Steinys-Hideaway Blog at OwnerBuilderBook.com

The following is a work of imaginative fiction and should not be construed as my true LIFE!
I should be asleep right now but I am up poring over PDF's of pre fabricated moment frames. Feverishly, I am thinking I should settle for having one bathroom rather than going onto debt for 10 years to have an extra bathtub.

Before that thought sinks in, I dash off a four or five emails to my engineer, the hardy frame corporation and the Simpson strong frame company to inquire about the possible suitability of these fabulous steel beams in a box!

Last night I was up at 2:00 AM writing a poignant letter to the vice president of a universal stair tread bracket company. His response I got this morning was sweeter to my eyes than poetry!

Sweet bliss of universal stair tread bracket... you fit so many treads and stringer configurations. Ah, but if only you would screw yourself in without my electric drill being plugged in... life would be perfect.

Today, I sent one of my associates to pick up a set of blueprints I had needlessly made for a contractor friend of my neighbor that works at the lumberyard. Needless blueprints because what he wanted was a different part of the plans. Ces't la vie, the more blueprints on my dining room table the better!

This guy Steve has an entire hardware store in his truck. It has more locks and drawers than my banks safe deposit box vault. But better than the petty cash and old diamonds and worhthless stock certificates at the bank vault, his drawers and boxes are filled with copper plumbing parts, miscallaneous hanger hardware, router bit boxes and endless assorted hoogies. And he didn't even break out his power tools.

Sweet jeezus, sitting at the table with him, and my little woman, and my dog and a set of houseplans, over a cup of home brewed espresso was better than a therapy session with Freud himself.

Plumbing, ah sweet plumbing! The musical call of the swirling water in the fall to the cistern of the depths!

Hey! Tell me that HVAC story again! I love that one about the
guy that tried to run a chase accross his ceiling joists and the roof collapsed!

The only hint of the darkness starts when we realize we ran out of room on the west wall because of the shear panelling call outs. We rally for a moment switching over to the idea of raising the deck to meet the floor height of the inside room. But after we bat that around and realize it won't really work, we fall into a slump and hit the wall. Then my miracle man must leave, taking his pixie dust of endless construction knowledge, unending "can do" attitude with him and the biggest tool box on wheels on west LA has to hit the road.

I slump behind the computer and start looking up flooring materials, clicking endlessly at swatches of greying artificial woodgrain, and then slip off into a slight episode of light fixture fixation. No sooner do I lose myself in the vast complex maze of a "lamps plus" endless parade of "bad chrome lamp things come to life" then I start to drown in the back eddy's of their interior design products.

The only way I see out of this is to start to plan a water feature, maybe even one with a fire feature in the middle of it!

I have to run, I am going to catch some DIY you tube episodes about how to notch a 2x12 with just a skill saw and a swiss army knife!

May 28th, 2009

Posted to Steinys-Hideaway by gary in venice, CA on 5/29/2009

I don't understand this thread and all this perplexity about people trying to save money! Of course people want to pay less for the same goods and services. That's the nature of our economy. It's the prevailing trend. Also, everybody is getting the squeeze put on them and they have to try and save money. So if you're a contractor it's up to you to figure out how to deal with it. If you do, you will come out on top.

There is a saying "quality , service or price, pick any two!" If I am an owner-builder I expect to put my own butt on the line and I want to get paid for it. I am going to take the gamble, take the risks and should get some benefit for that. If I suck at it, then maybe I will do badly. But I know so many people that have been burned by contractors you are taking a risk anyway.

Look at the business models that abound around us based on providing quality products and services at previously unavailable prices: Costco, Walmart, Schwab Brokerage, Ameritrade Discount Brokerage, Home Depot to name a few examples. It used to be you had to pay hundreds of dollars to trade a stock, you had to use a stock broker to make a trade. Remember when "self serve gas" was an innovation? Do you want to pay the extra money to have someone pump your gas and wipe your window? You used to have to have a salesperson hand you each item from the service counter at the hardware store and some special places still operate that way.

But for instance, do you want to pay $7 more a foot for copper pipe and shop from the mom and pop plumbing supply? I guess maybe you do if the client is paying for the material and you are getting 15% mark up on whatever their cost is. But not if YOU are the one footing the bill. OR do you just want to bury the cost of materials into the budget, not break it down and then you get the materials for as cheap as you can? I mean, you deserve a cut of the materials because the home owner isn't qualified to order the materials the way you are right?

Here's a great example: I want to re pipe my house with copper. A plumber bid $2,600 to do it. I priced out the materials, it's probably $500. So the guy wants $2,100 to crawl around under the house and solder the pipes etc. Well, that's an entire week of crawling around under the house at $50/hr. There's no way it's going to take that long. Now most people aren't going to want to do that, but I am willing to take that job. I will crawl under the house. If the guy wants to do it for less money, when he gets to where it's not worth it to me then I will do it. Or if it's something I just have no clue about.

But if I hire a contractor, I have to let him do everything on my house. Then he hires some journeyman to go under the house and solder everything and pay's him $15/hr, the finishes it in two days, and the contractor gets probably $1,500 bucks if things go well.

Well I could use that $1,500 bucks!

When I did my kitchen, an electrician wanted $500 bucks to rewire my light fixtures. I went up in the attic, it was like two wires, on splice and a hole and voila, I did it in 45 minutes.

And NO he didn't tell me how to do it, he just convinced me that for $500 I was willing to go in the attic and see what the heck was going on.

When it comes to additions and custom construction it's easy to obfuscate comparative value since you don't know exactly what you are getting.

But when you look at something relatively straightforward and competitive like heating you get an example of how sketchy the home improvement industry and building trades industry can be. We just did did a heater in my Mom's house and let me tell you the range of quotes was huge for the same job, we could have paid TWICE as much for the same thing. Also, the range of service was big. And people try and LIE to you and they try to PRESSURE you to sign on the dotted line. WHY? Because you're going to get a heater, you probably can't do it yourself, but there are 100 guys that want to get that job and if they don't get you to buy from them today they are going to lose the sale to SOMEBODY OUT THERE.

So they have to either give the best deal, have the best service and products or sometimes they just LIE about things and intimidate people. So you better realize that a smart consumer is going to be VERY careful about how they spend their money and who they hire.

Right now there are more contractors than buyers. But the contractors don't want to lower their expectations. In fact the contractors need to make MORE money per job because there are less jobs. As a homeowner I am in a difficult position.

If people want to put their own energy into their own house, there should be a way for them to benefit from that. If you want to only be a full service contractor or you only want to work for full service contractors as a sub that is your right. Just build your business on that model , explain your position and stick by it.

As a business owner it's your own responsibility to set your boundaries and procedures, guidelines etc. But to expect that people should just believe that your services are the best value they can get is unrealistic. Obviously people are going to get multiple bids and they are going to learn along the way and they SHOULD learn along the way.

Midnight Madness!

Posted to Steinys-Hideaway by gary in venice, CA on 6/9/2009

May 28th, 2009

Posted to Steinys-Hideaway by gary in venice, CA on 5/29/2009