Just finished doing a mountain (well, at least a small hillock) of paperwork to file our third loan draw. This painstakingly meticulous process involves recording every expense for which we expect to get reimbursed from our construction loan and validating those with receipts. Some of these are invoices direct from subcontractors which the title company will pay directly. Others are receipts we’ve already paid for which they will reimburse us.

Now if we were doing a more traditional build then we’d serve as the general contractor and we’d have maybe 20 or so subs who we had to pay over the course of the build. Those subs would include all their individual expenses into a single invoice at one point in time. And we’d also build the whole house in maybe 5-8 months. Instead, since we’re doing much of the labor ourselves, we have dozens of individual receipts for specific materials from multiple vendors and the project spans more like 15-18 months instead. (My spreadsheet is currently on line 180). The friendly but very firm lady who handles this kind of thing for the title company has admitted that ours is a very unusual project. Normally she doesn’t have to decipher 20 scanned pdfs of cryptic gibberish from Menards in order to process a single loan disbursement. All-in-all she’s been very patient and understanding, but this process requires significantly more documentation by both her and I to ensure everything is on the level.

We haven’t filed a loan draw since October and I now have a few vendors who have been waiting more than 30 days. That makes me kind of a crummy GC 🙁 In this case I was holding off on the big expenditure for our brickmason because we still have some leaks on the East Wing and I’m not 100% sure they don’t have more work to do there. But no more stalling, its time to move things along.

This makes for a nice status check on how things are going on the project overall. I’m happy to report that so far things are going according to plan. Some bids were overspent like the foundation, fireplace, and windows. Others were underspent like framing, permits, and utilities. (In the case of framing, we saved big money at Menards.) Most of those expenses have more or less balanced out, which is what you would hope for.

Then we had expected to get into the trades where we do a lot of our own labor, and that’s where we expected to start stockpiling savings. The three major trades are HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. Since I couldn’t source custom ductwork myself and I ended up hiring an HVAC contractor, that one won’t come out ahead. We had expected to save on labor and use those savings to buy much more efficient systems than we originally got bids for. We did buy a more efficient system, and we are saving money by doing a lot of ductwork ourselves, but the furnace install and the custom parts of the ductwork added labor cost we hadn’t planned on, and will take that line a bit above its original bid. But at least we got the system we wanted.

Plumbing on the other hand has come in over $9K less than the lowest bidder. After passing the plumbing inspection, even including the cost of some rework, we saved almost 78% on that. Sweet!

We’re just getting underway with electrical, but as of today I’ve bought most of the materials to do the work. We have thousands of feet of wire, every outlet, switch and light box, the main breaker panel and $1500 worth of circuit breakers all in various states of install. If we stay on track from here we’ll have similar $9K savings on the electrical work.

Even without the electrical savings we’ve got a comfortable $21K buffer at this point. We had always intended to try to save money in the middle phase of the project and then use those savings toward the end to upgrade finish materials. If we ended up doing worse than expected we would just have to live with simple trim, flooring, cabinets, etc. But if we stay on plan we can afford to be a little more choosy on some of those later decisions. Here’s hoping we stay on target!