The Contract; County shenanigans

I've been a little busy so this post has been delayed. Some interesting developments as far as what the County wants before they will give us a building permit; but first, some bits about the building contract. I won't go into a lot of specifics for our case, but this was an excellent source of information on what to ask for in a contract. Looking through the contract our builder gave us showed that most components were there. In addition, looking up builder's info on your local CCB web site can be very informative. The CCB site I've linked to, of course, is the one that would apply in our case but you can see what to expect.

The final word on the contract situation: with some minor changes/additions, we're about ready to sign on the dotted line! About two weeks after that, we will have to be outta here because the bulldozer arrives to knock the old place down....so we have to get cracking on that end of things. We probably will hire a mover to help with the larger items.

Now, about the County. Discussions with their planning folks initially got us pretty excited because they were talking about putting a sidewalk across the entire frontage of the property, and paving the entire distance of the driveway. The former is relatively minor, but could stand out like a sore thumb because we would be the only frontage on the street with a sidewalk. The latter issue could have been very expensive, since the driveway will be >200 feet long. Not to mention that it would be paving over the sensitive roots of some very large Doug Fir trees, which is a big no-no.

However, relative calm returned after some additional details came out. It turns out that they only want about 20 feet of paved driveway, coming off the public road. And the "sidewalk" may only extend a few feet on either side of the driveway, more like an apron. It also can be asphalt instead of concrete so it will look more like an extension of the main road. Our main problem may be people using the apron as a parking spot, which would block access to our place. A "vehicles will be towed" sign might come in handy at some point....

So we will see a slight "bump" in the price but on the larger scheme of things it probably will be less than 1% of the overall budget. Whew.

Summary: a good contract is important; resources are readily available to help configure your contract; calm is recommended when it comes to handling unexpected developments in the project (i.e., get used to the unexpected, 'cause it's gonna happen!).