Waconda: Happy Anniversary!

The first week of June is a landmark for us. So many milestones have occurred lately!

• It’s the one year anniversary of the date we signed a contract with Crest Homes to build our dream house. Based on current progress, this means it takes about 15 months to build a 1500-sq-ft rectangle. 
• It marks the date that our construction loan matures. Based on current progress, this means we get to start paying a mortgage on a house in which we can’t live. 
• It's the deadline to file for a principal residence tax exemption. Based on current progress, this means we get to pay a higher vacation home tax rate on a property on which we can’t vacation. 

So, obviously a celebration is in order. We plan to do something that evokes the proper level of merriment and joy, like getting root canals and then shaving the dog. 

And no celebration is complete without a guest book on site for all the creepers who think it's perfectly acceptable to walk around the house after the construction crew has gone home, even though No Trespassing signs are clearly posted. What really hacks me off is that at least two of the looky-loos have contacted our builder asking for quotes so he can build them a house just like ours. I really hope they ask us for a reference so we can encourage them to copy our over-budget, behind-schedule Castle in the Air.

To say I’m discouraged is an understatement. Our preciously short Michigan summers are slipping away, one lovely day after another, and yet the status quo is two-steps-forward, one-step-back. We are still only in the rough finish stage and very few of the mistakes have been corrected to our satisfaction. I'm to the point where I don’t even want to drive by the site because I can’t take any more bad news or disappointment. 

I am worried about the stress this places on Senior. He's resorted to the Squeaky Wheel strategy of making daily phone calls and emails, scrutinizing punch lists and cost sheets and asking countless questions to offset the whole team's lackadaisical attitudes and frustrating lack of urgency. He tries to balance the universe by also pointing out things done well, but it’s getting harder and harder to focus on the positive. 

We launched our boat a couple weeks ago. There is no place to relax on our shore, but we can float away for a while and imagine the future. It's just one way to make the best of the situation. One other way for me to cope is to take a hiatus from my Waconda blogs until we've finished the project. My attempts at wit and satire keep taking a sharp turn into bitter territory. I'll post a final update when the project is done and we've moved in.  Until then, some memories are better left… unremembered. 

Waconda: The windows

When George Fuller originally built the cottage that we are renovating, he named it Waconda after a Native American story. It means "Great Spirit of the Water". I'm pretty sure that Spirit is just messing with us now.

The house is coming along. It took a while for them to finish the roof, allowing the spring rains several opportunities to marinate the interior, but it's done now and the shingles look great. We did an initial walk through with the electrician and mapped out where our outlets and canned lights should go. Rough plumbing is underway, the basement floor will be poured this week, and the windows were installed.

Ah the windows. They're beautiful. They offer stunning views of the lake. And they are totally wrong. You see, the windows are supposed to match. What we wanted was double hung windows with mullions (those little slats that divide the window into squares) in the top half. Even though the windows differ in size, the mullions should be the same proportion from window to window. And the dining room and the master bedroom each would also have a large picture window to allow for unobstructed views of the lake. What we got was a mish-mash of mullions. Some are big, some are little, some are in-between. A few cover the full length of the window and some reach three-quarters of the way down. The bedrooms each have casement windows instead of double-hung, which we learned were required to meet local building codes for egress (apparently the average Michigander is too fat to fit through the bottom half of a double-hung window in an emergency). And in our half bath, the window is off center, so the trim disappears into the corner of the house.



Our builder said the window company made the mistakes, and contacted the representative. They've assured us that we will personally meet with the rep to review each window before ordering the correct replacements.

I'm not sure how long it will take to get the problem fixed, but at least it doesn't hold up any of the other work on the house. Someday we'll laugh about this whole process. For now, I just hope George's Great Spirit has had his fill of practical jokes.

Waconda: Tomorrow, Tomorrow

So blogging about Waconda isn't fun anymore. It's just too depressing. It's been about a month since my last update, and we're only about a week ahead of where we were then. Our builder's mantra has been "tomorrow".  

  "When will the modifications to the trusses be finished?"
     "Tomorrow."
  "When will they be delivered?" 
     "Tomorrow."
  "No trusses yet. When will they be delivered?"
     "Tomorrow."
  "Still no trusses! When will they be delivered?"
     "Tomorrow."
  "Where are the trusses!? Seriously, when will they get their act together???"
     "Tom--" Well, you get the idea.

This went on for a couple-three weeks, until finally we had trusses! Which then lay on the ground for another week or so, because it was too cold / wet / windy / dark / swarming with locusts to finish prepping them and put them on the house. Then they told us the crane broke. So they fixed it. And it broke again. 

But just like Broadway promised, sure enough the sun finally came out. The crane showed up, the trusses went up, and progress was made. We stopped by to watch for a little while and it was pretty cool. And then the crew actually worked again yesterday -on a Saturday!- to begin putting the plywood on the roof.


In the meantime, we HAVE been having some fun picking out finishes. We looked at flooring samples, deciding on an engineered hardwood in hickory. We are still getting quotes to keep that under budget. We also spent a great afternoon wandering around a huge warehouse looking at slabs of granite, marble and other stones. Toby had suggested a couple for us to focus on, and we fell in love with a beautiful soapstone that will look fantastic in the kitchen. Now we can start looking for the kitchen backsplash and bathroom tile, while the framing crew finishes up. Their next big steps on the job are to finish the roof and install the windows. I figure they'll be done tomorrow.

Waconda: Back on track (or not)

Ok, that's better.  Still not exactly what we envisioned, but an improvement over the giant appliance box that we had before: 

And just to remind us of why this is all worth it, here's today's view from the upper window:

* * * * * * *

UPDATE 4/13/14: Oh hey, did I say things were back on track?  Well that lasted about 45 minutes. Shortly after I posted that update, a freak spring hailstorm blew in with violent winds.  

And that was when this:

Turned into this:

So where is the back wall?

Ohhh, there it is!

Waconda: Déjà vu

I keep talking about our plans to build a small house on a big lake. Our design intention has always been to keep the "cottage-y" spirit of the original house. We planned a second floor, more of a half-story than a full one, for ascetic purposes. It will balance the front porch roof without overwhelming the rest of the house. We aren't even going to finish it off right away. Eventually we will convert it into extra living space, with windows at each end and storage space under the eaves. Maybe it will be a meditation room overlooking the lake, or (if we're lucky) a bedroom for future grandchildren. We even joke about using it as a shuffleboard court since the space is long and narrow.  

It's huuuge!

But as we've come to realize (over and over again), things rarely go as planned. Somehow this design got lost in transition from drawing to reality. As the walls were raised in preparation for the trusses, it became obvious that they were twice as tall as we wanted. The house is headed to butt ugly territory; a massive box that overpowers the landscape and alienates our cottage dreams.

So once again we find ourselves facing a setback. We do not like the mistake and don't want to change our design. The walls have to be cut down, and new trusses have to be ordered to fit the intended design. We're not sure how long it will be before the corrections are made and we're back on track. 

Like Yogi Berra says, it's Déjà vu all over again.

Waconda: The 2x4 Jungle

We're finally to the point where it's easy to see the progress on the house. The main floor is all framed in and the layout is taking shape. I would explain what you're looking at in this picture, but if you envision things anything like me, it won't make sense.  Floor plans are a lot easier to understand when they are drawn out and all the rooms are labeled, with tiny little furniture pieces tastefully drawn in and no dog hair is showing on the floor.

Our living area kept shrinking in our imagination, to the point where we were sure we'd feel like Alice after she found the Eat Me Cake. But now that we can really feel the size of the rooms, we are reassured.  I mean, we are literally sighing in relief. Have you ever seen that Tamiflu small house commercial? The one where the guy has to hunchback his way down the hall to the kitchen, and when he gets there his knees are in the living room? By the time he scrunches himself through his bathroom door, we're dying. But happily, thanks to the high ceilings that our builder recommended and the thoughtful design, the only room that feels kind of 'snug' is the guest bedroom. And that is actually part of our evil master plan to keep visitors from getting too comfortable and overstaying their welcome.

I've been out of town a few days, so I'm anxious to wander around the site after work tomorrow. The weather is still relentless, giving us a day or two of 40-ish temperatures that melts the snow into a muddy bog, then sinking back down below freezing and spewing out icy snowflakes. Tomorrow's forecast is 43°F with an 80% chance of precipitation. Sounds like a perfect day to build a house!

Waconda: We have WALLS!!

I am doing the happy dance today. Good things are happening. The polar vortex appears to have finally finished its brutal assault.  The snow is starting to melt.  A broken water main on the street across the bay was diverted before it got to our house. But most importantly, there are signs of progress on our job site. And even better, there were humans doing work on the job site! (Well, actually they're all just standing around and one guy is scratching himself, but who cares!  We have walls!!)

Waconda is going to be a tall skinny little house, pretty typical for a lake lot. It's sort of a shotgun style, similar to the wonderful old house we lived in back in New York. After the work crew was done for the weekend (because they never, ever work at our job on a Saturday) we went in for a closer look and to get a feel of the layout.

This is me standing in the kitchen. If I stick my right hand out, I'll be in the dining room.  And if I take half a dozen steps backwards, I'll be in the living room (sprawled on the deck, because I will have tripped over that wall-in-progress). If I go through the door at the back of the structure, I'll be on the front porch looking over the lake. We walked out there too, but the wind was really whipping in from the lake and I didn't want to take my hands out of my pocket long enough to take pics.


That lump in the far right corner of the house is Senior, who is demonstrating how it will look when he is curled up in bed in the master bedroom. The bed is a little hard, but the view is out of this world. It feels like you can touch the sky. In fact, the whole room feels very grand since there aren't any boundaries. Showering and getting dressed may be a little tricky though. A guest bedroom and the bathrooms still need to be roughed in. Ultimately there will be another floor above, which will remain unfinished for now. 

I'm cautiously optimistic that the work will continue to roll along. The weather forecast for next week is promising, with temps reaching into the 40's a couple of the days. We're making some final choices on the cabinet package and trim pieces. It feels like things are finally coming together. But just to be safe, as you read this, knock on wood!

Waconda: Old Man Winter

According to this Associated Press article on Time's website, Detroit is the city hit the hardest by the awful winter most of the country has been experiencing this year. While this is better news than the usual top 10 lists featuring Detroit (yeah Forbes, I'm talking to you), it's especially frustrating for, say, people trying to build a small house on a big lake in the middle of said winter.

We have had a little progress. The carpenters have been framing some of the garden level and have roughed in a set of stairs up to the main level. We were feeling pretty good about the work until Senior noticed the foundation is cracking. Frost settled in below the footer and gave a bit of a heave-ho. It can be repaired, but it's just one more thankyousirmaywehaveanother moment.

The lack of progress continues to frustrate us. But, even though little has changed on the worksite, there is another steadfast constant that brings it in to balance. We can still stand on the shoreline and look out over the peaceful beauty of the frozen lake. Even during the worst winter on record, it serves as a reminder of why we chose this spot, and hints at all the future will hold long after the build is behind us.

Waconda: Don't Even Ask

Every couple of days someone asks us how the house project is going. And the answer we give is always the same: “Don’t even ask.”

According to the project timeline we got from our builder before we signed our contract, they have competed 5 weeks of work in the last seven months. The only change since my last post a month ago is that they tore down the remaining corner of the house and threw it in that red dumpster that is frozen to the ground in front of the property.

I guess Murphy cursed us with his Law, because just about everything that can go wrong, has. To summarize:

We started the project off on the wrong foot when our builder thought his silver tongue would prevent us from needing a variance, but instead we had to appear before the zoning board, who only meet during a blood moon. 

The excavation process took a lot longer than expected, primarily due to the bedrock under our house that would have impressed Fred Flintstone himself, and because our builder proved to be a lot better at talking about paying his subcontractors than actually paying them. 

We thought the lengthy delay in moving the gas line would be our only problem with a utility provider. We dealt with the realization that Consumer's Energy must measure time in a parallel universe because it took three weeks to complete a service that should have been done in three days. But DTE got the last laugh by requiring ten business days to disconnect the electrical lines from the house. On the ninth day our area was hit with the first of several ice storms that tied up every available crew for the next month. (And don't even get me started on why our builder waited until the last minute to put in the demolition order with the utility companies, or why he didn't do them in tandem.)   

And speaking of the weather, we knew that the warm winters we’ve been experiencing the last few years were atypical, but this Polar Vortex is getting really old. According to the carpenters, their nail guns won’t work in sub-zero weather. And apparently using a hammer is out of the question…

     …But that point is moot anyway, since the crew is down and out with the flu.

We’ve explored the option of firing this builder and hiring another. This isn’t our preference – for one thing it’s tricky due to the confines of our construction loan; and as the old adage goes, we could be trading the devil we know for the devil we don’t know. But the main reason to stick it out is that we love the architect who has been working with us to design the house inside and out. He is the builder’s son-in-law and part of a package deal. However, in the interest of our sanity, we met with another builder to see if he would like to take over the project. He said he was interested and he’d send us the quote in 4 days. 

That was over a week ago. <<sigh>> 

Damn you, Murphy!

Waconda: The Holidays

When we closed on our house last June, we planned a 4-6 month timeline for our rebuild. We were looking forward to celebrating Christmas in our new home.

Well, Christmas is in 2 days. And the house isn't quite ready.

Here's hoping for Valentine's Day.

Waconda: The road to a full house is paved with empty promises

Finally, we have basement walls! The 2-man masonry crew has slowly, painstakingly placed the blocks to create our basement walls below the grade, and since this picture was taken, the wood portion above the grade has been finished. The quality of the work so far has been good, but somehow no one except Senior noticed that somewhere along the line a footing was left off the drawing, which has to be corrected. So next week we can look forward to… nothing. All the contractors are going hunting. The latest plan is that they will begin to lower the house the Monday after Thanksgiving, weather permitting, and then promptly knock it over.

The biggest learning experience so far has been the disappointing realization that no matter how many times our project manager promises to keep us informed of any changes to the schedule, he will never contact us unless he wants a check. If we push for an update to the timeline, the answer is usually "next week". The weather had been gorgeous all October, so it was frustrating to visit the site on a beautiful afternoon and find that the crews hadn't shown or had already gone home, or that materials hadn't been delivered. We knew to expect that the project would take a lot longer than planned, but we didn't realize that communication was a one-way street.

On the bright side, Senior and I have been meeting with Toby on the interior plans and they are coming along great. We want a simple, clean, energy-efficient design that puts the attention on the view and not on the house. It's been a lot of fun picking out materials and finishes. We download a gazillion pictures from Houzz and Pinterest, and have become pretty good at stealth photography of anything that inspires, no matter where we find it. I find myself noticing details that never seemed important before - for example, now I can tell you the finish on every driveway on my block, including the apron at the garage, and what type of faucet is used in most of the upscale ladies rooms in the tri-county area. We send our ideas to Toby, and he manages to put them into a cohesive design.

Back at the job site, we've heard the neighbors are having fun imagining how much money we are throwing into this hole. So far they have all been patient with the workmen's trucks encroaching on their driveways and a big old Porta Potty taking up prime real estate by the road. We've tried to respond quickly to any concerns, which has been well received. But they still think we're crazy. And maybe we just are.

Waconda: Stuck in a Rut

Here is what the house looked like a week ago, after the footings were poured: 

 And here is what it looked like today:

I know laying the ground work and marking straight lines is time consuming, but those ten blocks don't look like much to me. I can see they are making SOME progress. I know this because the site is full of important-looking things, like wheelbarrows, plumb line spools, pallets of block and vast piles of dirt. (And Gatorade bottles. These guys go through a lot of Gatorade. A hundred years from now someone will dig under the house, come up with the empties, and wonder if we were bootlegging the stuff in our basement.)  So based on this evidence, I'm hopeful that by next week we will have walls!

Waconda: Lift-off!

We have lift off - the cottage is up in the air! And I mean waaaay up. It's pretty spectacular. In fact it's a bit of a distraction to people driving by. The cottage sits on a winding road with a blind curve to the east. Traffic tends to go by pretty slow, especially if a Sunday driver wants to take a picture of the lake. I understand that it's a kind of a shock to see a house suspended in mid air, but c'mon people, don’t stop your car in the middle of the road to gawk! That’s just asking for trouble.

Our new demolition contractors, Fred and Jim from C & A Construction, were busy prepping for the new foundation. Digging out the basement turned out to be harder than snapping your fingers without using your thumb. I guess when the last thing to move the earth on your property was a glacier, and a house has been sheltering that dirt from wind and rain for the last 95 years, it gets pretty compact. They actually had to use a jackhammer to break it up in order to excavate it.

We've had our own challenges these last few weeks trying to get Consumer's Energy to shut off the gas at the road. They took the "measure twice, cut once" concept to a new extreme and marked the property 4 times before they actually sent a crew out to cap the line. I've been trapped in an endless phone loop with them since July trying to get this straightened out.  Meanwhile our project manager struggled with securing the building and soil erosion permits from the township. I learned that building permits are based on the square footage of your entire dwelling, not just your living space. This seems to include exterior walls, eaves, porch, driveway, mailbox, passing cars and the square mass of all the ducks on the lake. But with persistence and a checkbook, all the issues were finally resolved.

We were supposed to get a call the day they actually lifted the house so that we could watch, but that didn’t happen. It’s a slow process, so perhaps it was better that we got to wait and see the dramatic transformation all at once. Once they had dug out enough dirt, two long steel beams were inserted under the length of the house. The way it was explained to me, they jacked up one end of the house and then supported it with four foot lengths of railroad ties. Then they moved to the other end and jacked it up to match. They repeated the process, stacking the railroad ties like Jenga towers, until they had enough clearance to pour the footings and build the basement walls. The whole thing is really cool!

The excavation crew is wrapping up, and if all goes well, the masonry crew should be in next week to pour the footings. We are really excited to see the project moving forward. Check back later to see our progress. And stop trying to snap your fingers without using your thumb. It just doesn't work.

Waconda: The Prologue

If you read this blog regularly, you might recall this post about the summer cottage we bought in 2012. The original owner christened the house “Waconda” when he built it. Our plan was to eventually renovate the cottage into our permanent year-round home. 

It’s really important to us that the finished product retains some of the original character of the house and if possible, remains true to its roots. The cottage is something of a local landmark due to its location. The setting is ideal, just outside of town with beautiful lake views and a long shoreline. Everyone seems to know the "little red house on the bay". We've had great times there with our kids and our friends, having cookouts, watching fireworks and just pushing off into the lake to float. The Girl engineered a fire pit and The Boy was inspired to write this song while sitting on the fishing dock. It was easy to overlook the peeling paint and sagging roof and the chimney that looks like a domino run. The house had a fridge and running water. Not much else was necessary for a day at the lake. But with no furnace and less than 800 square feet of living space, it wasn’t going to work for us to move in full time.

So shortly after purchasing the cottage, we contacted Crest Homes and had some plans drawn up. Meanwhile we put our other house up for sale and waited. And waited. And waited. We showed it more than thirty times without an offer. It was located in a high-end subdivision but didn’t have all the high-end finishes that are a requirement for the HGTV generation. So after six months we took it off the market, got out our cookie cutters and made it picture perfect. Last May we listed it again, encouraged by the news that the housing market in Michigan was starting to upswing. Within 5 days we had accepted an offer for more than list price. We set a closing date in mid-June and called our builder to tell him to dust off our housing plans.

Last year, before we bought the property, Senior met with the local township and showed them a statement of work describing what we wanted to do. The inspector said everything looked fine and we should have no issues.  So imagine our surprise when our builder went to apply for a building permit and was declined.

Our biggest obstacle is that the house was built before the current zoning laws were written. Grandfather rights allow us to continue using the property in the same way without restrictions, but any changes may violate the zoning code and have to be approved. We aren’t trying to build a McMansion that covers the entire lot, but we do want to extend the house a few feet towards the road. Years ago there was an attached one car garage (you can still see the cement footer) and we want to reclaim that square footage. 

Our builder was convinced that he could talk the inspector into approving the plans. He spent the better part of two weeks trying to convince the township to see it his way. After all, there was no other direction we could expand, and our neighbor’s garage extends right out to their property line. The inspector steadfastly refused, saying his hands were tied by the setback requirements. After their game of chicken ended in a tie, I went down and filed the paperwork requesting a variance to the zoning law, paid the application fee and waited. And waited. And waited. It took 5 weeks before we were put on the agenda.

In August, after sitting through 3 hours of zoning appeals from Starbucks and Sonic Drive-in and one other resident, we were unanimously granted our variance. We were now clear to begin our project! Step 1: a basement. The current house rests on pilings and dirt and, in one corner, a house jack. Again, because we are grandfathered in we are not allowed to tear down the existing house, but we are allowed to lift it up out of the way. We contacted the house-lifting guy we had lined up to see when he could start. He told us that due to the delay he was now fully booked and couldn’t get to our project until late October. Ugh.

All setbacks aside, we are finally ready to get the project underway. We've found a new house-lifter who will (hopefully) be prepping the site this week. We are working with a great designer, Toby Fraifogl, who is helping us visualize the metamorphosis. After many months of planning and dreaming, we are on the verge of reality. My job is to chronicle the transformation, which I’ll do in this blog. If you are curious, check back in and see our progress.

New thing #29: Waconda

For the last couple years, there was an old summer cottage for sale on a big lake in a little town not far from our home. We've driven by it many times and talked about how pretty the location was, but how impractical it would be to buy a place that needed so much work at this stage of our lives. We already have a beautiful home, and maintaining it is a full time job. And we all know about the soft housing market. So we did the right thing.

We bought it.

A wise woman once told Senior to imagine what his headstone would look like. She said the dates don't matter... what matters is the dash between the numbers. That dash represents what you did with your life. Now we may not leave a universal legacy, but we do want to live life to the fullest and enjoy each and every day. So with that in mind, Senior and I each wrote a list of goals we wanted to achieve in the next decade or so, and then compared notes. Our lists were surprisingly similar, which might explain why we've been happily married for so many years. And one of the things on both our lists was to live on or near the water. Even if it's impractical.

The house was built in 1916 and had been owned by only one family prior to us. They named it Waconda, which means "Great Spirit of the Waters" according to a Native American story. Helen, the previous owner, spent her summers there until her death at the age of 102.  One of the last traditional summer cottages on the lake, it sits on a shallow bay that is home to ducks and swans who are pretty annoyed that we have taken over their dock. We are still in cleaning mode so we haven't moved in for the summer. We're happy to spend a couple hours there or even to just stop by long enough watch the sunset. Neighbors drop in and say hello, like Betty, the helpful lady who told my kids that Helen died Right There on the porch, and the cheerful guy who told us that her dying wish was that the property stay in the family.

We kicked off summer with a Memorial Day picnic at Waconda. The kids alternated between relaxing in the sun and raking up the seaweed encroaching on the dock, flinging it up on shore in all its smelly glory. I got out our tippy little kayak and paddled around the bay, collecting the flotsam that washes in from the boaters on the lake. I now have 63 bottles of sunblock. Senior channeled his inner engineer and figured out how to make the floating dock actually float, then we all pitched in to launch it. I was proud of the way the kids took ownership of the place. If I'm very lucky, I'll get to see them share it with their children some day.

Our plan is to enjoy the cottage "as is" this summer. Well, after we bleach it from top to bottom. We've put our house up for sale and if the stars line up correctly, we'll eventually remodel Waconda and make it our full-time, lakefront home. I hope Helen approves.