Category: Flora Construction

Day 31 ~ This is what the hold up was for

The surveyor showed up.  He spent a day with tripods, laser beam machines, and other magical devices and then, towards the end of the day, there was a lot of good old fashioned hammering.  As soon as he left I walked the job site and found 2″ X 2″ wooden stakes pounded into the rock at each corner of the house  And this house has a lot of corners, fourteen of them, I counted and then I double checked.  Twice.  He sprayed each of the fourteen stakes bright pink.  Now we can move on to the foundation walls.  Finally.

Day 30 ~ Okay I am sick of looking at this!

On Day 5, which was 25 days ago, the excavator who cleared the lot and dug trenches where the walls of our house will eventually go, finished.  He was done.  He took his big machine and he left.  The trenches are filled with large rock and he’s painted where the foundation forms are to be built.  We are now on Day 30 and nothing has happened for over two weeks.  David, who left for India yesterday for a vacation with family, was hoping to SEE something before he left.  No luck.  We are waiting for a surveyor to show up and put stakes in the exact corners where the walls meet in our new home.

Day 1 ~ The Real Day One

David and I woke up in Harlem on the last day of this year’s six night visit to Manhattan.  We gained three hours on our flight back home and, after picking Opal up at her sister’s house, still managed to get home to Georgetown in time to see in the day’s fading light that work happened.  Excavation has begun.  From walking out of Mary and Melinda’s party on November 7th of 2015, when I said to David while he was driving us home, “That’s it, I want to build a house for us,” to today, that’s how long it took.  From inception to actual ground breaking, one year, ten months, and eighteen days.  Just shy of two full years.  Wow.  And whew.

And so it goes . . . . .

Got up early, left the house early, well before 8:00 AM, as it’s Monday and I have my weekly office meeting to run.  No workers were on site when I left but it was early and I figured they’d show up near or after eight.  Busy day at work, many agents coming at me with many needs, so I completely forgot that today was DAY ONE.  David and I are leaving for 6 days in Manhattan tomorrow so I came home early, 2:30 PM, to pack.  I just assumed I’d turn the corner onto Flora and there would be heavy equipment tearing up the street in front of our vacant lot.  But no.  No. Nada.  Nothing.  Not a thing had been disturbed, it was very clear no one had been here at any point throughout the day.

Really, when you think about it, it was probably the perfect start to building our house after almost two year’s of planning, pushing, and waiting.  They have clearly established how they are going to keep our expectations in check.  They have clearly established who’s really in control here.

DAY ONE, a harbinger of what’s to come.

We Got Our Permit Today ! ! !

We are shocked at what it cost us, but we actually got a building permit issued to us today.  When our architect was getting close to being ready to submit our first round of plans, I was told to go to a City of Seattle website and pay a fee for a permit number.  So I did.  The fee was modest, just a few hundred dollars.  That was painless I thought.  Later I found out that that first few hundred dollars was just a fee to get in line to apply for a permit.  It was a fee to be allowed to apply at a later time.  After a good deal of back and forth between the City and our architect, the actual plans, the final and complete set, were submitted.  The day they were I was given a very short window of time to go back to the same City website and pay for the permit.  That time it was thousands of dollars.  I foolishly thought that was it.  Surely a permit can’t cost more than the two fees we’ve paid already.  Well, yes, yes it can cost more.  About a month passed.  We were notified today that all the corrections and revisions to the plans had been approved and the permit was ready “to be picked up.”  It sounds as if I’m being invited to go down to City hall where a nice counter person is going to hand me a very official looking permit.  Nope.  Back to the City website again and – I couldn’t believe this – a few more thousand dollars to “pick it up” online.  And no one hands you anything.  You just get an email with a .pdf in it and you print out your own damn permit.  But you don’t get that email with the .pdf until AFTER you pay the third fee.  Total cost of a permit from the City of Seattle to build our house:  $6,202.

 

In November of 2015 David and I went to a party

The idea to dismantle our koi pond and garden and build a house where the koi pond and garden used to be came to us as we left a party on November 7, 2015. In 2011 David and  I downsized from a house that had 4,300 square feet of living space (and a 400 square foot garage in addition to that) to a much smaller house in the heart of Georgetown. Our current Georgetown house has two floors, each with 1,120 square feet, for a grand total of 2,240. Everything we need fits into it. Beyond being the perfect sized house for us now, it came with something that I longed for: a flat, vacant 4,000 square foot.  It had a sidewalk on the street on one side and level alley access on the other side.  It became the garden project of my dreams.  While we realized it could have a house on it, we never planned on building anything more than a great yard.

Then we went to this party. The party was a joint effort of Joe and Kim who own JAS Design Build and two sisters who each had a home of their own before they decided to buy this little Wallingford bungalow and downsize into it together. JAS did the gut and remodel to the bungalow and the work was enchanting to David and me. We had such a nice time at this party: great cocktails, great food, cool glassware, all served up in a wonderfully designed space, perfect space. We spent most of the night taking each other aside and saying, “Hey did you notice the way . . . ” or “Take a look at the way they . . . ” or “This is how we should live, in smaller but higher quality space.”

We stayed at this party way longer than we planned to stay out that night and we took it all in. It was, in our minds, the perfect event. Mary and Melinda (the sisters) gathered fun, interesting people together and presented them with a wonderful spread in a great space. As David and I were closing the car doors and pulling away from the party, I looked at David and said, “Fuck. Now I want us to build a house.

And that’s how it all started.