The outside is nearly complete, minus landscaping and a driveway. Endless winter and record rain and snow has been holding off the pouring of the driveway. Work to dot every "i" and cross every "t" on the inside continues.
When we committed to a custom house there was much that I didn't understand and much more that I could not predict. Lumber became scarce (and of course scarce = expensive) because during the lockdowns too many people decided to do home improvement projects at the same time.
The 2021 freeze that crippled the wind driven power grid in Texas rippled into a long lasting shortage of resins, and resins go into everything in home construction such as plastic pipe, caulking, sealants, adhesives, flooring, roofing and paint so all of those and more were in short supply with jacked up prices. International shipping and port problems meant that valves and other essential cheap bits from China couldn't get here. $7 a gallon diesel fuel and a truck driver shortage made moving materials from port or factory to jobsite hit and miss and more expensive. It's been a 2+ year long mess of once in a lifetime unanticipated consequences. But we're finally approaching the finish line.
Not only were there building material shortages that nobody predicted but there was also a pecking order concerning who got any of the available scarce building supplies. Tract home builders got first dibs because they bought in bulk and had existing long term contracts with suppliers. Our builder got what was left over, when he could get it.
The city building department got overwhelmed with permit requests from the big tract builders and developers so individual one off projects like ours went to the back of the bus. I know from having worked at the Seattle building department that permits are a profit center for a city so developers and tract builders got their permits first.
We had to order our garage doors a year in advance due to a nationwide garage door shortage. We applied for our construction loan/mortgage during a low interest rate driven building boom so that resulted in a multi month financial colonoscopy, the reward for that being a low interest rate for these inflationary times.
On the plus side the build has taken so long that the Covid driven appliance shortage ended before we were ready to pull the trigger on appliances. I just didn't have the knowledge or experience to be able to predict any of these things. We never did anything like this before, we were a bit naïve. I thought that you design, order and pay for a house and it gets built. Like I said, naïve.
