Thursday, July 5, 2012

On our way!

The last month has been very busy and extremely productive -- so much so that today I actually filed the application for the building permits. We've come a long way!

Today we met with Hammer & Hand again, and although we were hoping to finalize the budget, we often don't know how things will go until we're there. Almost as soon as we arrived, though, Aaron (director of operations, and our budget guru) took a call from Peter, our lead carpenter, who announced that he had just spoken with the fire marshal who says we do not need fire sprinklers -- a huge savings -- and that the fire marshal would send a letter to that effect to the county. Woohoo!!! That is awesome news -- and offsets the costs of the windows we want!

That started our meeting out right, and after clarifying a few other things we realized that there was no longer any need to wait to file for the permits -- the budget is where we need it to be and we're all excited to move forward. Bryan and I weren't sure we'd get to this point, but we are so excited -- and relieved -- to have made it.

Now we wait for all the permits to be granted, and hopefully we'll break ground in a month or so. In the meantime, I'm hoping for some downtime; the last couple months of manic price-shopping for everything that goes into a house has worn me out. The upside to this is that it's done -- we may make some tweaks to our picks, but the grunt work is mostly behind us.