... and not just because we're upon the winter solstice, with sunset at 4:19 pm and 8 hours, 25 minutes of daylight.
a bit over two weeks ago the general contractor (GC) for our home construction decided he was bankrupt, called it quits and went home. He left us with a ~15% completed home that is months behind schedule, with no roof or windows, sitting in the middle of a big, muddy hole since the foundation hasn't yet been backfilled with earth.
we spoke w/him the next day. After 22 years in business, a few bad decisions had caught up with him and he no longer had enough working capital to continue. We considered helping him out by floating him some money but he didn't think that would help.
The good news in the situation -- if you want to call it that -- was that the subcontractors he'd hired to do work on our project were all paid up-to-date, so he didn't owe any money on our project (except for one sub, the plumber, whom I squared up with shortly thereafter). But we were well and truly screwed, with no place to live after end of March. Plus we are out-of-pocket for a bunch of cash we fronted to keep the project moving until the stages completed: for example, the excavation and demolition were way over budget so we ponied in for payment of those beyond the budget given to the bank. That money is now gone.
In retrospect, we should have seen the signs: The endless delays by the concrete subs, the lack of working capital, the wildly-off estimates on excavation... all of those things were warning signs. But we wanted to believe that things would start to cruise, and he'd pull it off: We'd worked with him before and he delivered, and he did good work. It was like a poker game where we had too much in the pot to back out without losing it all.
luckily the designer on our job happened to be partnering with another contractor and offered to step up and complete our job. This new builder has a good reputation and references. I visited a home he's working on in West Seattle and it looks quite good. He isn't cheap -- the cost of our project is now $50K more than we had budgeted -- but part of that increase is due to mismanagement by the original builder and part due to overspending by us on some items like windows. We haven't quite finalized the contract with the new builder yet, but we're very, very close to that.
so the silver lining is that we get to keep our designer on this project as he's now partnered with the new builder, so that's good: he knows more about the design and project than anyone. But once again we've lost more time (weeks -- they can't start until January 2nd), and it's raining again, and the basement is accumulating water -- again.
sometimes it's hard to remain optimistic.
