For background, see last year's report: Adventures in Remodeling
We started by hiring a firm of remodeling specialists, CG&S Design Build, who came highly recommended by friends. The architect came up with a magnificent design that was, how shall we say it, I bit more than we envisioned. Several iterations later, we had something that we thought might work.
In the meantime, Linda developed cold feet. "I'm not ready to move out of our current house."
That entailed some more iterations to convert the design from some place for us to live into something we might be able to sell: A cozy plan with a nice open floor plan on the first floor, and a master suite, and two guest rooms with a shared bath upstairs. About 2200 square feet. Perfect for an empty nest couple, or two young professionals. A realtor we consulted proclaimed it "perfect."
We discovered a small problem. We planned to enclose the front porch to provide more room on the ground floor. The front porch, which dates from the original building, extended over the setback line from the street. That meant we needed a variance to enclose it. We hired a consultant — more on that later — who advised consulting the neighbors and presenting the plan to the neighborhood association. The affected neighbors thought the plan looked fine. We got them to sign a letter saying so.
The neighborhood association was another story. Maybe it was my technique. The bottom line: they voted to oppose the variance. They could have simply not taken a position, but they voted to oppose it. I thought the whole project was dead then.
I found out something when we appeared before the Austin board to seek the variance. Actually, I learned two things:
- If you are going to oppose a variance, you have to show up.
- When you hire a consultant, it's a good idea to get one on a first name basis with the board members.
When our consultant rose to speak, the chairman said, "Say your name for the record, Jim." (His name was Jim also) Ten minutes later, we had our variance by unanimous vote.
We proceeded to select flooring, kitchen appliances, light fixtures, everything. We ended up with an incredibly complete plan for the project. All we needed to do was finalize the financing and get started.
You can guess what happened next. Our timing was perfect. The bottom fell out of the housing market just when we were ready to go. Loans for projects like ours were nonexistent.
Everything is on hold.
So it goes.