Reply to Come along as we build our custom home- lessons learned in real time.

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "Come along as we build our custom home- lessons learned in real time."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]So we have the plans, the engineer...and then COVID hits.  It really felt like the world was ending.  We were paralyzed for a few months as we just watched and waited, and contemplated selling the lot.  Ultimately decided to go forward because our reasons for building hadn't changed. Took us until late 2020 to really get underway with the engineer.  So we paid the deposit and went forward and then our engineer disappeared.  Stopped answering calls, voicemail was full, emails, everything.  We couldn't reach him, and neither could our architect. She was mystified;they'd worked together several times over the years.  We reached out to other engineering firms, but by this time, everyone was building and renovating--the ones we talked to had waiting lists, prices were going nowhere but up.

This was it, time to throw in the towel and admit that building was a mistake, eat the 5K loss and move on.  Then lo and behold, the engineer called us, after about 3 months of being MIA.  It was a 2 person engineering firm and BOTH engineers had caught COVID.  One of them had died, and the other had been in the hospital on a ventilator for 2 months.  And, the lead engineers wife caught COVID and was also hospitalized, and his brother-in-law, who had also died. It was awful.  He was a lovely person and the scale of tragedy he endured was breathtaking.  He asked us to stay with him, because on top of everything he was now in danger of losing his business.  So that is what we did.  We had the ability to wait and it was the right thing to do: but I would say this added about 1 year to the overall length of the project.

The only lesson I have here, other than having a lot of flexibility on timeline, is that a lot of the key companies involved in building a small businesses.  Really small.  With the builder and the engineer in particular, a good question to ask upfront would be:  what is the plan if anything happens to the business owner?

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics