We're really looking for the help here! We've only spoke with one design/build firm so far. They basically told us if we GC the project ourselves we could keep the cost down. We're definitely interested in doing as much work as possible, but I'm not sure with working full time, if we can handle all the inspections, dealing with contractors, ordering materials, etc. To be honest after visiting the Houston Code Enforcement site, I don't see how a General Contractor does it. This website is a spiderweb of documents and different costs that look like they could all add up to around $10k only. This was pretty amazing to me that the city charges so much for all this. I'm hoping that I am reading this all wrong and that someone reading can ease my worries here.
Anyway, back to the plans. Like I said before, we've looked into one firm so far. MDGI, recently renamed as StudioMET. Still trying to understand why the name change. Anyway, we really like the designs of their houses and have gotten a lot of what we want in a house from looking at there various homes. I haven't see a lot of reviews on them besides these two (positive1, positive 2) and this one (negative). We've played around with the idea of locating some of their homes and sending letters to them to see what they really think about the houses. There are a few of their townhomes down the street from us on Jackson Hill. They look pretty good, but one of them seems to have had some pretty bad structural settling that has cause some pretty bad stucco cracks.
Some other architect's we're interested in are Intexure, and MC2, but still looking. Suggestions?
So what the hell are we looking for in a house? Well we want a more modern home with a very open floor plan, but we don't want cold modern. Most of that we will handle with interior decor, but we don't want the place to feel like no one lives there. We're estimating that 2300-2500 sq. ft. of which we want a master suite, two bedrooms and one office/bedroom, with 3 bath. We should be able to fit all of this in two floors, however, I would like to add a unfinished third floor to improve the resale of the house later. This space could be finished to add another bedroom, a studio, theater, playroom, whatever. I just feel adding this space would be a prudent idea to keep the taxable square footage low but have the option of growing over time.
One design element that we're really interested in, is having the Living Room, Dining Room, and Kitchen all open to each other in a straight line, with one wall open to the outside, preferably with a pool. We have some rough drawings that I will try to post here soon. I'm struggling a lot with the front elevation as well as the large amount of glass that I want that I know we shouldn't have.
All and all we're wondering if we can get all this at that $100-110 range and how much we will need to do to get to that price point?
Monday, July 12, 2010
The History So Far....
The wife and I have been playing around with all of our different options for a few years now. We know that we need more space to grow our family, however, the options are near endless. We've bounced back and forth between building new, expanding or moving to a new house. Due to the age or our house (1920's Bungalow) we felt the maintenance in the end wouldn't improve much over what we have now. So we've removed that option from the table.
Moving to a new home has it's appeals and it negatives. The Houston housing market doesn't seem to have be hit by the recent economic issues at all. Houses are holding their prices and it seems that building has reduced but not significantly enough. We've played around with the idea of moving out to the suburbs, but since we both work on opposite ends of Houston, this becomes less appealing. Looking around in the loop, houses are nice, but in my opinion are really overpriced. Much of this has to do with the fact you can't find a 5000 sq. ft. lot in a decent neighborhood for much less than $250,000.
We've looked around at a few places and as well as a lot of looking on HAR.com. We never find something that impresses us enough to consider dropping the kind of money folks are asking. Hence, after a few years of "discussing" back and forth with the wife, we've setting on going down the path of moving our current home, and building in it's place.
It's a hard decision to make to move our 1920's bungalow from the neighborhood that it has lived in for around 90 years. We live in the rapidly growing Rice Military (or off of Washington as more people my be aware). There are still a lot of old homes in the area, but it quickly being taken over by townhomes and custom homes. There are a fair share of quality constructed townhomes, but also a fair share of crap. We have confidence the neighborhood will continue to grow for at least the next 5-10 years. A lot of which will have to do with the success of the Washington corridor, which some argue is a repeat of the Richmond corridor of 10 or 15 years ago. In the past 3-5 years the Washington seen has exploded with upscale bars and restaurants, luckily we're far enough away to not hear the crowds, music or parking overflow, but close enough that we can walk to most of the bars in close to Shepperd.
Our local elementary school is Memorial Elementary, which is not at the top in HISD, but is above average as listed at GreatSchools.org and in a really nice area right next to Memorial Park. One great thing about HISD is the Magnet Programs. We have every intention of trying to get our kids into either the Vanguard program or the Bilingual Magnet program offered by HISD. The Vanguard is really competitive, so we're not as much worried about getting into those as we would like the Bilingual option.
So now that brings us to today. I'll make a new post with the research we've done on build so far. Stay tuned...
Moving to a new home has it's appeals and it negatives. The Houston housing market doesn't seem to have be hit by the recent economic issues at all. Houses are holding their prices and it seems that building has reduced but not significantly enough. We've played around with the idea of moving out to the suburbs, but since we both work on opposite ends of Houston, this becomes less appealing. Looking around in the loop, houses are nice, but in my opinion are really overpriced. Much of this has to do with the fact you can't find a 5000 sq. ft. lot in a decent neighborhood for much less than $250,000.
We've looked around at a few places and as well as a lot of looking on HAR.com. We never find something that impresses us enough to consider dropping the kind of money folks are asking. Hence, after a few years of "discussing" back and forth with the wife, we've setting on going down the path of moving our current home, and building in it's place.
It's a hard decision to make to move our 1920's bungalow from the neighborhood that it has lived in for around 90 years. We live in the rapidly growing Rice Military (or off of Washington as more people my be aware). There are still a lot of old homes in the area, but it quickly being taken over by townhomes and custom homes. There are a fair share of quality constructed townhomes, but also a fair share of crap. We have confidence the neighborhood will continue to grow for at least the next 5-10 years. A lot of which will have to do with the success of the Washington corridor, which some argue is a repeat of the Richmond corridor of 10 or 15 years ago. In the past 3-5 years the Washington seen has exploded with upscale bars and restaurants, luckily we're far enough away to not hear the crowds, music or parking overflow, but close enough that we can walk to most of the bars in close to Shepperd.
Our local elementary school is Memorial Elementary, which is not at the top in HISD, but is above average as listed at GreatSchools.org and in a really nice area right next to Memorial Park. One great thing about HISD is the Magnet Programs. We have every intention of trying to get our kids into either the Vanguard program or the Bilingual Magnet program offered by HISD. The Vanguard is really competitive, so we're not as much worried about getting into those as we would like the Bilingual option.
So now that brings us to today. I'll make a new post with the research we've done on build so far. Stay tuned...
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