carpetted bathrooms. i have a great aunt who has those. Big expensive nice house and fuckin carpet around the toilet. so gross.
Its like any situation. The challenge for the builder is he has to warranty it. So how much does that cost him? Usually they mark it up at LEAST 100% to cover if they have to fully replace it. Most times they never have to do anything close to that, so there is some wiggle room. Think of it this way, if he buys the shower head for $300 and the plumbing costs him $100, he is making $1600 on this "change order". Is he willing to do the same amount of work for $800 instead? Probably, so that means he has about $800 of wiggle room in this single option. Or you could go the shady route, and show up the day the plumbers are roughing in the plumbing and offer the contractor $100 to rough in the plumbing and leave it at that. We literally had a guy show up while they were framing his house, and he paid the framers $200 to frame his upstairs about twice as big as it was designed. Most times we wouldn't catch things like that, but it was big enough we realized it immediately. I told him he can pay for the extra square footage, or we were going to charge him double to get it finished. The contract called for like 1200 square feet of finished space. He was trying to get another 1100 square feet of finished space. I wanted to murder the guy. With a small plumbing change. We normally wouldn't care. Remember with most houses the initial markup is around 10-12%, however all the design center stuff is where the real money is and where they make MOST of the additional profit. Those places are so overpriced its insane.
Oh, I hear you on the markup in the design center. It’s insane. Couple things I noticed that were the most outrageous: Kitchen cabinet handles instead of pulls were a $900 upgrade. Iron stair spindles instead of wood were $250 extra per linear foot. My backsplash with arabesque-pattern tile is $1,800. Stainless hood was $2,500 extra. I still question how much negotiating power we’d really have in the design center. Those aren’t sales people. This also isn’t a custom builder constructing one-off homes. It’s what most people would consider a cookie cutter builder constructing hundreds of houses in a neighborhood.
He paid the cost for the extra footage. He was a shady guy from the start so we expected trouble with him. Ended up with a sweet house though.
Yea I wouldn't expect you to have much negotiating power with them, it would be like expecting to have negotiating power with the front desk person at the car lot. I would get a list of the things you want and talk to the builder and see what kind of price breaks you could expect. Each builder will be different, some will be willing to negotiate more than others. I am just here to say it happens. A lot of the stuff should be discussed up front as well, things like what happens if I bring my own materials, like iron spindles? Would the builder install those? What kind of flexibilty do you have in other options, like window upgrades, or stuff like that. You have to remember, each custom option is something they have to track and manage outside of their normal cookie cutter process. Also those prices are insanely high. It reminds me the next time I build a house, I am doing it myself lol.
Lol we got a quote with the builder’s vendor on plantation shutters, and it was $9,000. We had them installed in our last home (which wasn’t new, but had more windows) and the cost was about $4,000. The builder markup really is crazy.
Its because people are lazy. They just take the first quote and go with it. If you are cheap af like me, you are willing to call around and invest some of your time to find a decent price, its worth it. A lot of people don't want to bother with it and will just take whatever price given. Or they are just ignorant to the whole process.
And by in large the entire process with contractors absolutely blows. If you don't know someone it can be a real nightmare and you can get absolutely gang banged.
This is dead on. I mean we had guys who we used on 20-30 homes a year, and yet I still had to constantly be on the job site every morning to ensure the contractor showed up, and it was worse when you had to have them come back and fix things. That is a benefit the bigger guys have where they have total leverage over a subcontractor where he will be extremely responsive. Its still a crapshoot. If you are a smaller guy building less than say 20 homes a year, if a subcontractor is a good one, he follows the money, when a bigger home builder calls and needs him, you go to the back of the line. I don't blame them but its tough. Then you have to account for swings in the economy and when business is booming, its even more difficult to find quality guys who know what they are doing.
Has anyone run that outdoor bleach in their power washers? I want to run it in mine, diluted of course....but don’t wanna fuck up the power washer.
I haven’t done bleach but I have run undiluted Simple Green and a couple other cleaners through mine. Never had any issue. I would be concerned with bleach as it can eat away at some plastics and rubber seals I believe.
Just wanted to update the thread to say that we decided to keep the rainhead shower head. I won’t be granting interviews at this time and would appreciate if you could respect our decision. #2Blessed2BStressed
A few months ago my HOA emailed me saying that they were offering every resident up to 6 trees for free, we just had to plant them or pay someone to plant them. I assumed they were going to be small trees but I love trees so I got all six. they were delivered today and they’re all 7-10’ oak trees. A couple live oaks, a couple burr oaks and a couple red oaks. I’m pumped about them but now I’m going to spend some money to have them planted because I’m not digging those holes
I'm sitting here wondering how the hell a HOA can justify giving away that many trees at that size, its gotta be pretty expensive Then I remembered that lots of HOA's are basically run by the developers until the development is 100% complete (sometimes longer) and I am guessing the developers fucked up and took out a bunch of trees they weren't supposed to and the city/environmental agency is coming down on them and forcing them to replant a certain # of inches diameter of trees throughout the development Basically the HOA/ developers are saving themselves some labor costs to plant them by "giving away free trees" to unsuspecting homeowners
Not a bad idea. Also there are tons of nursery auctions around here during spring. Best deals are generally the larger trees/shrubs because most people don’t have the equipment to haul that shot around and plant it easily. As a result if you’re prepared you can get some absolute steals.
That and clean around the rubber gasket in the washer. All the crud that gets caught around there can be pretty gross.
Damn near nailed it. This was an old horse farm and they had to tear out a bunch of trees. The city granted them the permit with the understanding that they would plant 350 new trees. So the developer is actually paying for them, the HOA just organized it
I used to be THAT GUY pricing your stuff, and the price reflects one thing. They don't wanna do the work. Spindles are usually 3 to a step. Fuck that. Did they charge you a "custom option fee" that went towards the "deposit" for these "upgrades"? Quotations are emphasized for typical homebuilder salesman pitch. Edit: All of your asks are being subcontracted, and none of what you asked for is an additional labor fee for most general contractors. They are marking up material + labor on something you are making them pay additional materials for, which is pennies on the dollar to your quote. Tile is tile. Vent hoods are vent hoods. Spindles are spindles.
We have a garage apartment adjacent to our main house and I'm looking for a good way to extend the wifi signal to cover it. My laptop gets a good signal but a lot of other devices do not. I have a Netgear R6220 router centrally located in the main house. WiFi range extenders, repeaters?
A WiFi mesh system is a solid option, however I am not sure it’s worth the investment unless you are out there a ton. I would just get an extender as long as you can get a decent location to boost the signal from.
Is a mesh system a good option for a small home that gets terrible WiFi coverage because it’s old construction? Could be a potential Christmas gift for the in laws.
From what I'm seeing it's basically a choice between spending $250+ on a mesh system or around $50 for an extender. My router does a great job around the house but it falls just short of giving me coverage in the apartment.
Speaking of trees, if I have one more mother fucker ring my door bell trying to sell me palm trees I'm gonna flip out.
Welp. That’s the problem. House has an addition that gets no coverage because of the cement blocks separating the rooms.
All depends on your access points and what you get. You can get some with gigantic balls. Also you could probably get away with running one wire near that addition. I have a similar addition, where my office is the wall was external (same wall). One point in the kitchen handles that fine. I ended up on mesh because I’d already spent significant time/money trying to get fucking extenders to work. They did like 80% of the time, but not that well. Outside of resetting my ISP modem this has been rock solid.
Yeah, it's a record player. Our dining room is on the other side of the kitchen and I don't see much need in a breakfast nook just off the other side so I made it a bar area. Going to put a small leather cigar chair in there and stuff.
That was a last minute decision. I wasn't aware my cabinets had drawers on the backside as well so we didn't do the overhang just for the ease of being able to access them. I can sit at the bar and still have plenty of room and comfortably eat at the counter.
Gotcha. Didn't think it would be, but happened to notice how different it looked than how ours is. You have very similar layout to my house and of course the same exact tile which I've mentioned before
We may have had the same contractor. Did he run you 40K over budget and then quit returning your calls?