The Blog is BACK!

Yes, that's right. To our thousands (give or take) of fans out there patiently waiting, I'm happy to announce the BLOG is BACK.

As alluded to in prior posts, its been a bit of a whirlwind since we ended the contract with Bayfront. As noted, we do own the land now so that piece is done. Over the last couple of months we considered several different options and had endless meetings and phone calls. Options included change in time line (wait longer), drastic change in house design, and exploring other builders. Kind of a long story but for the purposes of this blog its enough to say that we have landed on going with a different builder.

When we first visited Duluth we were introduced to Mark Sams who works for Kevin Vegar construction. Kevin is a smaller operation who has a small crew and he does most of the work himself. They only do 2-3 houses a year. Mark is his client-facing person...essentially the project manager. His wife Jamie helps as well. Way back in one of the early posts I linked to pictures of a house that was our inspirational "starting point" for our house design...well that house was the Sams' house.

Here's a couple of the pictures:

Front view:


Rear View:


Part of the Great Room, you can see a little bit of the beams that we liked:


Kitchen:


Family/Rec Room:


We had several conversations with Mark and Jamie. The one big difference between building with someone like Mark and Kevin is that Kevin doesn't have much overhead. No fancy office, not a lot of crew members, and does much of the work himself. They do contract out things like the foundation, plumbing, and electric. But a good share of the stuff they contract out is with other smaller operations that they have partnered with for years. In general they really seem to be able to keep their costs down. And they do great beautiful woodwork.

Mark bid out the plans that we ended up with Bayfront and came up significantly cheaper. This was of course a thrilling turn of events. But Mark would need to have the plans re-drawn so he could get full detailed blueprints. He recommended Heather Hiner of Hiner Home Designs. He suggested that we could probably find more cost savings by tweaking the designs as well. So at this point we were pretty optimistic and scheduled a time to meet Heather.