I don't know everything, but I learn a lot from other posts on your site. I have also bought a lot of your publications and learned from them. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Frank B., San Pedro, CA

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8/22/09

Posted to Delisledigs by Trudy in Jacksonville, FL on 8/22/2009

I hope to add photos soon...

The house will be roughly 5,025 square feet under roof and about 1,300 of that is a wraparound porch. We decided to build with ICFs and chose Fox Blocks, as they are touted to be easy to work with. We plan on doing the walls ourselves - with the help of some friends.

Even with a reliable contractor we are making sure his prices beat ours or we use the bids we got. It would be easy to coast and just okay everything, but this gives us more ownership and we are determined to stick to our original budget. We have six quotes for kitchen cabinets for the house, but are still getting quotes because the numbers are so far apart. Fortunately we still have time to make the decision.

It is good to see some progress. We can begin to see the dream come to life.We now have the stem wall complete, the plumbing piped, and the wire mesh is going in for the concrete to be poured next week. A little less rain and it would go faster, but we need the rain.

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Getting started

Posted to Delisledigs by Trudy in Jacksonville, FL on 8/1/2009

After two years of planning we have finally begun. Originally we were going to owner-build, but then the bottom fell out of the banking industry and we went from having a dozen banks to choose from, to one that would do owner-builder loans.  Then the local bank decided that since several of their owner-builders had not completed their builds they only wanted to do loans with contractors. This was depressing since we had spent many hours researching everything and getting prices on what every phase would cost. We found a contractor through a friend that will allow us to do as much of the build as we want to. That will help us to keep cost down and hopefully he will be able to beat the prices we got.

Since the construction trade had slowed to a crawl, we thought things would move quickly but instead found just the opposite.  We submitted our plans to the city and everything was approved except the septic which needed the drain field expanded and the trusses. We had an engineer sign off on the trusses, but the city required we have the same engineer on the trusses as the original house plans; so that took a little more time. The second submission took 8 weeks to approve just these two items.

We have the stem wall up! Yeah... I guess the wait was a good thing since the price for the foundation came down by $10 grand since we first priced it out.