Why Seven Months Later?

What happened?

The Design Charrette was a big disappointment for me. I can say that now after months have gone by and some work has gotten done on the house.

Each of the players did bring their expertise to the table, however, it did not appear that any one expert was all that interested or felt able to comment on the expertise of the others. So there was little or no cross pollination of expertise or ideas.

All of the initial participants in the charrette have done work for the project, but more than one person changed jobs and then others finished their work or it is still in process. It is virtually impossible to keep a team together for the entire construction process and have them meet regularly. This idea was an impractical ideal, the reality did not work out for this project.

One of the outcomes of the design charrette was to have realistic expectations of the cost of the whole project. Of course I had nothing but a quote or two for the slab replacement if someone else did all the work, not enough to go on for the project that I was planning. So I had the whole job reviewed by several contractors, and they all thought it was a very costly project. I had no budget to do what they thought needed to be done at the cost they estimated. The most reasonable totals were from Wise Guy Construction and he estimated about $150,000 to redo the slab area of the house.

The biggest barrier to pursuing a LEED gut remodel was what we were NOT prepared to do, given the estimates for the work. That is to also tear apart the rear of the house and expose every exterior wall instead of just the slab portion. Maybe we will get to that step some time in the future, but we are limited to what HAS to be done by our budget, so we gave up on the LEED outcome at least for now.

But I’m going to go ahead and tell what actually happened in the intervening months as I got over the LEED disappointment.

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