How did you find this place ?
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5 years ago
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dees_1
5 years agolindaohnowga
5 years agoRelated Discussions
If you did an in-fill build, how did you find your lot?
Comments (8)We are preparing to build on an infill lot. We looked long and hard for the right opportunity. We ended up buying an older house on a double lot. We are fixing up the old house to sell and will build on the vacant lot. That being said, I looked at a number of possible teardowns and possible renovation/addition properties. If it were me, I would look long and hard at the price, location and attractiveness of the lot. If your market is individual buyers, I would talk a lot about the location, proximity to amenities, school district, etc. The lot we will build on is very very small, but the location is excellent. As with pretty much any house sale, if the price is right, you shouldn't have too much of a problem finding a buyer. Is this property in Chicago? If so, can I ask which suburb? Another possibility you may want to consider is subdividing the lot and selling it as two separate parcels. Our lot added very little to the price of our house, but is worth substantially more as a stand alone property....See MoreHow/where did you find your custom cabinet maker?
Comments (11)I build custom cabinets and furniture in Los Angeles. I mostly build my own doors because everything I do is non-standard. However, there is nothing wrong with a cabinet maker outsourcing doors, if fact, in some cases it could be better. The large companies that build just doors have specialized, very expensive, very accurate equipment. Some are better the others but clean corners, tight joints, square and flat doors are what you should be looking for. The cabinet maker and his reputation should be responsible for the quality control not you. The drawbacks with out-sourcing are they all tend to use very similar profiles. That said, these profiles are similar to the look of the lower to middle-end national brands and that's why they're used. Second, when it comes to stained wood doors they're not going to be as discriminating as a custom guy should be at selecting matching boards. With the finishes like the ones on the national brands sold a HD and Lowes this doesn't matter. They do much to hide the wood with conditioners, toners and glazes. Of course, with a painted door, matching the grain wouldn't matter. There inferior quality shows up in a different way with paint cracking at the stile and rail joint. This leads us to the other thing you have to worry about once you get your doors. Having the finish done. The two things you notice on a cabinet door is the door style and the finish. The finishing skills of most custom cabinet shops are not on par with their woodworking. Some have finishing departments and do a good job. Some outsource their finishes. Some do a crappy job and say "what did you expect for the money". Quality finishing is a specialized and complex trade all to itself. I spend a good part of my time perfecting finishes and replicating the finishes of the highest price cabinets on the market so I can speak to this with experience. I will also be outsourcing some of my doors but they will be custom profiles that I will specify and be very involved with at every step. John...See MoreHow did you find your GC?
Comments (17)Many thanks to all of you who shared your experience. You surely made me feel better since it confirmed finding a good GC is not an easy task. It definitely is a supply and demand issue. The ones we asked to meet have good records, they are busy. In this town maybe there is one other reason that is house-flippers are back to picture, contractors are busy with those cheaply made, fast turnaround projects. Business has been slow for contractors for a few years, I suspect now they try to grab as many businesses as they could, but can not handle workload on hand, yet may not be sophisticate enough to predict future openings on their schedule. It may be the reasons they do not turn us down, they want to string us along. What I gathered from your experiences is that we need to be more active in getting recommendations and go to Home Shows. Some of you said you received recommendation from KDs. How did you find your KD? It was not easy for us to find a KD either. We met them in cabinet dealers' shop, most were eager to sell cabinets instead of designing a workable plan. We checked three of them with good looking past project portfolio, all of them had very bad rating on Angie's list. We later found out one of the three are out of business, another one has changed business name and store location. We are talking with one now who could never keep an appointment, and is very slow to respond emails and phone messages if at all. I sincerely hope I could find one as good as the KDs on this forum. The Appliance store suggested us to get hold of contractors affiliated with NARI (National Association of the Remodeling Industry), has any one tried this route? Please keep your experience and suggestions coming in, they are incredibly helpful, to me and I believe would be for other fellow posters. Thank you again....See MoreIf you hired a designer, how did you find them, and how did it go?
Comments (17)Thank you guys! blfenton, you are right! I want this to be an updated midcentury. I actually want the bathroom to look contemporary modern, with lots of white-clean, modern, and bright. The exterior will replicate the mcm architecture but the interior will be more updated. I am really stuck on the floors and very nervous because I want to do the whole house in one floor type. kwsl2-That acutally sounds like fun. I wouldnt want to pay to fly someone out here though. I have called a few places so far. One was recommended by a store, but they dont do residential properties. Another one I called only does multimillion dollar homes and wasnt interested. I called a couple other places, but havent gotten a return call. I called an architectural firm whose work I really like, but they do their own work and didnt know of anyone. I am also nervous about the cost. A lot of the stuff I see online is very expensive multimillion dollar traditional/farmhouse style homes. Maybe these places are expecting calls from builders or architects and not homeowners?...See Moreliira55
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