture I couldn’t decide on were the ones over our kitchen island. You know that funky kind. When the house was being built, I finally picked on a pair that was supposed to be red. When they arrived, they were orange. Now I have no orange anywhere in the house, so I had to add orange. I picked bar stools with orange seat covers, I found dining chairs that are an orange leather, we even painted our old (many times painted) piano orange!! Now I have a whole lot of orange because of 2 lights.
I also had the time to visit the flooring place and after considering various options I decided to do the whole house in bamboo flooring. Basement would be bare concrete and the mudroom would have vinyl – we have snake skin leather looking vinyl floor. It is very cool.
By the time our architect’s plans were finalized I had the kitchen and bath designs finalized and priced, as well as, the lighting fixtures. My architect’s estimate for the house he had designed was $400k. Remember, I had asked for $350k. Not bad. So now my builder looked at the plans and drew up a contract which he claimed couldn’t be done for less that $425k. I reviewed the contract closely and found he had given really small allowances for kitchen, bath, flooring, lighting, plumbing etc. It is the finishes of the house that are expensive. By now I had pretty good estimates for kitchen, bath, appliances, lighting and flooring so I asked the builder to increase those allowances. I still have no idea how plumbing slipped right under my radar. And even if I had no time to pick out fixtures at that point, the experience from the other line items in the budget should have raised a red flag with regard to the plumbing budget. Our plumbing budget was set at $5k, the bath tub in the master bath cost $5k! So now the budget came back to me at about $525k. I said, ok, lets build.,.
Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009

Building Our Custom Home – Part III – Finding an Architect

When I started looking for lots, I also started to look for an architect to design our home. I looked through the list of registered architects in our area and found only a handful of names. There are only a few rare homes designed by architects in the US, most architects do commercial or industrial design and very few work as residential architects. Anyhow, I don’t know that I had any specific criteria, but I picked out 3 names from the list. I believe if it is meant to be, it will be. I could go through the whole list, but if instead I find what I need among the 3 why go beyond. And if not, I can always expand my search.
The first architect I met had pretty much retired and had last designed and built homes in the 70s and 80s. He lived in a house that was designed by him in the style of those times. His portfolio also contained homes of that style. It was difficult for me to judge if he could give me what I was looking for in a house. He did ask pertinent questions regarding our needs for the house. There were 3 things that made me decide against him – I wasn’t convinced he could offer what I wanted design-wise, he had his own ideas of what should be in the house (independent of my own requirements) and finally he wanted me to pay him $20K, which I thought at that time was quite steep, especially considering that I would only get blueprints from him, and then my builder would have to develop construction documents from them.
So on to architect #2. He was part of a firm that did both commercial and residential work. His portfolio was impressive. He also offered a very reasonable suggestion – for the money I wanted to spend on an architect he said, I should look for plans in books or on-line and find something that I thought matched my interests the most and he would amend them for a more custom fit. While I agreed it was a reasonable suggestion, I still wanted something truly custom designed for us. Although at this point, I was beginning to realize this was maybe a pipedream. But I said thank you and good bye to him as well.
Finally, architect #3, he was at the point where he only planned to do residential architecture, his passion. He had a staff of drafters, architects, and interior designers but he was the principle architect. As soon as I met him, I knew he was going to be our architect. The first thing I said to him was – before we start discussing anything, I should let you know, I studied architecture. Most of the work I saw in his portfolio was modern, that is what he liked to do. I also knew he had designed a home for another Indian family and he told me he designed one home in India long-distance! But as you can imagine, most of the homes he designed were upwards of a million dollars.
I laid out my requirements to him. In short, I wanted a house no more than about 2500 sq ft, within a budget of $350k. He accepted my job right away; I suspect he did it because I studied architecture and because I gave him a challenge.
I had prepared a long list of requirements for our home. Some important ones were – walk in closets in all bedrooms, even if the kids’ rooms have a little smaller walk-ins. I didn’t care if the bedrooms were small, even the master bedroom, I didn’t plan to put a sitting area in the bedroom. Who uses that area? Of course, my original quest for a larger foyer area, and especially a working mudroom. I also wanted a walk-in pantry and a large front porch. My list was 10 pages long. I had information regarding how I wanted the spaces to flow. For example, I wanted our guest room on the main floor so they wouldn’t be close to our or the kids’ rooms, which meant the powder room had to be a full bath. But when you decide to build a small house, you have to realize some compromises, the powder room had to be close from the mudroom, situated so the guests didn’t have to see or go through any private spaces. But unfortunately, this meant we couldn’t have it attached to or next to the guest room.
The architect told us to expect the plans to take about 6 months to complete…

Copyright Kalpana Kanwar August 2009