Someday We Will Move In

Building a house is a 6+ month long emotional roller coaster ride - full of many ups and downs.  Mix in the excitement and the emotional attachment of a new house, plus my severe impatience, and there's bound to be a moment where I lose my mind.  This week, that moment happened to BGE.

Steve and I were pretty excited at the end of the last blog because although BGE couldn't make any promises, they did say they'd be able to start by the middle of last week, a few days sooner than the August 20th start date.  We were ecstatic to see that they delivered the supplies last Tuesday, so that made us think they'd start the work Wednesday, however Wednesday came and went with nothing done.  My impatience level was probably 20% at that point because Wednesday is technically middle of the week, but maybe their definition meant Thursday.  Steve reached out to Matthew at BGE to ask if the work was starting that week.  He replied and apparently the middle of the week actually meant Friday.

On Friday, I was in a meeting at 10:30 but saw my cell phone ring with BGE's number and I felt my blood pressure instantly rise.  I called Matthew back after the meeting to find out what was going on.  To his credit, I was impressed that he called to tell me they ran into an issue.  Like I mentioned before, as long as I'm in the loop, I really am a nice customer.  He explained while digging, they ran into an old foundation and they will need to dig that out, adding an extra day to the job.  I let him know I appreciated him keeping us in the loop about this.

Steve and I went to the house on Saturday and we were a little disappointed to see that they ripped up the Comcast line and threw it away in the dumpster at the house.  While this is frustrating, we don't need Comcast to move in.  But we did email Matthew to ask how we go about fixing this.  On Monday, he let us know he'd talk to the contractors.  We thought that meant he would ask them right away on Monday, because we didn't want them ripping out the entire line if they didn't have to.  We didn't hear from him all day after that.

Now Mathew tried to set my expectations early on that all the work they need to do is "weather permitting."  My definition of that is that they can't work in rain which seems obvious since they are working with electricity.  However, when there isn't rain, I expect work to be done until it starts.  Monday's weather was cloudy and overcast all day, but it was 78 degrees and never rained.  Sounds like a perfect day in the construction world, right?  Well they didn't work at all and we have no idea why.  Keep in mind this was also the day the project was initially supposed to start.  My impatience meter was probably at 80% on this day.  There was absolutely no excuse to not work that day.  Since I was already pretty frustrated at this point, Steve emailed Matthew asking when they'd be working again so that Victor can talk to them about the work they need to do and when we can schedule other contractors around them.  No response on Tuesday.

Tuesday was a rainy day, so I was prepared to not take anything out on BGE because I knew they wouldn't be able to work.  But this is the day I blew up.  Steve stopped at the house on Tuesday to check if anything happened because it didn't rain until later in the day.  While there, he ran into Victor who seemed to be just as frustrated as we were that nothing happened either Monday or Tuesday.  He told Steve that the rain didn't even start in the area until noon, so that was another half day that the contractor wasted.  There are a ton of little things that need to happen in order to get occupancy and all of it is waiting on power.  Knowing there was more time that went by that they didn't work and knowing that Victor was just as frustrated, I was done.  Impatience meter went through the roof.  I told Steve it was time for Bad Cop Becky because I wasn't going to let them waste another day of no rain, and the weather since Wednesday has been perfect!

I would have called Matthew, but I knew he wouldn't be there and I also knew he had a conference call with the contractor early the next morning.  So I emailed him letting him know that it is unacceptable that the last day and a half went by with no work and I expected better given how frustrating this whole process with BGE has been.  I had an email back from him before his call with Ferguson (the contractor) and it didn't help because it was a lot of "man-splaining" about the process and no apology for our frustrations and holding everything up on our house.  I had enough sense to call Steve before replying and Steve told me to thank him for clarifying the process and that I look forward to hearing what Ferguson's plan is.  I'm the bad cop, Steve's the level-headed one.  Matthew wrote back pretty quickly with the empathy I would have expected the first time.

I don't like being the bad cop.  I really don't.  I felt terrible the night before knowing what Matthew was going to read first thing in the morning.  But sometimes, it needs to be done and it worked.  Ferguson committed to working the rest of the week and Matthew told them that they are to let him know if anything in their schedule changes and why, so Matthew can let us know.  Even though I demanded to know why they let a day and a half go by without working, he was smart to leave that answer out of his email back to us.  I'm sure it was an answer I wouldn't have liked.

As promised, Ferguson worked full days on Wednesday and Thursday and got a lot of the work done.  Matthew let us know that the project completion is still Monday and as long as they are working, I'm fine.  We also heard from Matthew that Ferguson had already reached out to Comcast to fix the line they ripped up, so that's at least in the works too.  Unfortunately, Ferguson didn't work today.  We tried Steve's approach first today and he sent an email making sure they still plan to be done Monday even though they didn't work.  If Matthew has an ounce of sense, he will make sure they do.  Otherwise the bad cop will be coming back out.  :-(  And that's where we are now in the BGE saga.

Last Friday's progress - they made it down the common drive to the spool you see in the distance past my car.

The chunks of foundation they ran into.

Wednesday's progress - all the underground work was done

Transformer was installed on Thursday

Not a whole lot has happened inside the house, but the oven was finally installed on Wednesday and we gave Beth a tour of the house!  I'm not sure when the next blog will be because after we get power, they will start all the tasks/inspections needed to get us our occupancy permit, so there won't be a whole lot going on as far as blogging goes.  They do still need to install floors, but since it's muddy around our entire house, I'm not sure I want to walk around on new floors to grab pictures.  We'll see how long I can hold off though, because let's face it, I'm probably too impatient to wait to take pictures.  :-)

Finally have our double oven installed!!

Well tank was installed - this is a big step needed towards occupancy!

Beth is seriously the best!  She helped us get the land where we built and she sold our house in 4 days!  Let me know if you need a real estate agent!  Plus she brought beer!  :-)

More Than Meets The Eye

Picking up where the last blog left off...

Last Tuesday we had our meeting with Clark, Victor, and Megan which you can read about (and get caught up on the BGE saga) here.  I think during the meeting with our Bob Ward team we may have reminded them that we get shutters by a couple of the windows because when we mentioned it they had to check the plans to be sure.  I drove by the next morning on my way to work and the shutters were already installed!  That's pretty much it for updates to the house, but now the update on BGE...

Shutters

Fitting the stained glass in the window!

The window my dad made!  We haven't officially installed it yet (we're waiting until we move in).  We were just fitting it in the window in these pictures and dad has a few finishing touches to do.  LOVE IT!!!

We heard from Matthew at BGE last Wednesday that he had his conference call with the contractor who was doing the work at our house and the absolutely fantastic news was that they were able to move our job up to "middle of next week," meaning this week.  I was setting myself up to be in "I'll believe it when I see it" mode and well...I never thought I'd be so happy seeing a transformer in our yard today!

HOLY CRAP - WE ARE GETTING POWER SOON!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's pretty much it for now.  Once the power run is done, there are a few loose ends in the house to take care of and then work towards getting our occupancy permit.

Can't Make Any Promises

I don't know if what I have to say is exactly an update, but it's information nonetheless.  Here it goes...

I'll try to make the super long story brief, but I "can't make any promises."  Remember this blog here where we first found out that BGE wasn't going to be back out to the property until August 20?  At the end of that blog, I mentioned that a few people we knew kindly reached out to us with contacts at BGE to see what the deal is.  We are so thankful for Denise (who Steve used to work with) and her son-in-law Paul for their help!  Paul works at BGE and we reached out to him with our information and a quick rundown of what we knew of the situation (which wasn't a whole lot).  We heard back from him right away and he asked us to give him a few days to research.  When he got back to us, he gave us an explanation of the process BGE does when it comes to new home construction and he told us to contact a guy named Tom (I'm guessing the head of the New Construction department) if we had any questions.

Rewinding a bit - before we knew about the August 20th date, Victor (our superintendent from Bob Ward), myself, and Steve were calling a guy named Matthew pretty much every day for two whole weeks to try to find out when BGE would be coming out to do the work.  Matthew is the Designer/Project Manager for our house from BGE.  I know Steve and Victor are much more level-headed than I am, but when I'm getting radio silence after multiple phone calls and messages, I get more and more irritated.  I'm pretty sure the last message I left for Matthew was mean enough that made him never want to talk to me.  But in reality, as long as I'm kept in the loop - even if it's bad news (most of the time) - I'm a pretty rational, nice person.  I promise.

Okay - going back to Tom now.  Because Paul and Tom were the only ones to provide us with relevant information about the project, I wanted to call Tom and thank him for the explanation he provided to Paul and of course my other motive for calling was to see if there was anything that could be done to move the install date up.  Tom was super nice and when I told him we had been in the dark for two weeks about any of this, he got pretty concerned and asked if I had ever talked to Matthew.  I was honest and mentioned we had all been leaving messages for him and never heard back, until I guess when he called Victor on July 20th notifying him of the August 20th install.  Tom and I had a great conversation and he indicated that he would flag our account so that if there were any cancellations, he'd move our install up.  Of course he followed that up with he "can't make any promises," which after he explained the whole process to me, there really is a logical explanation for the long wait...but I'm super impatient if you couldn't already tell.  :-)

The next day, I had a phone call from Matthew apologizing to me about not returning my calls (imagine that!?).  He probably thought he was talking to a completely different person if he compared my last voicemail to my tone on the phone that day!  He mentioned that the sub-contractor was going to try to get out to our property last week to at least re-assess and potentially start some of the work sooner, but again he "can't make any promises."  I emailed Matthew yesterday afternoon to let him know we had a meeting with Victor scheduled today to walk through the entire house to get an idea on what is left to be done and about how long it will take.  I asked if the sub-contractor had been able to go out to our property and if there was any update on whether or not they could start sooner.  He wrote back first thing this morning to let me know he'd have more information tomorrow after a conference call with that particular contractor.  So that's where we stand with power right now.  I know that's a whole lot to read for what is essentially no news.  On to today's meeting with Victor though...

We had requested this meeting to do a walk through of the entire house with Victor to wrap our heads around the rest of the process.  We've been asking for a lot of updates over email lately because they are down to a lot of little things to be done (plus floors, which can't happen until after power).  When we aren't in the loop, we start to think the worst so we were getting pretty frustrated seeing a tiny bit of progress, or nothing at all on the house.  To prevent frustration, we figured this meeting made sense.  We didn't know this, but Megan had arranged for her, Clark, and Victor to all meet with us, which we really appreciated.  If you don't remember from earlier posts, Megan is the sales person who took over for JoAnna while she's on maternity leave and then Clark is the architect (who is very well-known in the area).  Between the three of them, they explained the rest of the process very well and really put our minds at ease so we don't show up frustrated at the house anymore.  Basically, there are only four things left that can be completed before power:  shutters, porch railing (which we are required to have given the elevation), barn doors, and the oven & microwave install.  The barn doors should be installed this week and then the trim guy will need to come out and do the trim that goes behind those doors.  He's also the same guy to do the porch railing.  The oven can be done any day now, and that guy was there on Friday to do it, but the cement truck that was there that was pouring the front sidewalk actually got stuck in the yard/driveway, so the oven guy thought it was best to come back another day.  ;-)  The shutters, I think they actually forgot about until we said something today, so they'll order those and they'll be installed once they come in.  We did find out today that they ordered a new microwave to fit the space in the updated cabinets, and that will be installed once delivered.  All other items such as flooring, doing a chlorine flush in the water (required for occupancy permit), paving the driveway, seeding the grass, painting the front door & columns, final touch ups on drywall, final painting touch ups, dishwasher install, etc. etc. etc. cannot be done until we get some freaking power!  The nice thing is, I think it dawned on Clark today just how much BGE is holding up on our house, and it sounds like he might be making some phone calls too.

We know that once BGE comes on the 20th (knocking on wood somewhere...) that they have about a week's worth of work to do.  So we asked the million dollar question to Megan, Clark, and Victor today.  Assuming BGE completes their work on the 27th, when is best case and worst case move-in date?  They didn't give us a worst-case date because I think we all agree that if BGE dares to not show up on the 20th, they will have a lot of angry phone calls coming their way.  But as of now, best case scenario looks like we are moving in mid-September.  However, I'm getting my mind prepared for early October.

That's a long blog, and again, not a lot of interesting news.  But we've at least had the process explained to us both from BGE's perspective and Bob Ward's.  That just reiterates my point that as long as Steve and I are in the loop, we really are happy customers!  Again, thank you so much to Denise and Paul who really got that ball rolling for us - it has certainly made us less angry about the situation.  But, I'm still impatient and can't wait to move into our house!  :-)  In the meantime, here's some pictures of progress.

I don't think I ever posted the final pictures of the stone.  If I did, well...look at them again.  :-)

Close up of stone (again, front door isn't painted yet) 

Front sidewalk was poured last week, but kept covered because of rain (I guess???)

Front sidewalk

Permanent steps to the garage (instead of the temporary ones to the right)

Subway tile in kitchen

Subway tile in kitchen

Closeup of subway tile in kitchen

Looking from the front porch onto the new sidewalk.  For some reason, it's the only picture I took of it uncovered.

Mini Update

I don't have a whole lot to say, so I'll let the pictures do the talking again.

Dad's making progress on our window for above the front door.

They fixed the cabinets so there is room for the microwave, however, the microwave that has already been delivered is way too big for that spot.  We don't seem to get answers over email very well lately, so we've requested a meeting with Victor to go over every room in the house and get an idea of what is left to be done and timeline.  This will be one of those things we talk about.

They started to install the range hood.  They can't finish it until we have power, but they needed to install the base so they knew where to do the tile backsplash.  The tile was supposed to start yesterday, but it didn't.

After having two identical bathtubs in the garage for about a month and a half, they finally got rid of one of them and installed the other!

Power to the People, Please?

Angry, mad, irate, livid, pissed - none of those words accurately describe my rage on Friday.  I had every intention to blog about the house Friday afternoon, but I was so angry that I just couldn't.  The reason I was angry was because we received an email from our team at Bob Ward that informed us that BGE wasn't going to run the power line until August 20th.  On top of being whatever the strongest word for "angry" is, we were heartbroken.  The house is so close to being done and this sets us back another month.  We've asked Bob Ward what can be done to speed things up and if we can at least get into the house to paint.  We're still waiting to hear back on those things, but we're really hopeful for positive outcomes on both.

Saturday, we decided to drive out to the house anyway to see if any of the random tasks on the inside were completed (they weren't...), and as we drove in, we saw two BGE trucks in our driveway!  I think we were both running out of the car to the trucks before Steve had the car in park (I'm exaggerating, but trying to convey our excitement)!  We spoke with a very nice guy from BGE who told us they installed a new utility pole which was something we didn't even know had to happen.  We asked about the August 20th date and he said that seemed pretty absurd to make us wait a month before we have power.  He was going to say something to his people that we are ready for power and he highly encouraged us to tell our team at Bob Ward to put pressure on BGE to run the line.  He even told us that Bob Ward has more pull than they think.  Our first task tomorrow morning will be to let our team at Bob Ward know that!  We are also thankful that a few friends of ours have reached out to let us know that they know someone who works at BGE and that we can reach out to them too.

That's pretty much it for the blog.  Since nothing has changed at the house, I don't have any pictures to share.  Sorry about that.

We're Stoned!

I have a few updates to share, the most disappointing of which is that "July-ish" is now a definite no-go.  It's looking like mid- to late-August for move in.  Here's why...

First, we still haven't heard from BGE about when they are going to run power.  They did let Victor know that they inspected the pre-work they required of Bob Ward and that we are good to go.  But they haven't returned calls from Victor, me, or Steve regarding when power will run to the house.

The cabinets in the kitchen that were incorrect have been ordered and will be delivered next Wednesday and installed that Friday.  The subway tile back splash in the kitchen will be scheduled for probably Monday the following week.  We're still waiting on a few random things inside the house to get done, but the only "big" thing that remains is flooring.

The most exciting update to share is that we finally have a stone-front house!!!  Carlos (the stone guy) still has a few finishing touches to add tomorrow, but it is pretty much done.  I'll take another picture tomorrow when his truck and scaffolding aren't in the way.  All that's left for the exterior are shudders, painting the columns and door, and gutters.

Garage doors

Start of stone!

Stone almost done!

July-ish

As we get closer and closer to completion of the house, we are getting more and more people who ask when move-in is.  My response:  July-ish.  Contractually speaking, Bob Ward has to have the house done by July 22 (five months after breaking ground).  However, the next clause in the contract explained that five months is "weather permitting," and we did have some snow hold us up back in March, so we can't hold them to July 22.  I don't know if it's because I'm excited, or anxious, or stressed, but I feel like everything is moving at a snail's pace right now.  Not a lot has changed on the inside of the house since last week.  There are still appliances that haven't been installed, the barn doors for the pantry and master bath haven't been installed, subway tile hasn't been installed in the kitchen, and the list that feels never-ending continues.  We still need floors too, but we know that's not going to happen until we have power so the hardwood can acclimate to the environment.  I know we are so close to the finish line, but it just feels like we are crawling to it.

The only appliance that has been installed so far.  Steve tested it and we are hooked up to gas already!

Concealed the sprinkler heads

The other thing that affects move-in is BGE (the power company for the blog followers who are not local).  I mentioned in a previous blog that they gave Victor (our superintendent) a few tasks that needed to be done before BGE ran power from the road to our house.  Those tasks included running a PVC conduit underneath the driveway for BGE, having septic and storm water management installed, and leveling out a spot for the transformer in our front yard.  The transformer spot is ready to go and the PVC conduit has been installed.  They worked all day Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday to finish up the storm water management installation.  Maryland code now requires gutters to drain underground, which is great since we are on a well (this will refill our aquifer).  It kind of puts a wrench in our plans for the rain barrel system we had planned for the garden, but Steve says we can still make it work.  They started septic yesterday too.

Storm water management

Start of septic

Still no sign of stone on the outside of the house.  We were told weeks ago that it was going to be installed two Mondays ago.  Just yesterday, we were told that they were waiting on the grading and the storm water management to be done before they even ordered the stone.  So I have no idea when it is starting at this point.

I know the tone of my blog today is coming off a bit negative...ok, maybe a lot.  Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely glad to see progress, but I'm just frustrated with having a little less than 2 weeks left in our current house and I'm pretty sure we won't be moving into our new house within that time.  There's a lot going on with packing our current house (the series of pictures below depict Sophie's idea of helping us pack), coordinating storage units, what goes to my parent's house, what do we do with our pets, delivery of furniture and other appliances that we had to buy, among other things.  I'm stressed and that's putting it mildly.  It is July 7th and there is a lot of July left, so I guess we are still on track to move in to the house "July-ish."  But if I'm being honest, I am pretty sure "July-ish" includes the first week or two of August.

Our "helper," Sophie

Let's end on a positive note because I have a really cool story, but the only pic I have doesn't do this story any justice.  I drive past the house every morning on my way to work.  I like knowing if anyone is working or not (I'm obsessed, remember?).  Thursday, I drove by and in one of the lots that will share the common driveway with us, right by the road, was a bald eagle sitting on a small tree.  As I drove by, it didn't really register with me until I had just passed our driveway.  It finally dawned on me, so I turned around to take a picture because how often is a bald eagle in your front yard?!  Technically, it was in a future neighbor's yard, but close enough!  I started to walk toward it to get a better picture, but they must have really good hearing because I was nowhere near it when it started to fly into the woods in our backyard.  It was really cool to see (especially right after 4th of July!) and made me so excited to be living there soon!  Hopefully we see it again when we live there!

MURICA!