Pre-Construction Tasks

It’s been over a year in planning, but we have finally completed the pre-construction phase of our new home.

I am REALLY hoping all this planning is going to be a benefit. There was a HUGE learning curve in just knowing what needed to be taken care of and figured out before any dirt was moved. 

I am a planner by nature and by job. I work in Microsoft Project on a daily basis and I love it. So, when it came time to start thinking about building a house, I made a schedule in Project. 

It took a lot of revisions as I learned. But I always say that my first stab at a schedule is meant to be butchered. I take no offense to changes. The whole goal of my first draft is to have something to work with. 

I am always realistic in my scheduling of tasks and I add buffer time. The snapshots I am providing today are the actual timelines of how things happened for us. Some things went faster than I expected, and some things went slower.

Of course, the design process was slower than I liked, but it actually was not far off. We got our preliminary when I thought we would, but the final came in two weeks late. 

The process with the bank went smoothly. The originally quoted me 2-3 weeks time to close. I provided them all our documents 3 weeks before my goal closing date. They ordered the appraisal and that came in higher than our budget, so that was good. When all things were ready and approved, they said we’d close in two weeks. That would have been the 30^th. I hassled the bank about setting a closing date. They weren’t in a rush, and asked me why I wanted to close by the 31^st. There were many reasons, but they told me two weeks, so I was holding them to it. 

We met with our ICF contractor the week of Christmas and he also questioned our start date. He had a client waiting in the wings, but we were first priority only if we were solid on our start date. If not, he’d take the other client first and we’d be waiting 6 weeks for him to be available again. We didn’t want that happening. 

We got the permit approved through the city fairly quickly. It was ready on the 30^th. The temp power pole and utilities were ordered on the 31^st. I knew most things could happen all on the same day, but I still wasn’t expecting it to be as fast as it did go. 

All the planning is done. It's time to execute.