The last viewing of the old house as originally built

We are finally, at long, long last, looking forward to getting the first remodel (at the old house) underway!

If any of you want to just walk through the house to see what it's like before the remodel, we are going to have it open this Sunday, 10/20, from 4-5 pm. Send us a message if you need the address.

We'll have the new floor plans and tile selections on hand.

Of course, we'll have a bigger (and real, with food!) open house after  the remodel is done and we have (temporarily) moved back in there. This "open house" is for the folks who haven't seen how it is currently laid out inside and want to have the "before" visual.

House Specific Updates

Old house: We are set to go with a builder that has worked primarily in the Houston Heights for the past 20 years. The references have been great and we have appreciated the interactions we've had with one of the principals. It is a family outfit of 3 brothers and approximately 35 full-time employees (trades are subbed out to their regular subs). We anticipate a great result based on everything we have heard.  (We discovered them on Angie's List.)

New house: The design competition on Arcbazar continues to attract more interest. We are now up to 22 designers from around the world. We have had just a few questions from a designer so far, but we put up a very detailed spec. Some designers may feel they have everything they need to know to create a design for us. Also, there are still 4.5 weeks left in the competition, and many will likely be working on the project more as the deadline approaches and questions may fly then.

We continue to be impressed at the submitted designs for other competitions, and we often have a "wow! that design is so perfect!" reaction to the winning design (just like the client). We wish we had known about Arcbazar for the old house simply because we are curious what they'd have dreamt up as solutions. As it is, we are pretty happy with the design we created, and we're anxious to see it built out.

Finally, forward motion is on the horizon!

A whole new way of looking at design

Site: New House

After our horrid experiences with first a Design-Build firm in 2010 and now an Architect in 2013, we had no idea where to go for the design of the expansion (master suite and Endless Pool) at our new house. Expending effort only to find a new architect who would also back-burner our non-million-dollar project at every opportunity was a non-starter. We had to get moving forward. But how?

I decided to log in to Angie's List and poke around for architect-types. Hmm. There's a highly rated firm with a ton of reviews and it's in downtown Houston? Really? Where?

Reading the review, I realize they are not in downtown Houston, but offer design services over the web. Hmm. I read the reviews.

Some people are unhappy with the business model, which is crowd-sourced architecture/design set up as a competition. You, the client, put up a monetary reward with your design requirements and you set a due date. At that due date, you judge (rank) the designs you receive based on how well they meet your requirements and how well you like them. 1st place is awarded 60% of the award money, 2nd gets 30%, and 3rd gets 10%. Then the results become public on the member's side of the website and everyone can see them. It's like hiring multiple designers to offer you solutions to the same issue because that is exactly what you are doing.

The satisfied customers give absolutely glowing reviews and explain that it requires substantial effort on your part, but you get out of it what you put into it. These designers are from across the globe and rely on you to answer questions about site measurements, things you might like, etc. We have no problem with that.

I visit ArcBazar's website. There are some very interesting projects on there, with some very creative design solutions. I'm intrigued. I start visiting ArcBazar periodically, really going through some of the projects to read over the design req from the client, read the exchanges between the client and the designers, and review the winning designs (as well as those that didn't rank).

We watch for a couple of months and decide that this is how we want to design the work to be done on our new house. Time to write up our requirements. Hoo-boy. I spent several weeks working on this in my spare time and then, last weekend, that is all either of us worked on.
We posted our competition Monday night, with a deadline of 8 weeks (we thought our project was too complicated to expect something sooner). As of Friday morning, we have 10 designers signed up from 4 continents. The site says that many designers won't sign up until near the very end of the project, when they know they will have something to submit (as they now get penalized in the points systems for signing up for a competition but not submitting a design). Our first entrant was from Albania. We now have 2 from Albania, 2 from US, and 1 each from Serbia & Herzegovenia, France, Mexico, Georgia (Republic of), Morocco and Nigeria. The general consensus is that 25-50% of the designers will actually submit plans.

Yeah, we're pretty excited about handling our design this way. The average number of designs you'll get is 9, though I've seen a few competitions lately with upwards of 2 dozen designers.

Our competition posting is available only to ArcBazar members, but signup to the site is free. If you are interested, you can create an account and see what we have requested. (If you do, let us know if you see anything that we missed!) It's a neat place to browse around, too.

To bring you up to date on the Old House

Site: Old House

Well. It’s been an… interesting… 3 months since the last update. In July, we hit a brick wall when the architectural firm we had hired went…completely unethical on us. The Architect had us working over July 4th holiday to get product selections together. Which we faithfully did, working ourselves hour after hour, missing holiday celebrations (and rest) to work on the house project and we got the selections in an Excel spreadsheet to The Architect on July 5th. Because, by golly, according to The Architect, we would be going to bid on July 8 or 9th at the latest and he needed this info for The Schedules. He had also invoiced us for The Drawings and we hand-delivered The Payment on July 5th to him along with our product selections. (Yeah, you can go ahead and say, “uh-oh” now.)

Then, there was this quiet, “oh, we need the structural engineer’s drawings yet” (The Architect’s responsibility, per The Contract, and we had informed him that we had received, signed, and paid the contract for the Structural Engineer on July 2) and we went home, still convinced we’d be contacting contractors on Monday (7/8) or Tuesday… or Friday at the latest to set up appointments to come see our project and then submit bids. By July 11, we had asked The Architect for the revised Electrical Drawings to review for the inevitable errors, and we found them. The page they sent us was still wrong. So we e-mailed our request for a full set of The Drawings to review. And we got…

Silence. We sent email. Left voice mail. Sent more email. Nothing. Nothing at all.

I ask Roy to call them near 5pm on 7/22, and The Assistant (who is not an Architect) answered and said that The Architect is out until 7/29, and had (ostensibly) said not to give us the plans. He didn’t know why.

Have I mentioned that we had confirmed that our check had been cashed on 7/11? By now, even Roy is disturbed by their behavior.

So, on Tuesday morning, 7/23, I called the Structural Engineer. The only set of drawings they have for our project is from 6/5. They don’t know if those are current, so can’t schedule a meeting with us, and they will call The Architect for a current set of The Drawings. So we wait.

On 7/29, we e-mail The Architect. Again. And state that the Structural Engineer still needs a current set of Drawings so that he can meet with us. The Assistant e-mails the drawings to the engineer and us. I don’t look at them until I get home at 7 that night. They are, of course, completely screwed up, with multiple layers on top of each other, which means doors conflicting with doors, opening opposite directions overlapping in the same opening, etc. Just a big, stinking pile of poo – you can’t tell what kind of opening it is or or how big it is or where it is located along the load-bearing walls for which the engineer will have to specify construction requirements to redistribute the load correctly. The kicker is that the Structural Engineer has an appointment with us for 8 AM The Following Morning.

I e-mail our displeasure and distress and dire need of accurate plans to The Architect and also leave a voice message. Nothing vulgar, not even any curse words, just obvious distress over the FUBAR’d plans and the impending arrival of the Structural Engineer the next morning, but of course it's evening, so we hear nothing. So we find the last version we have, from the end of June, and we use that copy during the on-site walk-through with the engineer and give that to him to work from.

Then we receive an offended e-mail from The Assistant telling us we need to act more professionally towards our design team…kid you not. They issue Drawings to a Structural Engineer that are so screwed up as to be unusable and we get taken to task for not being professional? (As a friend said to me, “I wasn’t aware there were professional homeowners.”) And, just in case you are wondering, no, we are given no apology for their screw-up.

It takes us ANOTHER MONTH to get Drawings that are correct and that we are satisfied with (The Architect isn’t in any hurry, as he has His Money from us). On the bright side, we did discover in the meantime a better hot water system, so we researched like crazy and changed that spec mid-August.

We were finally issued Construction Drawings on 8/27 (sans The Schedules, I might add - we wound up having to create every one of those ourselves). Then began the calling of contractors either we had used before or with whom friends or others had worked. None of them ever called us back. Too busy in the hot Houston market.

Over the Labor Day weekend, we went on Angie’s List and looked for contractors and found a highly reviewed one. It’s a family affair with 3 brothers and 35 full-time staff and they have used the same trade subs for 20 years. Right now, we are expecting a bid from him the first week of October and he would be able to begin work in November.

Since 8/27, we have heard nothing, NOTHING, from The Architect, who is supposed to be helping us locate contractors to get bids and help us evaluate those bids, etc. I personally put him out of my mind as he is a huge aggravation (and source of stress) to me. When I got home on 9/25, what should be at my place on the table but…An Invoice from The Architect wanting payment for “Completion of Bidding Phase”. Seriously. 

No, we are most certainly NOT paying for a Phase that has not been completed! A letter to that effect, that his invoice is premature, will be mailed on Friday.

Roy doesn’t want to terminate the contract with The Architect, so we’re continuing on, but Roy will be responsible for all interactions with the Architect. Period. I want nothing to do with either The Architect or especially The Assistant. Ever again.

Someday, when we no longer have an open contract with The Architect, I will write reviews every place I can find on-line to write reviews. I expect better treatment from a fellow Rice grad, especially one who teaches a course on Building Your Dream Home through Rice’s Continuing Studies. It has been an unbelievably bad experience for a significant sum of money. We never would have hired him if I had seen even one review that outlined his business practices and attitude (poor and poorer).

Tomorrow, happier news: The New House Design Phase has begun!

Drawings and more drawings

We just returned our annotations on the 2nd round of drawings to the architects on Thursday. We had thought this round of review should go very quickly, with few changes, but...not quite. Some requests had not made it into the plan (from the 1st round of comments) and we changed our minds on several things, too, as we worked out logistics. This review did go faster than the 1st round of drawing comments, though, which seemed like it took forever, as we were researching and specifying elements as we annotated.

For your viewing pleasure, you will want to go to the actual blog (clicking a picture works in my e-mail, at least) so that you can view the PNGs large. (Once the picture loads in your web browser, click it again, and that should make it as large at it can get.)

In the demolition plan, you can see the layout of the house as it is today and where we plan to remove walls (darkest gray) and other stuff (cabinets, etc.). (All of the doors are being replaced which is why they are dark gray.)

This is the proposed floor plan we received in round 2. (Ignore the dark elliptical shapes - those are notes where drywall floating & texturing is required where we removed the 50 year old closet rods and installed Elfa shelving.)

The craziest thing we had to do was completely specify electrical placement - outlets, switches, lights, fans, etc. It was daunting, to say the least. In order to actually make a real-life plan, we decided to choose our lighting fixtures in as many locations as we could (so that took some time). They took this mess:

and made this:

They did really well interpreting what we wanted from all of the notes, but we still had changes to make to the 2nd round of electrical plan drawings. (However, I don't have an electronic copy as the copier/scanner at work absolutely refused to cooperate).

Here is the kitchen to be (you can get the compass mapping on the proposed floor plan). It is almost 35 linear feet of cabinets, more if you count the upper cabinets above the range and the refrigerator. Yes, that is two dishwashers you see. My friend from Rice, Susie, put 2 dishwashers in her new home in Missouri City over a decade ago and has never regretted doing it. We can definitely see the value, so we're doing it, too.

East wall: Doorway on the left goes to the sitting area, doorway on the right goes to the dining room.

South and west walls:

Kitchen island and north wall, which looks out the big window to the pond and waterfall. To the left are the converging glass pocket doors to the study. This formerly dark kitchen should now be flooded with light!

We have all of the tile selected for the floors and bathrooms, and even most of the bathroom and lighting fixtures. There is still so much more to decide though! (And to think, once I'm finished with the old house, I still have to do this for the new house...although, we have been doing a lot of product selection for the two houses when we go out looking.)

When the leaning Tower of Pisa becomes the Titanic

Those of you who have visited the new house might have been shown our own personal leaning Tower of Pisa, aka the utility pole that wasn't upright and pulled mightily on our electric line and phone line.

I complained about it to every CenterPoint Energy employee I ever saw at a neighbor's house (and that was several). Most of them said, "it'll be fine, I've seen much worse." Finally, one day last October, I called CPE -again- and used the "right words" to get to a live person and then continued using the "right words" (imminent danger, I believe) to get someone sent out to evaluate the pole immediately.

Thus, we got a red service tag on our door letting us know that he'd put in a straightening order, but "pole is fine until straighten".

Fast forward several months. I happened to be home when I saw a truck carrying utility poles driving down the street. I went out to meet the guy and found out we were getting a new pole as part of a larger pole replacement project in the area. Although the pole is technically not in our yard, the only access to the pole is via our yard (which we will want to take into consideration as we redesign our garage and access to our backyard, which is currently wide open to the driveway and not gated).

Weeks have gone by. The end street had several poles replaced weeks ago, but still our new pole languishes, killing off our neighbor's grass (with our trees out front, they couldn't deposit the pole at our house).

Then, on Saturday, 4/13, (yes, the day after the great Tile Move), as we were about to lie down for a nap, the most awful noise started. It sounded like the whole house was groaning and grinding. Then it stopped. Then it started up again, mere seconds later. Roy later likened it to what the Titanic sounded like when it struck the iceberg in the movie. It was horrible.

Then, the crashing and popping and undefinable noises started. We wondered whether a tree had fallen onto the house and power lines. I ran to the back door (utility room), which was open (for the kitties to come and go as they pleased), and discovered all of our utility lines laying on the ground, phone line pooled in loops and draped up at our door and on the deck, electric line draped over one of the worm bins, etc. (Yes, I freaked out, as both cats were outside.) This all transpired in maybe half a minute.

Then the zapping and zonking and popping started up again. The middle set of lines on the pole (where the houses connect to) were crossing in the trees and sparking and smoking, etc. The trash trees that had been allowed to grow under the lines were all that was keeping the pole and its two transformers from crashing all the way to the ground.

 

That was about 11:30 AM that Saturday. Over the course of the next 6 hours, we talked to lots of CPE folks and we took lots of pictures and video. They initially started to winch the pole vertical using only human labor. Later, when they decided that the pole could snap and swing at any minute and become a serious danger to the workers, they left and brought back a motorized winch to assist the manual winches. (I highly recommend you watch the video - I think it's pretty interesting.)

The end result is that the broken pole is bolted to a stub pole, which is tied off to one of our galvanized fence posts.

The broken pole is further tied off to our tree up by our deck. Yeah. It's quite the sight to see.

You can see from the pictures of the base of the pole that it is completely rotted (or termite-eaten) inside. But, "it'll be fine".

Oh - and the Titanic-sounding noises? That was our weatherhead and house holding up the pole and its two transformers, then the stranded metal wire connecting our line to the pole giving way under incredible stress. Most awful sounds to have experienced, reverberating through our house via the attic.

Minor correction

We realized that we didn't move 2 tons of tile on Friday - we moved 4 tons of tile. We put 2 tons of tile onto dollies in batches of roughly 250 and 500 pounds each trip upstairs - and then we had to pick up that tile and put it in our storage unit.

So, we moved 2 tons, twice, which equals 4 tons. And we lived to tell about it!

Insanity confirmed

We survived the moving of almost 2 tons (3,941.30 pounds in 75 boxes, to be precise) of tile today. I only wound up with a few smashed fingertips. We've both taken some Advil (and will take more later, I'm sure) and Roy said he is beginning to feel it across his shoulders. I'm sure we'll both be pretty stiff and sore tomorrow.

Yes, I helped move tile. The larger and slightly heavier (54 lb) boxes (the Poseidon Lake tile for the pool room) were actually easier to move as you could tilt them and pivot them. The boxes of Unika Crema (50 lbs each) were small and very dense (plus we moved them last) and I found it hard to get a good handle on a box, so Roy had to move most of that 27 boxes.

Some of the boxes of the Poseidon Lake were pretty wet and the cardboard holding the tiles together somewhat disintegrated/disintegrating. When we saw that, we were kind of like, "well, I guess we could have stored them in the new house's garage which gets wet when it rains. Seems like they are used to it." But that was a little late as they had already been unloaded at the storage unit facility by then.

Ah, well. You'll all have your chance to help us move the 2 tons of tile again - into a vehicle and then to a house, so never fear! There's always next time!