Wednesday, November 29, 2017

I am fiery hot with anger

I wish I had more news to share. This process has been so painfully slow that I want to scream, or cry.. or both. I know we will have a home when this is all done, but right now that feels soooo far away that I can’t even imagine it.

Anyways.. FYI, I’m not in a good calm mood today. So please excuse my frustration.

This has just been delay after delay. So, the foundation was re-done late October, but there was another error made by the foundation crew—they left an air vent in the bottom of the foundation on one side, meaning water can seep into our crawl space from the surrounding ground. We are STILL waiting for the foundation guy to come back to get it done. I mean seriously—it’s been OVER a month.. WTF is the hold-up dude? Can you not just patch it with concrete to get it done??

Last week Graham and I had our breaking point. Graham and I usually balance each other out. We have a very nice symbiotic relationship where when one of us gets stressed, the other is calm.. But not last week. We built off each other’s stress and finally decided to email our project manager with Lexar. We have not heard a word on when the framers were scheduled, when the foundation guy was coming back, or even a general completion date for the house. We have not even met our new project manager at all. We don’t have the amended floor plans for a slight change for our storage room. I have been trying to arrange a new tile floor set-up for over a month, and a color change of bathroom cabinets.. and I’m the one who has to email and remind them to email me back.. Is it just me or is giving a week between emails being extremely lenient? In this digital age where we expect emails and texts back right away, a week is more than enough time to respond. So, we sent a firm and frank email to our project manager describing our frustrations and lack of communication.

To our project manager’s credit, he called us right away after receiving this email. It was 8:30 at night on a Tuesday, so that was unexpected. He said that the email blindsided him because he thought he had communicated with us regarding the hold-up with the framing crew. Surprise—NO, he didn’t let us know the framing crew may take a while to get out to our house. That really upset me, and it was quite insulting to not be notified of potential delays.. especially when the delays affect our house’s building schedule right now. We feel like the red-headed stepchild of our Lexar office, because it feels like we are being neglected. WE are not the ones who have made errors or caused delays. Anyways, he apologized and emailed us an update the next day.. but really, it was damage control because we were still both very upset.

Phew. Now that I’ve updated you on the negative.. here’s the positive: our foundation has been backfilled and the footing drains have been installed (although both of these were delayed due to the snow--in November--when the machines got snowed in). Our retaining wall has been built. We haven’t been able to take pictures of it because of the rain and our schedules. Our dirt guy is seriously the best. If you have excavating needs, Steel Justice with Justice Construction in Graham, WA, is awesome. He is honest and hard-working. We highly recommend him. We showed up at our house on Wednesday night last week before Thanksgiving, and he and his crew were putting up the retaining wall in the dark, the mud, and the rain. He made some further recommendations for the wall and for soil stabilization for our slopes. I will definitely take some pictures this weekend when we can see it in the light.

Our fire hydrant was installed a few weeks ago. The great and very petty thing is that none of the people that will buy the lots around us will be able to use it for fire code credits for building their new houses. It’s my $8K hydrant, thank YOU very much.

Our framers are set to come next week.. hallelujah. I wonder if they’ll be delayed too, but hey, the weather has been dry on and off for the past 3 days. So, hopefully they’ll get finished with their house now and move on to ours. I watched this framing video on YouTube and I got super excited because our house will actually start to look like a house! Our excavator plans to lay more quarry spalls past our construction entrance because the rain has been relentless over the past month and our lot is now pretty muddy (no standing water though—woohoo!). The rain in the PNW has not bothered me as much as it has now because of the house building project. I literally prayed on Sunday for the rain to back off a bit, and much to my surprise, it has!


I hope to have more positive posts in the future, but I’m just here wallowing in my misery and anger. Maybe it’s because I ate a protein bar and Granny Smith apple for breakfast—super lame.

Update: Curious about our progress? Click on this link to see all of our home building updates, or check out my Instagram account.

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