This is the start of my blog on our new house. I'm a little behind on dates so I will bring you up to speed in the next few postings.
2/2/06 - We just purchased our new …sorry, very rundown….house. The lot is beautiful – it's a big L shape 300’ deep by 150’ wide at the widest part of the L and a babbling creek running through it surrounded by large California oaks. Very quiet and peaceful in close proximity to the city and all our routines. In short, a fabulous location that is a real hidden gem.
But… the state of the house is a nightmare. There is a main house, 2 illegal apartments in back, a large shed/playhouse, gazebo and old deck.
The illegal apartments look like they have been abandoned for at least 10 years. Rumor has it that the owner had a Days Inn nearby and sent his overflow clients here! The City shut it down back in 1993 from what I can make of the code violation posting on both units.
The main house looks like it has big problems too with dry rot, water leakage damage, termites, rats, trees damaging the foundation and other issues. The inside looks ok but the layout is poorly done with a wing of bedrooms on the right leading to a family room that requires you to walk right through a pink 1950s bathroom. The driveway snakes along the left side of the house to a 2 car garage, one of which cannot be used due to the angle behind the house.
Looking beyond the current state of affairs, we see a great way to transform this house and property – tear down the illegal apartments to clear the lot, build an addition on the back of the house and with the slope allow for a lower level basement that will be mainly above ground. Effectively a two story at the very back but all the main living on a single floor, very similar to our previous home floor plan which we liked a lot.
As part of the purchase process, our agent, Samia Morgan of Keller Williams, recommended we talk to a contractor she highly recommended about the estimated costs of the fixing of the fixer upper. We scheduled an onsite visit by Brian Smart of Structural FX. He was really helpful in giving us rough cost estimates of various renovations – kitchen, bathroom, adding extensions, demolition, city fees etc. He also seemed like a very efficient contractor that paid a lot of attention to detail, was on time and on budget - what a find!
Brian recommended avoiding a two story addition as this would take 9 months to get City approval. He advised that a one story total rebuild would take around 1 month for approval. He also advised that if we started moving walls around and he had to open walls and ceilings up, all the 1950s construction would have to be brought up to code and that it would cost slightly more, be much faster and end up with a much better house if we just demolished everything. By tearing it all down, we would also have complete freedom to build the floor plan we really wanted.
Brian recommended that we work with an architect and engineering firm, ASI Engineering, that he really liked to work with. He said they had a nack for transforming his building ideas into plans quickly, elegantly and efficiently. We also visited a few of the homes he built and a few that ASI had architected, which were beautiful. Everyone we spoke to opened their doors to show us the work and had nothing but high praise for Structural FX’s team craftsmanship, efficiency, cost and after build follow up. We met with ASI and liked their portfolio of work. We met the architect, Vanni, and the engineer, Amir, who would be working closely with us.
We did not really shop around the architect work as we felt comfortable with the personal references we got for ASI and cross checked pricing with a few of our friends who had built their own houses. Their rates were very reasonable.
2/4/06 We asked Vanni to come by and see our current house to get an idea of what we liked and disliked. He toured the house and took pictures. He said he would come back to us with a design in 2-3 weeks. We said that was not how we wanted to work. First, we wanted him to produce a few block diagram rough sketches that we could review to get the internal layout right.
2/8/06 Vanni produced three options in just a few days. We combined two and started iterations of this process – 6 times in all – until we got the floor plan we wanted. However, he then came back with the square footage and we were about 20% over budget. It was disappointing that he had not taken that into account when presenting us the options. So we had to do a couple more iterations to cut it back – squeezing some room sizes, changing the layout a little. Finally we had it right and to budget.
This process took about 3 weeks in all, very fast and efficient. We had to make a lot of the tough decisions right up front –how big the kitchen and family rooms (our two most important) would be, the orientation of our home offices where we would be working a lot and wanting to see the backyard, the location of stairs leading downstairs to be non-intrusive and little kid friendly, the number of fireplaces, location of windows and size of windows, skylights, closets (a big problem in our last house was insufficient storage for a family with kids), entrance area to facilitate dropping all that kid stuff, mail, groceries, computers etc when we would come home and a lot of other nit picky details. It forced a lot of long discussions up front and should ultimately save us on changeorders later.
We also found it REALLY helpful to have our contractor involved during the initial drawing phase. He was able to give instant feedback on what would cost a lot or save money in the design
He also helped streamline the design for faster build. We had our real estate agent Samia also comment on resale value for things we were planning to add or remove. That was also very helpful.
Vanni then worked his magic to produce the 3 dimensional layout – front, back, sides, decks etc. We were very happy with his first pass and made just a few modifications. All the work he was doing would be needed by the City for permit approval so we were processing that in parallel.
2/24/06 Then the dreaded call came from our contractor – “are you sitting down...? the City changed its permitting process on January 1 and it is more complicated now to get approval for a single story renovation that involves substantial demolition of the existing structure." We would have to send our plans to everyone in the neighborhood within a 300 foot radius (105 houses in all), hold a public meeting with them to review our plans, then file formally with the City, wait for their review, then re-mail everyone again to let them know of pending final approval by the City, wait for any comments again, then mail again that the final approval will be granted and finally get our demolition permit – a process taking 3 months. Fortunately we sold our other house before this and had just moved into a rental close by with a month to month term on the back end and a nice landlord!
3/1/06 After a few days delay when the City's label printer broke and the part time person who printed the labels did not get them out too fast, we finally stuffed the envelopes and mailed them out.
3/12/06 The town meeting ended up being quite nice – we met all our immediate neighbors, served up cookies, cheese and crackers and drinks to make it a social event too. Out of 105 mailings, only 5 people showed up - mostly immediate neighbors - and there was consensus that our build would be good for everyone. One neighbor had stories of unruly guests running around screaming at midnight and wiffs of pot floating over the patio during BBQs, all because of the illegal apartments. They were very anxious to see it all go and a nice new house raise the values of their properties! We were actually happy we went through this process - none of the neighbors would be surprised during our build and we got to meet them all right up front and ask their input.
3/20/06 We submitted our City application and I made a point of visiting the inspector to ask if our plans would be complete before submitting them. He said that 99% of submissions are not complete and get a rejection letter asking for the missing information delaying the process. I relayed this to my contractor who did not like hearing that and he took extra measures to ensure everything would be in order. We became the 1% that did not get rejected for incomplete docs and probably saved a few weeks in the process by investing this time.
4/10/06 We did the final mailing and had to wait until 4/22 for any further comments. No one had any. The City approved our plans on 4/25 and did the final mailing to everyone again that they approved and would be issuing our demolition permit on 5/10. We have scheduled demolition for 5/15 and a fence is soon going up around the property to secure it.
