The last time I mentioned this, we had decided on a house plan which we found on the internet, and we had told the builder which plan it was and all the changes we wanted to make. That was in early January. Well, it's mid-March now, and we just got a solid estimate on building that house. For the past two and a half months, the builder ordered the plans from the website, he had them "engineered" (which means evaluating the plan w/r/t the actual land where the house will go, getting it in compliance with local building codes, etc.), then sent the plans off to all the various sub-contractors to get bids on their portion of the job. The actual physical work on the house hasn't started yet - there are still more contracts to sign and more reviews to complete. This all would have been avoided if we had used a house design that the builder had used before, but I didn't want to have the same house as any of our neighbors. Alas.
This is process is painful for someone like me who likes to dive in and Get 'Er Done, as soon as the will and the means are available, if not sooner. What a drag it is to have to wait for people who are waiting on other people who are waiting on other people...
So exciting. Does your house plan in include a finished basement, or are they just going to pour you a big empty box that you can use as an indoor skate park?
they don’t really do basements in NC. it’s all crawl space or slab.
not sure why.
It doesn’t freeze hard in NC, right? I think basements are primarily for getting the foundation deep enough that it will not be cracked by a hard freeze. They don’t have basements in Modesto, either. In NJ, yes.
Apparently I do not really get this newfangled threaded comments mechanism.
yeah. makes sense.
no, it doesn’t freeze hard here. i don’t know if i’ve ever seen the ground freeze at all here, in the 15 years we’ve been here.
basements are nice, tho. that big cool room seems like something the south should’ve adopted long ago.