There is hope. My wife and I spent the entire day visiting store after store, and construction depot after construction depot, researching the cost of construction materials. We had not done this since we extended our current house a few years ago, and it felt good to see what is out there. Luckily, we found lots of material that is cheaper than our architect’s estimates, so perhaps he was right after all – the cost estimate is on the high side and we can build a nice bamboo house instead of a cheap bamboo shack after all…

Just kidding. We have so much emotional capital invested in this house-to-be that we just have to make it happen. We continue to work on the cost, and on the design. There are several things we can still do, without having to compromise on the size or the design:

• We can select much simpler finishing materials for non-critical areas, especially in the basement
• We can even leave selected rooms unfinished, and finish them over time as and when we can afford it.
• We don’t have to select fancy brand materials, but can go with more “practical” alternatives: good quality products from lesser known brands
• We can wait installing any non-critical systems – who needs piped-in music in the toilet anyway?

I received the first-pass cost estimate today. The architect felt that he had to call me up and warn me, before his staff emailed it, but it still took me a while to pick myself off the floor once I’d reviewed it. Yikes! A third over budget!

I felt like cutting two floors off the house and switching to bamboo instead, but after a long phone conversation with John he had reassured me somewhat. This budget assumes high-end material and expensive contractors, in the knowledge that the final result would be cheaper. He wanted to set a top limit for the cost, to manage expectations, and he used a standard estimate for the cost per square meter, not wanting to make assumptions as to how low-end we were willing to go with the house. I was somewhat mollified, but vowed to research in detail some of these costs.

The first set of detailed drawings was turned over today. There are a lot of details that go into these drawings, and it seems like we’re just getting started! Most of the drawings look like the previous ones we agreed on, but with much more detail on them:

I am fine with these drawings. Other drawings, however, I had more problems with:

Now, I used to be a design manager with Timex, I used to teach robotics, and I can design high-speed semiconductor test equipment from scratch, but when the discussions get to gravel beds, steel rafters and sagrods, I feel a little out of my element. I think need to do some reading here!

Another thing that scares me is that we are already trying to decide the details of the roof framing, and the height of the toilet paper rolls, and I’m just getting used to the fact that we’re building a house in the first place! But John assures me that this particular set of drawings is to be used to seek a building permit only. We can always change the drawings later, he says…

I met today with our architect’s electrical engineer and we discussed my proposed wiring for the house. I thought he was going to faint. The only reason he didn’t bolt from the room I think was the prospect of making money actually installing all this wiring for the “stupid house owner”. I showed him a 32-page PowerPoint presentation outlining my thoughts on the wiring. Every other slide looked something like this…

…and every other slide contained a written summary of all the sub-systems, including Power, Telephones, LAN, Home Control System, TV, CCTV, Sensors, TV “Art”, Panic Buttons, Lights, Outdoor Systems, and Audio/Video. I shall be covering most of these topics in detail over the next year or so, as we design and construct the house.

I have to admit that I completely understand my wife’s questions on the necessity of all of this wiring. My stand is that it is much cheaper to install it now rather than after the walls have been put up; it’s an investment, since it increases the value of the house; and it allows me to get more serious with an old hobby - Home Automation - which at some point might even become a business.

In the end, depending on what the cost comes out to, I might meet her half-way and switch to wireless or power line-based solutions for some of the most wiring-intensive sub-systems, such as the LAN and the Home Control System. However, my experience tells me that issues such as interference, range, bandwidth and security makes for a less-than-simple decision. I’ll return to this topic once I receive the proposal from the electrical engineer, and see how much wiring really has to go into the walls.

We got the first perspective drawings today, and they’re looking great, we think! We like them so much; this design is pretty much final. These drawings also show much better the interplay in colors and surface structures between the white concrete and the brown wood.

I laughed so hard when I saw the BMW parked in front of the house in this sketch; I guess the artist was hoping we’d have some serious budget to spend. Hopefully our grey Toyota will look just as nice in the driveway. I do like the way the wood frames the windows nicely on the second floor, and the way it hides the downstairs bathroom window. The wood paneling above the main entrance also helps to make the house seem less imposing. We’ll have to come up with a better design for the fence, though; we don’t like the one proposed here.

The rear also came out pretty well, except that we’d like to redo the fence here also, and use a different kind of stone for the exterior basement wall (something darker and in mixed sizes). The many windows come out better here than in the initial design, and this design looks like it might actually work. We’ll have to work through the details of the windows to determine cost – the fixed glass windows that don’t open should come out much cheaper. We also like the wooden “grills” below the windows in the Master’s bedroom, which hide sliding vents that open up to increase air circulation. The house is located quite high up, and we expect to not need to use air conditioning on most nights of the year.