When we first met with our builder and architects, I had told them that I wanted a 2-car garage with lots of workshop space in the back, asking for the equivalent of a 4-car garage, and I unfortunately never double-checked the dimensions on the plan till we were well past the review dates. On the blueprints, there was a beam running left-to-right, halfway through the garage, and I, for whatever reason, assumed that it was some border between the two-car garage and the workshop behind it. It was not till I started to mock things up, when I took the dimensions of a pickup truck, that I realized I would only have 10 ft of space behind the cars for my workshop.
When I did bring up the idea to the architect in February 2016, of expanding the garage past the lower patio to the East, it sounded like it would be a very expensive, and time-consuming endeavor, so I ended up just deciding that I would live with the smaller garage and live with the idea of parking my cars outside permanently. I definitely didn’t want to cause any extra delays as we wanted this house to get done as soon as possible.
While trying to accept the state of affairs, I was trying to think of ways that I could recover some extra space for storing things in the house, and came up with the idea to dig out the entire basement. Looking at the blueprints, it it seemed like it should be pretty easy to dig out a few extra feet under the South side of the house, up to 5′ tall, as to have a lot of storage space that did not count against our final square-footage (because of the low ceilings). I talked to the builder and he thought that the idea seemed totally do-able without having to make any changes to the plans. This sounded great, so we tentatively decided that when we dig out the foundation of the house, allowing us to have a lot of storage for all of the random boxes, toys, bikes, etc. that would typically clog fill the garage.
About a year later, during one of our in-person meetings in February 2017, Joe suggested that we actually dig out the entire basement, and ignore the idea of staying under 5,000 covered square ft, as the added area in the basement would add a lot to the value of the home and wouldn’t “cost too much more” and would “be a great value”. He noted that since the current permit was in review, that crews could actually get moving on moving dirt now with the current permit once it is approved, and just file a revision concurrently since those revisions only took 2 weeks. This seemed to solve all of my issues as it would have given me a huge workshop (35 ft x 12 ft) and would have allowed us to continue to stay on schedule. I remember leaving the meeting extremely happy, as well as Tina, as she knew how much it meant to me to have a workshop in this house.
Little did we know that this decision would add so many delays and costs to the project. I wish Joe would have been a little more upfront and realistic with us as we were totally new to building a house and didn’t know what to expect. In the end, this small change probably cost us about $200K, and added a lot to the time, as the excavation company was not comfortable digging out the basement without the final plans approved. The “quick” turn-around with the architects ended up taking almost 2 months.
The digger that we had on our property in March 2017 (right) ended up doing nothing but be a giant paper-weight for the tarp; They packed up and went to another job while we waited for our permit to be fully approved. Resuming things proved to be difficult as the little orange excavator ended up breaking down just before they were able to get to our job and was a little too old (7,000 hours run) for the repairs to be worth it. Finding a replacement during this time in the building season proved to be a challenge, as there was so much construction going on in the area and there was no replacements available in the state.
Custom Kirkland Home 