Appliance "Fun"

Travis saw something indicating that Texas was once again having a Tax Free weekend on certain appliances over Memorial Day weekend. We had already done a bunch of research and put together a list of what appliances we were going to need in the new house. As such, we decided to take advantage of the Memorial Day sales, plus the extra 8.5% savings and buy some of our appliances. The builder has a warehouse where they can store them for us until they’re installed. There is some risk here as we won’t fully inspect the appliances until they’re brought to the house, but we decided it was worth the risk.

Not all appliances qualify for the tax free savings. We decided to only buy things that did, but even that got slightly complicated. Ultimately we decided to buy the following:

  • Refrigerator for the utility room

  • Washer

  • Dishwasher

  • Dryer (not tax-free but we wanted to insure we got one that matched the washer)

  • Induction Cooktop (also not tax-free but we did have a rebate that saved us additional money because the fridge was the same brand)

Of course, no one store had everything or had the cheapest prices on everything. We ended up buying the fridge and cooktop from Lowes. We did the entire transaction online and that all worked perfectly.

That’s when it all started to fall apart..

We were buying the rest of the items at Home Depot. We tried to do this online also, but their website wasn’t taking the sales tax off and we couldn’t figure out any way to sort that out. We headed to a store to do it there. When walking in the store, they had signs all over the place about the appliance tax-free weekend. They were pretty busy so we ended up with a guy who works in the kitchen design center. He was very friendly but quickly ran into the same problem we had. Their system just wasn’t dealing with tax correctly. He asked some of the appliance sales people and they just said it worked sometimes. They didn’t have any suggestions on what to do if it didn’t work. While he was working on this, we also realized that he was getting a price that was over $100 less for the dishwasher (we liked that!). He got the department manager out and she said that she had a way to make it work. She said that if you ordered online as a guest (rather than logging into a Home Depot account), it would work correctly. She started down that path but of course then we realized that the dishwasher was back to its original price. Not deterred by this, she decided she’d order it through their internal system (where the dishwasher was cheaper) and then get a store manager to credit us the sales tax. After entering all the items into the system she walks us up to the front of the store to have a store manager deal with it. Travis pays for the order (after first having to confirm with his credit card company that he was in fact buying appliances at two different stores). Then the manager starts trying to do the credit for the tax. He’s having no luck and calls his manager. She ends up coming to the front of the store and after some time is able to give us a credit for the tax. The crazy thing, Home Depot is giving us a credit for the tax, but it’s just coming off the stores income. They aren’t actually crediting the actual tax - just the amount. And in fact, we got the amount of the tax credited, PLUS sales tax on that amount. All of this took about 2.5 hours.

All was good . . . or so we thought. . .

That night Travis is reviewing the paper work and realizes that on the last order, the person has accidentally selected a higher end dryer than we wanted. He gets online and starts chatting with Home Depot support. They have various things they offer to do, but ultimately the order has to be cancelled. Travis has them cancel the order and the next morning heads back to Home Depot to redo the order again. He gets to work with all the same people again. Lucky Him!!! In truth, they were all very nice and really were trying to make it work. It just seems crazy that a company the size of Home Depot hadn’t figured this out. It’s not the first time Texas has done this and Texas isn’t the only state that does the tax free weekends. Furthermore, we bought these on Sunday (the first time) and so they’d been dealing with this in the store for several days. Crazy that they hadn’t come up with a process to deal with it. We weren’t the only people buying appliances!

Later in the year we still have a bunch of appliances to buy:

  • Refrigerator for the Kitchen (which is currently out of stock)

  • Wall oven for the kitchen (the one we want is discontinued so we’re watching stock to determine when to buy)

  • Vent hood for over cooktop

  • Built in microwave and trim kit

  • Wine fridge

We figure things will be on sale again at Labor Day and that will at least be closer to when we’ll actually need them.

Motto of the weekend - “It’s a lot of work to save money!!”

Here’s our cooktop at the warehouse.

Underground Plumbing

Now that the forms are in place for the foundation and a survey has shown them all to be in right location, work has begun to deal with underground plumbing. The existing house had one bathroom and a washer connection in the garage. Of course we’re moving everything around so none of the plumbing associated with those or the kitchen are of any use. The new house layout includes the guest bathroom, the utility room, a powder room, and part of the kitchen in the existing structure. All of these will need plumbing underneath the existing foundation. The third bathroom and a sink in the workshop will be on the new foundation so the plumbing for those will be much easier.

Currently the plumbers have been cutting out existing foundation to location plumbing under existing foundation. So far they’ve got quite a bit of the guest bathroom done and have the “tunnel” over to the utility room and powder room. It seems to be hard/tedious work - we don’t envy them at all.

Below you’ll find a few pictures of the work so far.

Guest bathroom plumbing. The big pipe to left will be for the toilet. The smaller pipe coming off that will head over to the vanity and wet bar (on the other side of the bathroom wall). The cavity above the big pipe will be the drain for the shower. It’s hard to tell, but the pipe running up/down-ish in the photo runs outside the house (towards top of photo) to the new sewer lines they’re installing to replace the old cast-iron stuff. It also runs across the hallway towards the utility room and powder room at the bottom of the photo.

The cavity at the bottom of the photo is where the washing machine drain will be. You can also see where they’ve cut through the top layer of foundation underneath the wall in the middle for the powder room. That will ultimately be the same depth as the washer drain and the guest bath work. Both of these will connect over to the guest bath on the way out to the main sewer.

Once the underground plumbing has wrapped up, there will be a city inspection followed by some underground electrical work for the living room floor and kitchen island. We assume there will be an inspection for the electrical work also (It’s possible they just run conduit - we don’t know). Finally, the steel rebar will be installed (along with rebar connections into existing foundation). Once all that’s done, we will then get concrete. We assume we’re at least several weeks away for that.

Foundation Forms

The builders started working on preparation for the new foundation in the back of the house. They have installed the new forms that “form” the boundary and height of the new foundation. Today there was supposed to be a survey done to confirm that all of the forms are in the correct place (we assume that happened but don’t know for sure). Then they’ll start doing re-bar, etc. in preparation for placing the concrete (apparently the term pouring concrete is incorrect?). They also have some plumbing and electrical work to complete before concrete. Today they removed the sod inside the forms as they’ll have to do some excavation in there. The nice thing is it’s very clear the boundaries of the house now. It seems massive but as soon as we start putting furniture in the architecture program layout, we realize it’s not as big as it first appears on paper. We’ll definitely have some furniture from each of our houses that won’t make it into the new one.

Picture of the new foundation forms from north-west corner of the back yard.

“That Really Opens It Up!

Doug’s mom always used to say “That really opens it up” anytime they did any renovations on their house. She would have been thrilled with the current state of things at Willowby! The back half of the roof has been removed as well as two of the exterior walls. Later this week they’ll start placing the forms for the addition foundation. Next week there will be a foundation survey to make sure forms are in correct location as well as plumbing and electrical (for floor plugs in living room and kitchen island). It’s really nice to see things progressing, if not a bit freaky to see the house completely open like this.

We have good news on the mail slot front! We were able to find the mail slot door in the dumpster so it has been retrieved and will go back on the house at some point.

That’s really open!!!

Working Electric Pole and Some Framing

While we were in Puerto Vallarta this past week, they finally got the temporary electric pole electricity connected with a new meter. Travis ended up having to get involved to work with our electric company as CenterPoint wouldn’t install the temporary meter and connect the lines until our provider authorized it (basically they have to say they’ll be billing us for electricity used through that meter). Seems like it was all done yesterday. When we got to the house today, we were able to get the internet and security cameras working which we’re pleased about.

Glen had also told use that they had started framing interior walls at the front of the house where the roofline isn’t changing and no new foundation is being added. They were able to get the guest suite (bedroom/closet/bathroom) done as well as the study, powder room and parts of the utility room. The utility room extends on the west side to what will be new foundation so they can’t do the full room yet.

On a frustrating note, we determined that they removed the original mail slot (you can see it under the street numbers to the right of the front door in the banner picture above). We had planned on keeping the mail slot as a decorative element, but had not planned to use it for mail delivery. The box was very small and the mail person basically had to bend anything they put through the slot to get it down into the box. The construction crew had to remove the box as it was in the way for the new guest wall, but we’re not sure why they didn’t leave the external slot. Hopefully it’s still in the dumpster and they can dig it out. If not, they’ll have to do brick work to fill the hole the missing slot leaves.

Down below are photos of the framing that’s been done. We’ll try to describe what you’re seeing, but realize that it often just looks like a bunch of studs if you’re not familiar with the layout.

This is a photo from the front door looking down the hallway towards the living room. The wall to the right is the guest bedroom. The opening to the right is where the pocket doors leading into the study will be. The messenger bag on the floor is leaning up against the wall to the powder room (accessed from utility room) and beyond that is the utility room.

This photo is taken from the hallway facing through the pocket door opening into the study. You can see the header across the top where the pocket doors will go. The window in the back faces the street and will be replaced by a larger window that goes down closer to floor like the windows in the picture below. You can’t see it in this photo but there is a closet on the wall against the garage in the background.

This photo is from the hallway facing towards the guest suite. On the right side is the guest bedroom with two windows facing south and east. The guest bedroom is about 12’ x 12’. The opening in the middle is an alcove between the bedroom and the guest bath. There will also be pocket doors so that the alcove can be closed off from the hallway providing privacy between the bedroom & bathroom. They’re hard to see but behind the alcove is a linen closet that opens into the bathroom and a good size walk-in closet in the bedroom. The guest bathroom is on the left and currently still has two temporary posts in the middle of it helping hold up the room.

This photo is taken from the living room side of the utility room wall. You can see that the wall currently stops right in the middle of the open patio door on the right. Once they’ve added more foundation out there, this wall will extend another 6 or so feet to create a 6.5’ x 14’ utility room. They’re hard to see in this photo but in the background are the powder room and a slot for a utility room fridge.

This photo is taken from inside the utility room, right next to the existing patio door on the right. The recessed framing on the right is where the fridge will go. The opening to the left of that is where the door into the powder room will be. The opening on the left is the door to hallway. Just to the right of where the fridge opening is, there will be a door to the garage and ultimately there will be a door out to one of the patios on the west end of the room.

City of Houston Hell

The city permit office continues to drive us crazy. The permit office inspector came out on March 7 to inspect our temporary electrical pole. They approved it at that point (see green sticker in photo).

At that point builders called CenterPoint to have them disconnect service/meter from original house connection and move to the new pole. As of yesterday afternoon (March 16) the city had not released CenterPoint to make the change despite it being approved. Unfortunately the builder can’t really start removing the back of the house until this happens.

Floor Update

We heard from Glen that they are changing up plans for the floor. While discussing with plumber where/how they were going to bust through existing slab for the guest bathroom and utility room plumbing, Glen realized that all the raised floor where the tile had been was actually poured concrete on top of the original slab. We had assumed that the slab was originally poured with two elevations as the plans clearly indicated where there was going to be hardwood floors (lower) and linoleum and tile (higher). Glen had one of his workers start working at it and the additional layer came off very cleanly. For now, they’ve removed all of the raised sections except where the new utility room is going to go. Remains to be seen if that may also need to go, but think this is going to end up as a much nicer solution as we get to use the lower slab elevation giving us at least an extra inch in the front two rooms of the house where we only have 8’ ceilings.

The floor at the bottom of this picture used to be the same height as the floor under the lumber

Temporary Internet Solution

Travis had installed a cable modem and router in the house to provide internet over there. This is primarily so we can get alerts and use security cameras/doorbells over there during construction. Because of the extensive working happening inside, we needed to find a way to have the internet outside the house. Travis found a waterproof box on Amazon that was large enough and did a few modifications for ventilations and electrical. The builder’s electrician ran an electric line and coax cable (for cable internet) from the temporary electric service pole that’s been installed in the yard. We went over Friday and installed the box and all associated equipment. Now if only Centerpoint would move the electric service from the old house meter to the new service pole, we’d be able to see what’s happening over there. The builder will also be using the internet for their security cameras.

Our Internet Command Center

Our temporary service pole - just waiting for hookup!

Final Demo Begins

Immediately after we received a permit, the builders started doing the rest of the demo. As we’d said, the inside was basically down to the studs. They’d been preparing for this by bringing quite a bit of lumber to allow them to brace the roof while they removed interior walls.

The first thing we noticed (via security camera) was that masonry guys were removing brick on the back walls of the house. Our deed restrictions require all the exterior walls to be brick or stone. As such, we’re trying to reuse as much of the brick as we can as we won’t be able to find an exact match. The guys did a great job saving the vast majority of what they took off and have cleaned all the old mortar off really well.

The image below shows the existing exterior walls (in yellow and blue), where we’ll use the removed brick (green) and what we’ll use on the other walls (red & purple).

Exterior Wall Material Plan

Most brick removed off back of house.

On the inside of the house, the guys have started installing braces to support the roof so they can remove most of the interior walls. They’ve also removed the old hardwood floors what were in the bedrooms and living room. At the time the house was built, hardwood floors would typically be installed on screeds (wood slats) that sat on a slightly lower level of the slab that was covered in tar. This was before vapor barriers that we use today were available so the gap above the concreted provided that barrier. The builder will end up having to float the lower floors to make all everything level.

Here are some photos of the current inside with quite a few of the interior walls gone. Doug’s mom would have said it really opens up the place.

City of Houston Permit Gauntlet

As mentioned in the last post, our application for building permits was submitted to the City of Houston on October 18. Builder had told us that it would likely take about 4 week (at best) for approval. By the 21st of October we’d heard back that there were some issue that needed to be sorted.

The major one for us was that based on the survey that was submitted with the plans, the east side of the house was slightly less than 5 feet from the property line. You may remember we didn’t get a new survey when we bought but instead used one from a previous closing. Because the old survey showed less than a 5 foot clearance, the new parts of the wall that we were extending along that side would have to be built with fire rated materials (special windows, special sheathing, etc.). We weren’t excited about this due to the cost of those materials (especially the windows) and the fact that at a minimum the windows wouldn’t match on that side.

Travis looked at the old survey and realized that it was quite inconclusive whether the distance shown was to the fence or the property line. We decided to pay for a new survey and asked them to explicitly measure to the property line. On November 18, we received an updated survey showing that in fact the house was 5.1 feet from property line so we would be fine with our original windows, etc.

At this point, things get a bit murky about what’s happening. Through most of December, there is no obvious progress in Permit Office (they have tracking tool that you can view online, although we didn’t know about that until late January). We knew there were two minor issues that the builder thought had been resolved. We also had to pay a “Wastewater Capacity” payment to the city because we are reducing the amount of "pervious” space on the lot. This took several weeks to sort out with Glen finally just hanging out at the Houston Public Works office until they processed things.

Regardless, things progressed slowly and it wasn’t until Glen was again pressing things with individuals in the Permit Office that things got resolved in February. We were finally approved on February 20 and had a receipted permit in hand on February 28!

Yippee! Things may actually start happening.

Working on Plans

As we indicated before, we had a house plan that we’d used when interviewing each of the builders. It was close to what we were looking for but definitely needed polishing and changes to make overall flow better. We started talking through things with the builder and with a bit of back and forth over a couple of months ended up with something we really liked. At this point, perhaps our only frustration has been that Glen is a “seasoned guy” and still is doing plans old-school (by hand). As a result, any time we decide to move something, it’s a lot of work for him. Most of Averon has gone digital but Glen is still trying to come up to speed on their system (Chief Architect). After a longer time-frame than we probably would have liked, we ended up with 17 pages of plans that had engineering seals and were ready to go to the city. They were ultimately submitted to City of Houston on October 18. Sometime after that, we think we “broke” Glen when we realized that while the overall dimensions were correct, there was an issue with some of the individual room dimensions (something that would be impossible in Chief Architect). Pretty quickly after that, he got the primary pages of our plans done in Chief Architect and is now a convert.

First Floor Plan in Chief Architect

Initial Demo Work

Prior to submitting official plans for permitting, Averon has obtained a demolition permit. This allows them to do various types of demo ahead of any other work they’re planning.

As such, there is now a dumpster in front of the house and very quickly, the house is pretty much gutted. All sheetrock is gone (walls and ceilings), as are the kitchen and bathroom. Most of the electrical fixtures are gone and over the coming month or so, most of the plumbing is removed. The only real demo on the outside is the patio pavers are up and stacked and the patio awning has been removed.

Naively, with things moving so quickly, we convince ourselves that this is going to continue. We buy each of our direct neighbors gift cards for a local bakery as a peace offering for all the noise and traffic caused by construction crews that we are sure will be frustrating them any day now. Cue foreboding music again!

Finding a Builder

While we were looking at houses, we realized that in many cases we were considering some pretty major renovations. Our realtor talked to a builder in the Woodlands and shared what we were talking about doing and what we thought our $/sq ft construction estimate was. That builder confirmed that we seemed to be in the right ballpark.

Of course we didn’t plan on using that builder so pretty quickly after closing, Doug started trying to identify builders to interview. We had decided to use a Design Build firm. Basically these are builders who can do architecture work and do all the plan work to prepare for permit submission. It just seemed like it would be easier than iterating back and forth between an architect and builder.

We did a lot of research online about design/build firms who had worked in our area and spent time going through reviews. Doug did preliminary phone discussions with about five of those and ultimately narrowed it down to three to bring onsite and talk with.

The three meetings were very different:

  1. Firm one didn't really interested in our job. They were quite small and seemed focused on higher end renovations. Despite that, they did provide an estimate very quickly.

  2. Firm two was very interested but their process was very front-end loaded and we would have had to make all decisions very quickly. We didn’t think we really wanted to work that way (we didn’t progress far enough with them to get any type of estimate).

  3. We both agreed almost immediately that we liked the third company. For the meeting, they sent the project manager (Glen) we’d be working with if we selected them. He was the only one who really looked at the existing house in detail. He asked good questions, answered all of our questions thoughtfully, and we both really liked him. We ended up with a quote from them that was of course higher than our original estimates but during our interviews with all the companies, it was clear that building material prices had really driven costs up and so we were not too shocked.

In the end, after a number of additional meetings and a lot of Q&A back and forth, some site visits of completed and work in progress, we selected Averon Construction and signed a contract in late May.

Early Floor Plan

Here’s a pretty early floor plan Doug drew up after a few major changes to our earliest one, which in hindsight was pretty horrible. Since then, we’ve added a powder room into the laundry room (easier access from pool) and made minor adjustments in most other rooms. This version is the one we used when we were interviewing builders.

Original 1959 House Plans

After closing, we went by the house just to confirm we hadn’t made a horrible, horrible mistake. While looking around, we found a set of the original 1959 floor plans rolled up in a kitchen drawer (house was completed in 1960).

The layout of the house hasn’t really changed since then. The kitchen and bathroom have both had minor updates and the kitchen has gotten a peninsula separating it from the dining room to give more counter space. What is labeled family room on the plans is now being used as a dining room.

Once we’re done remodeling, the only thing that will be recognizable will be the garage!

Original House Plans

We bought a house!

After

  • 3+ Months of searching

  • 25+ House Showings

  • 40+ Open Houses

  • 2 Offers on Houses We Didn’t Get

  • 1 Missed Opportunity

  • 1 Successful Bid

  • We own a house!

Back in December of 2021 we started talking about our living situation and what to do longer term. At that point both of us each owned a house in Houston and we owned the lake house near Austin together (Spicewood, TX). We’ve been spending our time split about 50/50 between Houston and the Spicewood since the pandemic started. We agreed that neither of our houses really worked for both of us and perhaps it was time to look for something we could live in together comfortably. Also in our mind was that Travis was planning to retire in the spring of 2023 and we figured we should work towards having something sorted by then (Doug retired in 2016).

We talked a lot about where we wanted to live and what we needed in a house. Ultimately we decided on the following requirements:

  • Central Houston - perhaps extending out as far as Bunkerhill towards the west.

  • 1 Story

  • 4 bedrooms (2 for bedrooms, an office, and workout space)

  • Open living/dining/kitchen preferred

  • 2 car garage minimum

  • Pool

We knew getting all of this in our preferred location wasn’t going to be easy, but we were open to remodeling, adding on, and putting in our own pool.

We started going to open houses in January of 2022 and pretty quickly met a realtor at one of those that we really liked. Josh was willing to spend time talking about renovation options on that house and recommended another house that hadn’t hit our radar nearby. We started working with Josh and looking at houses pretty regularly. We realized pretty quickly that things weren’t staying on the market long at all and we were likely going to have to be pretty aggressive. Through January and February we looked at houses across our original location scope and pretty soon realized that we were primarily interested in the Timbergrove & Lazybrook Subdivisions (both close to Travis’ house). The neighborhoods are inside the loop north of Interstate 10 and between 610 Loop West and T C Jester Blvd.

Offers

During that first quarter of 2022, we made an offer on two houses. In both cases there were multiple offers and both times we bowed out at some point above asking. We liked both of them and both of them were in great shape, but don’t think either of us were heartbroken that we didn’t get them.

Missed Opportunity

Then we found a new listing and went to look at it on a Friday with Josh. We liked it a lot and spent quite some time at the house talking about what we’d need to do renovation wise. Doug had bought an inexpensive house plan application and had spent some time coming up with potential plans. There was an open house on Sunday afternoon and we decided Saturday that we would go take one more look at it during the open house and in all likelihood make an offer afterwards. We warned Josh that we’d likely be calling him Sunday afternoon. During lunch Sunday, we looked and the open house had been cancelled and there was a pending offer! This was the first time we really felt we’d missed out on something.

Success!

Finally, we found a 3BR/1BA house near 18th St & Ella Blvd. It was in good shape, showed well, and was in a location we liked. Doug quickly threw together some options for remodeling that weren’t too overwhelming to consider. Travis threw a wrench into things when he indicated that after looking at various houses over the months, he really liked the idea of the living room overlooking the backyard and pool (which didn’t exist at this point). We talked through options and came up with another plan that required essentially gutting the house and adding on about 1500 sq. ft. Multiple quick visits to the house with a lot of measurements taken, we decided we had a viable option and put in an offer. Of course, once again, there was at least one other offer, but in this case we prevailed.

Because we were planning to gut the house, we elected to do no inspections, We also decided not to have a new survey done (cue ominous foreboding music). We closed pretty quickly and by April 14 had a new house!

Now we basically just need to find a builder, rip it apart and make our notional floor plan come to life.

Photos from the listing