The Masters House

It has been two years since I wrote my post "The Low-Down on Water Seal for Your Fence" and since then I have become a little wiser. My first bit of wisdom comes in the saying "If a guy offers to stain your fence for about the same amount of money it was going to cost you in materials, let the guy make a buck". I was fortunate this time around that the guy who stained the deck of our new house offered to do our fence as side work for $300. Three 5 gallon buckets of Thompson Water Seal Stain would cost about the same so I took him up on his offer.

Granted, he only stained the fence while I would have stained and protected it with Thompson’s. It was worth it to me though because I got see how he did it and that will save me time and money down the road.

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Now that we are starting to wind down from moving ourselves and moving my brother-in-law into his house (yeah! I have my office back) we are beginning to look at the projects that we want to do around the house. We have talked about a lot of these projects here and there but now we are reaching the point that we have to define them a little more and prioritize them.

Here is a quick list of the projects that we are looking at in their respective categories in their preliminary order:

Outdoor Projects

• Retaining wall in the back yard
• Brink planters in the front flowerbeds and trees
• Side yard fences separating side yards from the back yard
• Trees in the backyard
• Outdoor staircase from the second story deck to the first floor
• Outdoor shed for the garden equipment

Indoor Projects

• Window Tint on the remain windows
• Paint the formal dining room, downstairs bathroom, and my office
• Install the new curved shower rod in the downstairs bathroom
• Install the plastic pads on dining room chairs and table

Garage Projects

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Everyone is going green these days. When I first moved into our new house the first thing I did was to replace all of the incandescent light bulbs in our house with fluorescent light bulbs. In my other house I was able to cut my electric bill in the summer by $100 (see my post Reducing Electricity Bill with LED Lights).

Anyway, our new house has a whole lot more windows especially in the front of the house. These windows get direct sunlight in the afternoon which is usually the hottest part of the day. Both of air conditioning units would pretty much be constantly on just to maintain the temperature in the house. My youngest son and daughter’s windows also faced the front of the house and their rooms would get pretty hot in the afternoon as well.

To date I have installed the tint on all of the front facing windows except the window in my office. Even as I was putting the tint up I could feel the temperate change even though the windows were not in the direct sunlight at the time. Due to the tint being metal based it actually reflects heat in general and not just heat that comes from direct sunlight.

The implications of this are far reaching since your windows are the cause of most of your heat and cooling that escape from your house. I am speculating that the tint will also to help keep heat in the house during the winter as well which will have additional energy savings.

My estimate is that my $150 investment in tinting my front windows could pay for itself within the next 3-4 months in reducing my electricity bill. My bill for the last month was $309 so we will see what happens as the temperature goes up over the next few months. If my bill doesn’t go up I will be happy but I am fully expecting it to go down. According to Gila (the brand of tint I bought) my estimates may be a little high but we will see. You can check out their savings page here - Gila Window Tint.

I’ll keep you posted with my savings.

Technorati Tags: Window Tint, Going Green, Home Improvement, Gila Window Tint, Home Window Tint

Well it has been quite a long time since I have posted here. In Blogoshere that’s a bad thing but I am back never the less.

My drop off in posting was directly related to how busy I became both at work and at home with both house at the same time. At work I got the equivalent of a promotion (I say equivalent because I got the responsibly but not necessarily the title or the money, but both should be coming) so that kept me busy during the day which when I had free time I would blog. With the two houses it was a combination of getting loans done, getting the new house ready to move into, and getting the older house ready for someone else to move into.

So here I am, sitting on my back porch of my new house with the majority of the move-in projects done. This is actually the first time that I have sat out on our second story porch and got to enjoy it. It is nice to be able to sit here with my laptop and type away and watch people walk back and forth to the little neighborhood park we have that is a block away.

The kids are in their individual rooms enjoying their own personal space. My mother and father-in-law were downstairs outside for a while but then retired indoors downstairs to watch TV in the downstairs family room. They eventually retired to their room that is also down stairs.

The house is really nice and has a great setup. Everyone has their own space and can get away to do whatever they need to do uninterrupted. The upstairs is where my wife and I reside with the kids. They all have their space and we have ours. We have our own family room upstairs and in the laundry/utility room we have added a little fridge and microwave so it doubles as a mini kitchen.

I feel so much more at peace in this house then I ever did in the other house. Don’t get me wrong, the other house is great but it just didn’t fit for us the way this one does. Here everything just falls into place and is comfortable.

Anyway, enough of the heartfelt commentary for right now. I will get down into the nitty gritty of everything that has been done at both houses in the days and weeks to come. There is a lot so expect to see plenty of posts.

WOW, that is all I can say - WOW.

Literally on the eve of getting ready to close on the new house that we are building here in Texas I get a reminder of what others are facing around the country.

I took a break this afternoon and started poking around realtor.com to see if we were indeed getting a good price for our new house compared to other previously owned houses around our area. The good news is that we are getting a great deal and that makes me happy .

At the end of poking around my current neighborhood (my new house is in the same neighborhood) I decided to look at the neighborhood that I lived in California when I lived there. The neighborhood was Horsethief Canyon in Corona, California which is in Riverside County. It is actually in an unincorporated region of Riverside County but still has a Corona address. It is actually the last neighborhood before you get to the city of Lake Elsinore.

Anyway, in 2001 I bought a 1450sqft 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath house that at the time was 10 years old (the same model/neighborhood as the one to the right). I bought it for $180K at the time. 2 years later I sold the house for $252K as the market was beginning to take off.

As time went on I would check to see how much similar houses were going for and would kick myself for selling so soon each time I saw the price go up. About a year ago that same model of house in the same neighborhood was going for $439k. I could not believe it. I mean that was over double what I had paid for it a little over 5 years before.

Well today instead of kicking myself I stood in amazement.

The same house today is going for $249K. In the last a year the value of that house has dropped almost $200K. Unbelievable. I can only imagine the person who bought the house a year ago for that much money and what they may be facing today. That same type of house is now selling for less then what I sold it for 5 years ago. Crazy.

To make matters worse there are at least 3 of the same exact houses for sale. The one that I have a picture of here is empty. I can only imagine why.

I really feel for everyone that is at the front of this ship as it sinks. I know how you feel, it happened to me 3 weeks after I bought that house in 2001. I got laid off from my job due to the tech bubble bursting.

Hang in there, things will get better eventually…

In 2 days the house went from having mud on the drywall to having character. This is a list of what happened in the last 2 days:

• All the brick on the outside of the house is done
• Texture on the walls inside of the house
• Baseboards, door, and window trim in every room
• Doors hung in all rooms
• All cabinets in kitchen, bathrooms, and utility room
• Stair banisters in place

All that in 2 days. The had 4 different crews there yesterday alone. It is amazing the progress that they are making on the house.

I think that they may have painted inside today which would be cool.

Yesterday was the first time that I have walked inside of our house that we are building and didn’t have to use my imagination to see how things would look. The drywall guys covered the last remaining places where there were previously just studs.

They also did a coat of mud as well which gets us one step closer to texture on the walls. The texture is significant because our Forman has told us that once the texture is on the walls that he can give us a pretty accurate finish date. That means that early next week we will know when it is time to move and do some final planning.

We should still be looking at the end of March which remarkably is only about a month and a half away. It is hard to imagine that in less then 2 months that I could be sleeping our new house.

There obviously are a lot of things that still need to get done once the texture is applied such as:

• Trim
• Paint
• Tile
• Cabinets
• Appliances
• Final electrical
• Landscaping

All of those things are really on the down slope of getting the house done though and if they keep up the present pace we should be on target for the end of May.

Now if only the brick guys would get it in gear and finish…

So it has been about 2 weeks since I post about the progress on the house. During that time the following items happened:

• We passed inspection for Plumbing and Electrical
• The outside brick was started
• Drywall was hung
• First coat of Drywall mud and tape applied

The builder is not wasting any time in trying to get this house done. I think it is because we are the only ones building a house right now in this neighborhood (they are building spec homes). I also think they want to get us into the home before we change out mind or something. Either way they are getting things done quickly.

Here is a slide show of the progress on the house. I am still messing around with various photo gallery websites to try to determine the one that works the best so please be patient.

That’s right, I spent almost 3 hours  yesterday at the house filming and snapping pictures of the drywall-less walls of our house. The plumbing and the electrical have reached the point that they are ready to be inspected and covered up by insulation and drywall.

I took pictures of the house that we are in right now when it was in the same state but only concentrated on the plumbing in the case we needed any repairs. I kicked myself for not taking more pictures when I converted the formal dining room into a bedroom as I did not know when some of the electrical was. I had to climb around in the attic to figure it out.

This time around I not only took several pictures and angles of the same walls but video along with it. The issue with pictures a lot of times is that it can be difficult to know exactly what you are looking at. With video you have the progression from one place to another so you can see where things go. I figure that with the combination of the photos and the video that we should be in really good shape for any repairs and/or upgrades that we may want to do.

The part of this mini project that really made me saw WOW was how complicated the plumbing system is in the house. The difference between the new house and the one that we are in right now is that in the our present house (which is a single story) the majority of the plumbing is under the foundation. In the new house only the main water line is under the foundation, everything else is in the walls and in the ceiling/floor between the first and second floors. Also, we have more then double the bathrooms, water heaters, and air conditioning units so that adds to it as well.

I was trying to follow each pipe individually but gave up after the 3 pipes. The area over the downstairs bathroom is just a huge nest of red and blue flexible PVC pipes going all over the place. I ended up taking pictures which lying on my back of the first floor ceiling in several different places order to get a good "map" of where all these things go. The truth is, I hope I never need to break these photos out due to a leak. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Going through the house like this also gave me the opportunity to really go over everything with a fine tooth comb. I noticed that one of the outlets that I paid extra for in the garage was not installed so I need to ask about that. Also, in several of the areas where faucets go (not all) there are extra pipes that are tee’d off then capped off. I am not sure what these are for but will be asking the foreman about them. I also discovered that the garage outlets are on the same circuit as the exterior outlets on the 3 different porches we have at the house. It is good to know that I won’t be knocking out the TV in the family room when running the table saw.

It was more work then I anticipated and I still need to capture the video and categorize the pictures but I think it is a couple of hours that were worth the investment. Years down the road I am sure that I will be happy that I took the time to catalog this.

Technorati tags: New House, Home Construction, DR Horton, Framing, Austin TX, Round Rock TX, Plumbing, Electrical

Our issue with the attic storage area has been resolved. The foreman over the construction of the house really put a lot of effort in and got it fixed exactly the way we wanted it. The floor is now the same level as the rest of the second story and the diagonal trusses have been removed. The floor is solid and there is plenty of space for us to put all of our junk stuff.

I really have to give a pat on the back to the foreman. I was hoping that we could get something similar to the way the other houses in our neighborhood had been built out. Well he did not get it similar, he got it exactly. I could not be happier. It is true, a company really wins over a customer when they screw up and fix the issue correctly for the customer.

One of the reasons that I am so happy is the extent that they went to in order to build it the way that we wanted it. They ended up ripping out 3 of the trusses that were put together between the 2 car and the 3rd car garage - THE WHOLE SET OF TRUSSES!!!. They replaced it with the 2 - new - higher trusses that were supposed to be there. Along with that they added a third truss to the double truss that was incorrect (side note - the framers had switched the third and double trusses - the foreman had them do it right).

I know it was not cheep to get 3 new trusses in and then tear out the ENTIRE attic storage area and then rebuild it - but they did it.

At this point when the house is finished I plan on writing a formal letter to Corporate DR Horton to express my gratitude to our foreman for going the extra mile to correct this for us. There was nothing that was stopping him from saying "Sorry, that is the way it was built" and leaving us hanging. Instead, he made it right for us and I want to recognize him for it.

Anyway, there are some pictures sprinkled throughout this post of the attic. I am working on updating the photo album so I will add more pictures there soon.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: New House, Home Construction, DR Horton, Framing, Austin TX, Round Rock TX, Truss