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Building a Light Green LEED House in Houston, TX
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February 2011

 

Second Month Budget Report and Demolition Complete

As February draws to a close we can say that we are on the road, but about a month behind our original schedule. Mostly this is due to the unfortunate timing of the large drainage project that came through our neighborhood in the past few weeks. We lost an entire week because the city poured a lovely new driveway for us, and it had to set before the heavy demolition vehicles could drive on it. These things happen… And we do have a very nice new road, driveway and soon sidewalks, and the neighborhood will drain much better when the next major rain comes. 

I have started tracking overages in the budget – if you see my last post, we learned that overages relative to budget are paid as you go, rather than towards the end of the process, even if they are not due to changes that we requested. So far it is not much – just a small red sliver that you can't even spot on top of the budget stack. No real change versus last month then on the budget, because of this.
Budget_actuals_blog

Good news is that the several of the next major budget items are coming at or very close to budget. We have heard on concrete, which is up next and under budget and also the metal roof which is a little over. By next month there will no doubt be more activity.

In the meantime, here are some photos of progress in getting the lot ready. The slate is clean. Let the building begin!

(download)

Filed under  //  budget   progress  
Posted by Oliver Bogler 
 

House demolished to make way for our new one - see the video here!

Not much to say, except hurray! The House is down:

Enjoy!

Filed under  //  progress  
Posted by Oliver Bogler 
 

Almost complete disconnect... as we are about to get started on our LEED house in Houston

Driveway

It has been a quiet three weeks on the blog, and at the site, as expected. It was the time of disconnecting things, which occurs somewhat stepwise and is of course necessary before the bulldozer goes in. As I posted last time, we also did some salvage and that has been completed. 

We had to disconnect the electricity, the water, the gas and now the sewer line, and then the City granted us our demolition permit. With that in hand, we are ready to go next week. Only other thing we are waiting on is the completion of the drainage and road resurfacing project that is just completing in our street, and which has been active in our neighborhood for the past year or more. 

As you can see in the attached photo, our driveway is about to be poured, and once it is done, the demo company can get to the house and level it. Since I am traveling a bit in the next couple of weeks, I may not get to video the event as I had hoped, so may have to content myself with an after photo. 

In the meantime we also worked on our first change order, related to the insurance for the project, which came in higher than the budget. From this we learned that budget overages are preferably dealt with on an ongoing basis out of our cash. In other words, the budget we had developed is more than a goal. It represents, line-item by line-item, a limit to funds that are available for a specific expenditure. I guess that makes me glad that we spent a long time working on the budget and so are fairly sure that we are close in most cases. It also makes me hope that the economy doesn't pick up too fast, and drive prices up for labor and materials. Anyway, I will put overages into the ongoing budget that you can see here as we move along. 
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Filed under  //  progress  
Posted by Oliver Bogler