What Things Cost in the SF Bay Area

As a follow-up to our previous post I thought it would be a good idea to discuss some of the costs we've had with this place. What we thought we paid for, and what we got for our money.

First off, 'The Kitchen Designer'

Irene did all the right stuff. She checked Angie's List and a couple local lists and got three names for us to talk to. We interviewed them all and settled on one that seemed to be what we needed. She said she did all her work in Chief Architect, her prices seemed reasonable and we liked her initial ideas.

I sent her .dwg files of the house and scaled pdfs for her to start her designing process. She couldn't figure out how to get the .dwg files into Chief which really annoyed me. When I got my copy it took me like 5 min to do it without reading the manual. This makes me think she only had the light version of the program which does not allow you to import files.

After waaaay too long and a lot of back and forth we met with her to view her initial designs. All she had done was printed out a copy of our floorplan and put a couple pieces of tracing paper over it so she could doodle out some ideas. About 20 min into this meeting I realized that she had maybe spent the hour before this meeting whipping out these 'designs'. Designs that ignored the things we told her were important to us and designs that were impossible to do in reality. She had things like the stove in a spot where you couldn't open the oven door while someone was seated at the dinner table? I was mostly annoyed because we told her specifically that we wanted to see things in 3-d done in Chief. Come to think of it I never saw any proof that she had the program or knew how to use it. It literally takes 10 min to whip out a basic kitchen in Chief if you know what you are doing...

So, for her three designs she did, we got one useful thing - switch the fridge to a new place to make the prep sink easier to use.

Price tag for one good idea $600

Kitchen Cabinets

We shopped around all the local quality cabinet shops, and for the cabinets in our initial kitchen design the prices ranged from $17-$37,000 for just the cabinets, installation and counter tops would be extra.

Next, we turn our attention to the idea of an architect to help us design out our master plan for the house.

Architect Costs

We went through the same drill and came up with three names. We interviewed them and were again shocked at what it costs. The arch. who showed up in the brand new $100,000 Por-shaaaaa wanted $24,000 to do the design and permit ready drawings. The two other guys were not much different. They all want a % of the building costs or budget...which I think is an inherent conflict of interest as the more expensive the house is the bigger their fee.

So we completely gave up on that idea....until Irene found this guy. He's a local architect. Lives in Alameda on a boat and is a retired professor of archetecture. He works in auto cad and knows the people at the Alameda building dept. He could read our .dwg files and was able to do a couple of designs...He made a couple of stabs at the top floor and the kitchen. I think he made one good suggestion in the kitchen...uh it was the tall pantry cabinet in the sunroom I think.

After weeks and weeks of weird lame excuses from him, he could never come through with any kind of finished design. He finally came over one Sunday afternoon and.....he was drunk....yep, we picked ourselves a drunkard for an architect.... We asked him to not come back after that.

Total cost for one good kitchen idea? $200

What really burns us is that we lost like six months to this process.

Quotes from Design-Build Firms

We covered this in an earlier post but to refresh: We've heard from 3 design-build firms so far and the prices they are all quoting are around $300-400 /sq ft. Heck, two of them said that doing a simple bathroom would cost $40,000.

Not to defend these numbers but we are talking about quality contractors, the kind that get their work in magazines like Fine Homebuilding.

So, thats what some of those things cost...I could do a run-down of all the costs for all the major projects we've done but that feels like TMI.

It Costs How Much!!?!?!?!

I mean really its going to cost that much!!!

As all our loyal readers know (both of you) we've been kicking around ideas to redo our kitchen area and the top floor of the house.

To refresh, we've got a design for the kitchen area we love.
And a decent working idea for the top floor of the house.

We've recently decided that with a baby on the way that there is no way in heck that we will be able to do much (as in none) work on the house ourselves while attempting to work full time and raise a baby. To this end, we've been interviewing quality (usually meaning high-end) design-build firms to do the work for us.

In our dream we find a quality firm that we can just write a check to and everything is magically done while we maybe rent an apartment somewhere else....

And Then Reality Hit

Interviewing Design-Build firms was interesting...things like if they paid enough attention to take their shoes off when entering our house and if they paid attention to our portfolio from the last Victorian we redid ourselves were telling.

The costs these people are coming up with have totally caught my wife and I off guard. A semi-consensus view from the firms that made the short list is....


wait for it...









$500,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's for the top floor and the kitchen. Half a million dollars.....wow it just really blew us away...

Thing I can't understand is how in the heck are these people going to stay in business with prices like these? I don't begrudge anyone making a nice profit but wow....with the market in free fall you can buy a really decent house in Oakland for that kind of money. They are talking construction costs of like $400 /sq ft... A bathroom costs $40-60,000 dollars they say...and the $40,000 number is for a 'simple' bath..... wow...

Couldn't we get a new house built for those kinds of per sq ft numbers?

This is forcing a major rethink on our part.
All our budgets were based on two things...

1. We'd be doing the lion-share of the work ourselves.
2. The housing market wasn't going to completely fall on its face.

Our new situation is now causing us to rethink our future path with this house...

Yep, we're considering selling the place as-is and getting out while we still have most of our sanity. We figure we'd take a ~$200,000 bath on the house (what we could sell it for vs. what we've put into it). Heck we even hired a pro appraiser to give us 'real' numbers to help us make this decision with and THAT was more expensive than we were expecting...

One working plan is to do just that and rent a 3 bedroom place in Alameda and bide our time while the market falls and we attempt to save as much money as possible. One issue with this is that we've now decided that we REALLY only want to live in one neighborhood in Alameda-The Gold Coast- of course, and houses in that 'hood hardly ever come up for sale. Plus, finding a house that meets our needs-size, garage, shop, storage makes for even slimmer pickens.

Another idea is to just say screw it and put more money into the house than we'll ever get out of it-don't think our current 'hood will ever be a $1,000,000 house neighborhood and just stay here forever as planned and enjoy our perfect for us house in not the perfect neighborhood (but the best school district and still a great hood) on not the perfect size lot.

Yet another idea we are mulling around is still fixing the place up and keep it as a duplex, live in it for like 5 years while saving up a downpayment on the 'perfect' place and then renting the current place out...

Any thoughts loyal readers?

fun with gas.. pipe that is

In the pile of trash remaining after Leroy's grandkids took everything they thought had value, were some tools from his days as a plumber. This box held the dies sitting next to it, which are used to cut threads into pipe. The two big pole things are ratchets the dies would go into, if they were from the same set.. Unfortunately, they weren't, and a ratchet for the great Ridgid set he had now costs several hundred dollars. Which might've been worth it, because it is really good set, except there was no 3/4"" die, which is one of the sizes we need.

So, we took a little field trip to Harbor Freight, which is sort of like a trip to the toy store, and picked up a full set for less than the cost of a Ridgid ratchet. We have no illusions that this will last nearly as long, or be of nearly as high quality as the Ridgid set, but we don't have all that much pipe to run so it fits our needs pretty well.

One thing that was all together was this tri-stand for holding pipe while you thread it - also Ridgid, and also remarkably expensive to buy!

You tighten the pipe in the vise, and the wide leg base makes it very stable so you can crank down on the pipe without it moving.

Plus, it's got a quick release, which makes it easy to get the pipe out after you've threaded a fitting onto the end of it, as we discovered later.

In theory, it's all very straightforward.. you slide the ratchet on a clean, square-cut, deburred piece of pipe and crank it clockwise to start cutting threads.

This ratchett has a reverse, which you're supposed to use every full turn or so to back out the shavings so they don't muck up the threads

And no holding back on the cutting oil.. lubrication keeps it all sliding smoothly

And voila! a pipe exactly as long as you need!

Everything went so well on the test pipes, we were ready to go on the 9' length of 1.5" pipe. One of the last things we need to do for the heat is to run the gas to the boiler, so that's what we're working on

Here's an action shot of Dan working the ratchet.

This is what it looks like mid-threading. We stopped regularly to get out all the shavings and spray lubricant in there, but the threads still wound up a little chewed up

From here it looks like a perfect job!

And the fitting went on easily, so it was time to put it inline.

We used teflon tape on the male pipe end and liquid plumbers tape on the female fitting, which is what all the pros recommended. It helps protect the pipe, since the galvanization is gone where we cut threads, and of course helps get a good seal.

The first one fit perfectly!

The next one I cut, and it wasn't quite as pretty.. and the fitting didn't go on as easily.. but it did go on and it doesn't leak.

But that's not really the point of this glamour shot.. I'm still barely showing, but I don't have any maternity work clothes, so we wind up with very attractive views like this.

We didn't get the whole run done, so it's capped off and next weekend we're back on pipe duty.

But Wait, One More Kitchen Design Iteration

So we went to a cabinet shop on Saturday and they look pretty good and their prices were pretty great so we are trying to zoom in on a final kitchen design....for real this time.

Here's the newest version of the kitchen plans with dimensions. Turns out we didn't have all the dimensions of the appliances right... Our microwave is waaaay huger than the one we had in originally. Turns out we need 6'-6" for our table and chairs and built in benches idea.

Here's the rendered birds-eye view. Don't know what this tells you but it looks pretty I guess.

Here's the view looking towards the south wall. Like that nice big window looking out into our backyard. You can see the dishwasher and the third window also. We will probably not do the small french doors opting for a regular door like we put in downstairs.

Here's the view looking back at the fridge and china cabinet. The cabinet over the fridge is going to be 'fridge depth' but we are going to recess the fridge into the wall 4" so that its basically cabinet depth. The upper cabs to the right we are going to make 18" deep, the depth of the MW, and bring them down pretty close to the counter. We plan on having a lazy susan in the corner cab and this is where most of our dry goods will be stored.

Here's a shot standing way back in the hallway and looking into the kitchen. We were worried that the fridge would stick out too far but I think it looks okay. Remember that the china cabinet on the left is recessed into the wall a bit so it makes the fridge look like its sticking out more than it is.

Here's a shot looking at the stove wall. Now, with the MW gone all the cabinets to the left of the stove can be for our daily dishes-cups-plates-etc. We are probably going to nix the shelves to the right of the stove in lieu of another regular cabinet. Irene thinks that we can fit all of our pots and pans in the two base cabs on either side of the stove. That means no more pot rack which is probably a good thing. Also we are not going to do the cabinets all the way to the ceiling we think.

That's it for now let us know what you think will ya?

what tree? what tent??

At 8:30 this morning the chainsaws started, and they were not even the loudest thing around.

Our neighbor was able to find a tree service that could come out on a holiday Monday and haul away the tree carcass, in the form of little chips of wood.

Very few people in the neighborhood heard it fall or saw the giant tree in our backyard, so unfortunately everyone just thought we were chopping down a tree really loudly at the crack of dawn on a holiday..

This was the view from the front of the house.

There were 4 guys working (in the pouring rain, on a holiday, really hard): one had the chainsaw in the tree and the other 3 would grab the branches...

.. and bring them up front, and toss them into the wood chipper...

.. which would spew chips of what used to be a great tree into the yellow truck.

These guys moved really fast.. this was the view of our patio after a little more than an hour. And when they were done they cleaned all the little twigs and bits up to the point that it looked like nothing had happened.

Until you looked up and saw the carcass of our tent, that is..

The rain cleared for awhile, and we decided to take advantage of that and take care of the tent once and for all

A couple friends and a neighbor came over to help us pick through the debris, bring the stuff that was still good into the garage, and throw what was destroyed into the back of our truck to take to the dump.

One of the things that didn't survive was the treadmill. And this was the year we were totally going to start using it again!

It rained on and off, which possibly sped things up, because we got through everything pretty fast. Then came the very satisfying tearing apart the tent itself.. we tried to use power tools on it, but the thing was so trashed it pretty much just fell into pieces.

side note: no worries about me lifting anything heavy.. I had 6 people yell at me if I so much as touched a bin, so I mostly just directed what should go where and refreshed the trash bags.

This is all that was left of the tree at the end of the day.. we saved a couple stumps to use as stools - I hope the cool red veining doesn't fade! - and scattered some chips down on the muddy side yard.

We have more daylight than ever in the back yard, which is nice enough now in the dead of winter, but it's going to be a drag in the middle of the day during the summer when there's no shade around.

We're really going to miss the tree, it wasn't even on our property but it was definitely part of the house.

about that tree we wanted in our yard,,

.. this is not what we had in mind. You could also file this under "just when you thought you had more than enough to deal with."

At 2:30 this morning I woke up to a very strange sound. It was loud and long and sort of whooshing.. It was a windy night, but that was definitely something more than just wind.

I jumped out of bed to see what it was and all I saw out the back window was tree. Which is unusual, mind you, because we don't have ANY trees on our property. So I moved into the kitchen and opened the back door and, sure enough, all tree.

I'm going to back up a few days here to when a big branch/limb broke off in our neighbor's yard. He was very worried about the health of the tree and thought it probably needed to be removed or it might fall. We agreed to call an arborist out to take a look.. It was a giant tree, that was very pretty in its day, but had been getting worse. The arborist came out on Friday and identified a few problems with the tree and determined it likely could not be saved.

About 3 years ago the neighbor behind us cut off a very big branch, which had a sore leading from it causing a lot of decay. It also appeared that a lot of the root structure had been removed from the same side to make room for the foundation of a garage being built. These were a couple of big contributing factors to the ill health of the tree

Many years prior to that, there was a fencepost that the seemed to be growing around. That may also have contributed to the problem.

This tree had been in the front of our minds all week, so when I looked out the window it was a very sad end to the issue. And the start of another..

We ran outside to make sure our neighbor was ok, and he was out there calling for us for the same reason. The fence between our houses was obliterated, but neither house seemed to have any damage.

There was one big branch still hanging off our neighbor's house and we were all worried that with the wind the tree might shift and the house might not get off so easy the second time

Out came the super-handy cordless sawzall, and the branch came right off the tree

The branch was still hanging off the house though, so Dan went offroading in his robe to get it down.

By this time the rain had started pouring down, and there was clearly nothing else that could be done, so we all went off to bed. Not that there was much sleep with everyone worrying about what damage there was, and how we were going to get the tree out of there..

This morning, it turned out not to have been a dream.

<-- This is the view from our upstairs window. It was a very big tree, and the whole thing is now in our backyard.

The tree is so big I couldn't get all of it in one picture, even from that high up! It stopped a foot or so short of the fence on the other side of the yard..

This is from the corner of the patio nearest the house. The tree miraculously didn't take down the back porch/stairs.. we can't use the stairs at the moment, because they're a land mine of branches, but we're pretty happy it's all still standing.

The weight of the tree seems to be on these branches at the bottom of our patio, and the way they snap off very easily, we're not walking underneath it at all.

<-- This is the view from the back corner of the yard. The fence is just gone, and the whole tree is resting on its branches in our patio

Thank goodness I got the hole in the roof of the tent patched! ;)

This is the thing I'm trying not to think about.. we can't get to the tent at all, because the tree is a little precarious. Plus, it rained all night long, so any damage that's going to be done is already done.

Dan sent the arborist an email last night when we came inside, and he called back this morning and said he'd be right over (in the rain, on Sunday, wife and kids in the car.. )

This is the giant sore running along the back of the trunk. At the top right is the very improperly cut branch that led to the decay.

Behind the tree, through the convenient opening in the fence, you can see the garage that the tree died for. Not a scratch on it.

Zoomed in a bit, you can see the fencepost that the tree ate a long time ago..

And the spongy bottom where typically, roots would hold the tree upright in the ground.

It being a Sunday, and pouring rain, and tomorrow being a holiday, it's not looking good to get someone out here to haul the tree away. But it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and the tent and the fence aren't going to break any worse than the completely destroyed they are now, so there's not much point in stressing about it sitting where it is. Besides, we're going to miss the tree, so another day or two with it is fine with us.

makin' way for baby, part 2

My friend Christine came over to help me line the walls of baby's room in fabric - Christine is the queen of making things look pretty with fabric.

The room is as tall as it is long, so it was a little difficult to find space to cut. The jumble of hose for the pneumatic stapler didn't help much..

For the ceiling, we wrapped the end of the fabric around a long, narrow piece of wood and stapled it from the underside. The fabric kept slipping, so we taped along it first, then stapled.

After this side was up, we pulled the fabric across the ceiling, taped it to a piece of wood on the other end, and stapled it up.

We did the ceiling in 2 sections, with the overlap in the middle of the room. There's no light in there, so this way I can get a hanging light and put it up in the middle of the room. The light will poke out of the fabric, and I can tuck the cord behind and run it down to an outlet

Then came the first wall.. this was a bit of trial and error because of the oddities of the room. There's exterior paneling, drywall and trim in varying combinations around the room. We wound up stapling the fabric to a piece of trim that runs all the way around the room, and we pulled gathers in it so it looks very curtainy (and girly!).

I decided to cover the door, even though there's a window in it. That's had the interesting side-effect of making the room seem just a little bigger. Even though we never open the door, and the litter box has been sitting in front of it for a year, visually it still seems like there's more space in there now.

I haven't decided how to do the curtains in here yet, so we just pinned the fabric up over the window to let light in. Once there's a curtain plan, I'll actually cut and staple the fabric around the window.

And then underneath the window, we stapled the fabric from the underside right up to the frame and then let it fall over the sill.

It's a very green, girly wall

The back wall we did more like the ceiling, wrapping the fabric around a strip of wood and stapling it up. We spent awhile getting the pattern to line up (I've never hung wallpaper, but I imagine this aspect of it is a giant pain!), but I pulled it a little off when I went back and stapled the fabric up to the window (the white gap between the window in and the fabric started bugging me after looking at this picture)

It's a little flowery-er than it seemed on the bolt, but it's very, very cute.

I'll get a soft, fluffy rug in one of the flower colors (I'm leaning towards purple, but both Christine and
Dan vote for hot pink), and it should be a nice, cozy room. I plan on stapling the fabric at the floorline too, so the little on can't go crawling back behind there.

Two walls down, 2 to go!