How many years of DIY

This week we found out that we passed Electrical Rough In and Plumbing Rough inspections. Woot woot! We had to make a tiny tweak to framing and change out a window. On the exterior progress is really underway. The siding is nearly complete as of the end of the day yesterday. I was walking toward the house with my sister in law and it really struck me how much I like the volumes we played with to give the house it's form. I really can't wait to see it painted. This past week I got to take some family through the house and it was neat to see their reactions.

We knew we would have some things come up along the way that we couldn't see going into it. This week we found out that the water line going to the street had some repairs at some point and they didn't use copper. John, our PM, has his guys digging a hole in the back to see if we can see where the two materials meet. Keeping my fingers crossed that we don't have to dig it up from the street. It just makes me happy that we are doing this work ourselves rather than buying from an unknown developer, who may or may not have addressed the issue properly. We are essentially building out an identical basement (different stairs) and people wondered why we wouldn't just leave the basement as it was. For us it was simple. We wanted to be certain everything was working perfectly and this is one of those things we might not have found if we didn't take everything down to the 4 walls. Plus, we now have furred out walls for insulation so I'm pretty pumped about having a warm basement in the winter.

I always tell my clients to build in a contingency for unknown expenses and this is a perfect example of why you do that. 9 times out of 10 I have found these "hidden surprises" to be an issue with electrical or plumbing, neither of which are things you can ignore.