Home Designer Meeting
Wed, Mar 7, 2018Today we met with the original designer to talk about our revisions. I must not have communicated very well the scope of our changes because he said we’re no longer talking about revisions, but a full new set of plans. This is a huge bump in cost. We’re going from a few thousand dollars, to a new estimate of $13,500!
I was already aware that the size of cabin we were looking to build would require professional structural engineering. You can DIY this, but only if the structure is small, and the snow load is low. I don’t know what our snow load is yet, but it’s likely pretty high. Maybe as high as 120 psf (pounds per sq ft). As I would find out later, the analysis involved here is very deep. The structural engineer will essentially prove that every component of your home is capable of holding more than the load it needs to carry. You have to consider seismic loads, wind loads, an uneven snow loads, in addition to any standard live load (people, furniture, etc) that would be present. Mistakes here cause buildings to collapse.
The quote we were given was about $11,000 for the design, and another $1,500-$2,500 for structural engineering. So maybe we could get this back down to budget if we did the design ourselves? I have kept playing around with SketchUp and am getting comfortable with using it. I know people have generated blueprints with the software, so maybe I could make it work…
Although we had some sticker shock, I am not trying to say we were being overcharged for the services. I am sure its a fair price. But I want to reiterate what the dream here was: it’s not to have a cabin, but to build a cabin. I really want to build the whole thing, or as much of it as possible, and so having this price discrepancy was more of an opportunity, to me, to get to do a bit more of the work.
So we have a cost setback, with a possible mitigation, but we learned another thing: the county is more like 6 weeks or more from issuing build permits. Starting construction this spring is unlikely. We also need to find a structural engineer that will work with us.
We knew our timeline was ambitious and had been prepared that there was a pretty good chance we would not be starting construction until late summer. If that became true, we’d pursue getting the concrete work done this year, and start framing as early as possible in 2019. In some ways, that is a much better plan as it maximizes our time to get the building waterproof before the next snow comes. We’ll just have to keep working and see how the timeline shakes out.
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