Dilemmas, Decisions and Budgets!

Here I am again… alive and mostly well. 

We are now in a challenging phase of the birth of Cooper’s Folly.

Well it’s all been challenging but this stage is perhaps the most demanding. I’ll proceed to tell you why!

We’ve had a long time to plan the house and much of it was done long ago.

And now we’re up against the mirror looking at our own nostrils, we are realizing that there won’t be any MORE chances to change or have second thoughts.  For instance:

• I was shopping at a countertop installation literally five years ago and it was a bright sunny day. Outside the establishment was a huge slab of coral granite, reflecting the sunlight and  basking in its own beauty. It was literally breathtaking!   Personally I have never been a fan of granite for countertops mainly because of the really ugly materials people often choose.  I  had seen so many orangey big-patterned slabs in houses that I disliked them and  nicknamed them “tabby cat “ granite.

Yuk!

          But coral? Who knew granite came in such beautiful colors? Not me!

• So Paul and I started a granite marathon to review all that there was available.  There are at least a dozen large halls around the Seattle/Tacoma area which contain several hundred slabs of granite – a hall of slabs like a giant maze.  Paul christened them slabrynths.  (A typical example of his humor.. )  If you put me in a slabrynth I could pick out this coral granite from the front door.   I loved it!  

• And for four years I wanted it.

• And then one day—whoop!  I was over it… and figured out that I didn’t want it after all, and broke out in goose-bumps at the thought that I could have spent 8,000 little old Murrican dollars on 68 square feet of counter top and borped every time I looked at it.  I did eventually choose another one and I think it will be gorgeous. Hopefully I will continue to think so until I sell the place or die, whichever comes sooner!

Well multiply that dilemma by a factor of 1000 and you might begin to get a feel for the challenge we face on a daily basis.

To put together a home of this size and nature (it’s big and complicated) a MILLION (ok –lots) of decisions have to be made on what we like AND what we can also afford!

So for the last five years we’ve stood in Hardware stores and looked at faucets, (aka taps).  That work paid off well.  Our local hardware store gave us a nice 20% off coupon as a “welcome to the neighborhood” and had a limit of 200 dollar savings.  Within a week of moving here we went out and bought five toilets, umpteen sets of faucets,  lights, mirrors and granite tiles, earning our maximum discount.  You know that garage that is bursting at the seams?  Well it’s bursting even harder now and that stuff is all piled up by the back door of the garage leaving me JUST enough room to get to my freezer.  We also saw and bought four VERY  super deal shower sets which we might just hate when we install them.  But they have fancy jets for your belly-button so – impulse buy! (My doctor might be reading this so –er, sorry, navel!)   Four impulse buys!  If we end up NOT liking them we will not like them four times over.  (OK—two shower heads in the master bath, --no more saying “who’s showering first,” a ha-- and one in each of two guest rooms.)  FOUR! We don‘t muck about, we go for it!  So that piece of homework stuck with us and thank goodness. However, we weren’t at ALL prepared when it comes to the bathroom walls etc.

For two solid months recently we have hung out so much in our local hardware store tiling department that one of the sales-ladies is now hugging me when she sees me!

Every bathroom has:

Something on the floor; something on the walls of the shower, something on the floor of the shower, something around the tub at the bottom, something around the TOP of the tub deck, something along the wall under the window, a back-splash behind the vanity (or not) a counter top and yet more tile behind the toilet.  Every one of these areas need an edge or matching bullnose and a decorative accent.  And it must not look like a tiling sampler with somebody showing off how good they can lay tile.  (Trust me I’ve been in million dollar homes where this 

 is a big problem! Groan.)  That’s just one bathroom and I have five of them to do.  (OK, one   master, two guest rooms, one powder room and a small shower upstairs off the “we call it the entertainment room but who knows what the hell will eventually end up there, room”.)

This has been so challenging that Paul has been in a total state of confusion over it. I work in pictures in my head and that’s not data.  Paul needs DATA!  He’s a lovable techno-nerd!

We started by choosing the basic vanity units.  One has to have an anchor!  Then we haunted the bone yards at two local “slabrynths” until we found off-cuts of granite that we liked for each of the three major bathrooms. (Granite off-cuts are cheaper, see!) One we bought and moved.  SO—the counter-tops are chosen by me visiting with bits of cupboard and tile to make sure that it would all look beautimous when installed together.   But we had many conversations involving “master bathroom, red bathroom, vs brown bathroom or “guest one vs guest two,” until we were totally punchy!

Brown bathroom samples

Master Bathroom, pebbles on the shower floor and bubble blend at the top. Seemingly bright but lots of dark grey cabinets along one wall so colors and bubbles to brighten up the room. The whole room was designed around that dark grey tile with the vine in top left corner - -totally having a love affair with that!  (Who has a love affair with a tile fer goodness' sake? Answer-- someone who is OLD!)

  In the master bath we are using BUBBLE tiles and -(I am mistress of aesthetics, P is master of the engineering,) so I worked for weeks to get a special color blend to go with the shower floor.   We finally succeeded. The bubble tile folk are looking forward to making them for us. This is what bubble tiles look like but in different colors.

That's actually a cherry red cabinet piece and hence the RED bathroom title.  Fun pebble tiles about the room in various places.  For comfort a SLICED version on the shower floor.  

Eventually and not being totally blonde, I sat down and built a spreadsheet with 80 lines in it calling out the name, location, reference number and cost of every tile for every room.   And how many of them we would need and what they cost.  The tiling bill for materials is just over ten thou people!   But how nice and clean it will be eh?   Well maybe.  A couple of the selected tiles were "discontinued" or going out of stock for months-- so - we bought what we believe we needed and they TOO are sitting in boxes in the garage.  

SO that’s just the tiles!   

Next we began slaving over lights, having chosen the wrong ones and Alec Trician won't install them as he believes them to be a fire hazard!

We knew exactly where our kitchen cabinets were coming from for almost five years and then BOOM, I decided that there was too much work and too many boxes associated with that strategy and now some ace lady is reworking the cabinets so they come all ready made in boxes.  (And more $$ of course!)  I may have to sell my bears for money!

Nah... not the bears-- I'll have to hock some baubles or something?

I have been set for at least a year on my oven. THEN I discovered that some nice young man had given me bum information.  And I went back into the oven abyss again.   Save some money, buy the best? Can a fancy oven be serviced in the boondocks?   Buy the best?  What’s the difference between the five models of the oven I did choose blah blah blah!

What are the regulations on “circulating the air in the kitchen?”   Do I have to have one of those ugly air extractors hanging over my head in the kitchen or can I put in a downdraft behind the cooktops?  Or can I have a fan in ceiling?  If you make the WRONG decision here you can have the COUNTY come along and tell you that you can’t LIVE THERE! (You did read my piece on The COUNTY didn’t you?  They’re still at it!)

And WHICH cook-tops!  Induction or not induction.  (I bought a free-standing induction cook-top and worked with it for a year to help me make up my mind.  NOPE!  Not impressed but it’s great to boil water. We don’t do many boiled water meals as it happens.)

So one by one we struggle through research, cost benefit analyses and come to decisions on those millions of items. (Ok—lots.)

Now I am studying stone veneers for the front walls of the house and how much we need, can we apply it ourselves, and can we afford it. OH YES THAT QUESTION! Trust me the budget question comes up every day as each step of the process costs more than the estimate.

THE COUNTY told us that we need to install something called a FILTRATION trench. It’s installed.  The lovely JOSH from KAT TRAX has been dozering around the site for the last month, and has installed same. It was only 10,000 dollars. Such a deal for something I didn’t know I wanted but had to have anyway.  It might RAIN you know? It’s been raining on that dirt since the dawn of time but now it needs a special trench to “drain the rain” –really?

By now your eyeballs are sore and you are wishing I would tell you what the heck is going ON with the new house!!!!

Ok –

After Josh pulled down and trucked out five loads of trees, stumps and assorted lumber, he dug out the foundations—they had to be unlevel because the bedrock wasn’t.  Josh spotted that and sorted it.

Then DtheB organized the shape of the house to be punched into the lot and there it was—the house to be. I am perturbed saying – why is it so far to the left on the property?  Answer- a geothermal heating system. (Can we afford that? –NO! But clever P found a system that you can order and DIY on the internet. More on that complex story as it develops.)

 Suffice it to say that it’s a huge area of dirt that is as big as a football field and Paul is going to have to take care of it somehow. He THINKS he’s going to get a riding mower! That’s not in the bally budget either……. )

That rectangle of concrete is a free-standing garage for tools and storage known by me as "the man cave!"   That big rock is standing there to protect the well head which hides just behind it.

And then IN THE RAIN somebody came and poured concrete. (I didn’t know you could even DO that but apparently some concrete dude sticks his finger outside, says “how wet is it” applies a wet/dry figure to the mix and lets the rain/humidity complete the mix. Science is such a wonderful thing!)

So the foundations are poured and I’m able to stand, up to my pant legs in mud and say, there’s the kitchen, there’s the front door and stuff like that.  The septic system tank stands majesticaly waiting for Josh to sink in into the ground.  And I can’t wait to use the porta potty—ha!

Now P is asking me to choose the paint for the walls.

But do I want to paint all the walls or not?  NO… so choose something else!  Do you want it all textured or not? If not WHERE?

My head hurts.

By the way I have to continue the story of the Viking, (see the Poulsbo post.) Somebody has adorned the mighty Viking with a red and white hat and 4’ candy canes.  I think he feels incensed at being wussed-up in this way.  Where is your sense of reverence people!  (And yes I tried to take another photo and my camera had eaten its batteries again!)

The smiley faced cookies in the bakery have been replaced by cookies with equally big smiles and Santa Hats!  

And so it goes!

Thanks for reading?

Hugs

Maggie