This Girl’s House

I’m not sure if I mentioned that Stevie and I live together.  Well, we are starting to pool our belongings.  He has a house with a large large garage, and I have a house with an average size 2 car garage.  Because my house is newer, and larger, we’re living here.  But anytime you have 2 people who have seen 50 years, you’re going to have lots of possessions.   Most of his items are of the “garage” variety, and that means we will need to build a new garage.  We wanted a 60 by 40, but we’re going to start with a 30 by 40 garage and go from there.  The thing is, because of finances and other issues, we’re going to try and do the job ourselves, and pay as we go along. 

I had already planned to build a garage and had bought a plan last year, but we didn’t find the plan to be suitable by itself.  While 1200 square feet, it was the wrong shape.  When it was just me, I thought that having another garage would be great to store some extra stuff, and to have a work shop where I could persue my hobbies.  Steve plans to use the garage to work on cars and he’d like a lift.  Actually, I would prefer a lift too, since I’ve always thought it was so dangerous for guys to work on cars using nothing more than jack stands.  Garage floors can be cold too.

We also wanted walls 16 feet high.  We checked back with Behm Designers, where I had purchased the original garage plan, but we didn’t find anything suitable.  That was a shame because I really liked their garage plans, and they had quite a variety.  I liked the designer too, Jay Behm.  When I spoke to him last year, he seemed like a really smart guy.

We found a local designer, who offered to design our garage for a really reasonable fee.  Good thing too because there seems to be so much variation in pricing among architects.  One guy I talked to wanted to charge me $7000 for a garage plan.  I was hoping we could build the garage by ourselves for just a little more than that.  The garage plan I bought last year from Behm Designer cost me $110.  Our new designer says he going to charge us $120.  That seems like a sweet deal.

Then we’ll need a engineer, and I contacted one last week who is going to charge 40 cents a square foot.   That too seems reasonable, although what do I have to conpare it too?  It’s not like there is anything written down about that I can find about what the price variation is for engineering.  The other question, just what is the engineering for?  What’s involved in that work?   This was what it was like to build the house.  People would tell you that you need to do or that.  You don’t argue, you don’t have time.  You just have to get it done, and along the way you find out what service you’re actually arranging for. 

Hopefully, we’ll have the plans in place within the next 3 weeks.  Then we have to finalize the site plan arrangements, and then we submit to the county for a permit.  God knows what that will cost.  I wish I could say that I knew what I was doing because I had done this all before, but I don’t.

It was cold today, but it sure was beautiful.  I hit the door at 5 pm armed with my shovel and my potato rake.  In an hour, I was able to load and unload the cart twice.  The berm on the left hand side is starting to come along.  I’m making real progress.  I’ve basically covered the area that I want landscaped with paper and at least one layer of fill.  It felt real good to be working outdoors in the sunshine, even though the air was a bit crisp.  It’s hard to believe that it’s still so cool this time of year.  It’s been averaging about mid forties.  I wasn’t the only one outdoors.  Stevie has been working on the trees that fell during the great winter storm for months now.  They were huge trees, tall and wide in girth, so large that I can’t even straddle them.  And so many fell, or are snagged in other trees now, which represents an even more dangerous situation.  The only thing to do though is to work on them one by one.  We will have wood for many winters.

This Sunday, I spent 5 hours working outside, and I only stopped when it began to hail.  Moving fill, digging into mounds, shoveling it out of the cart, or if necessary, placing it in spot with the use of wheelbarrel and bucket.  But when I stopped, I immediately became stiff.  It’s been a few hours and my hands are swollen from calluses and cuts, even though I wore thick leather gloves.  But I did make some progress.  A neighbor stopped and told me that things were looking good,  but for the longest time, he had been confused with what I meant to do with the rocks and boulders that I just dropped out there by the corner of the driveway.  For some time, I had been just dropping boulders that I found on either side of the driveway.  I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have enough time or boulders to do the job.  Sometimes, I think that my retired neighbors forget how it is when you work 60 hours a week.  It’s hard to squeeze in time to make improvements on your house, and what might take them a summer, will take me years.  Oh well, I can’t really worry about what other people think or say.