Choosing plumbing fixtures - Cooler than it sounds!

The dream of building my own house started a long time ago but who thinks that it will/can ever happen? I became enamored with timberframe homes a few years ago and even went so far as to buy an antique timberframe (on Ebay) and hired an architect to design a house around it. About that same time I bought a stack of books about home building, including one called The Owner Builder Book. The author explained and demonstrated throughout the book that anyone with a strong desire, some diversified experience, and half a brain can be his owner general contractor. That book also had associated with it a website with a forum and through that forum several of us formed a local owner/builder group, had a few meetings, and shared ideas. Several others from the group went on to complete their house but losing my job kind of put a damper on my own project.

A couple years later after watching the others complete their houses I reassessed my finances and decided that we really could build a downscaled version of our house with the same look and feel but sans timberframe. Last winter I looked through probably thousands of online house designs and Flora and I finally boiled it down to a single design that would give us everything we wanted. I found an engineer who would put our design into AutoCAD and give us a sealed set of drawings for a reasonable price and we started rolling.

We already owned our 3.6 acre lot so with a roughed out budget we set off knowing that we would eventually have to get a bank involved to provide further financing. Last week was the week we went to the bank to sign up for our construction loan and boy what an experience that was. Think about a job interview and an IRS audit rolled into one and that should give an indication of what it was like. I can't blame them for being careful since being able to qualify for a loan does not in itself mean that someone is qualified to build his own house. But what a stack of paperwork I had to fill out. One of the things I had to do was to get actual firm prices on all the things I had just estimated so today we went to a wholesale plumbing fixture company and spent about two hours making decisions about all of our fixtures. It was very helpful to have a knowledgeable person guiding us through the process and yet one more time I was reminded about what crappy service we come to expect in this Wal-mart/Home Depot world. The big box stores seem to have a motto "our service is crappy and so is our stuff but hey, trust us, our prices are low".

My rough budget had shown $4800 for fixtures and our total today came out to just under $4300 but I do still have a couple additional bathroom sinks to buy but still I was amazed that I was that close. I discussed the experience with Flora afterward and we both agreed that it was great fun being able to pick and choose exactly what every sink, stool, and faucet would be and we can hardly wait to use our new shower. Since we spend a lot of time in the kitchen we picked out some really cool things to use there including this faucet. It has not been that long ago that the only kitchen sink choices were porcelain-coated steel or stainless steel each in a couple of sizes. These days there are thousands of choices. We ended up with a big double stainless steel sink that is kind of restaurant style and with that great faucet who knows; maybe I will even do dishes from time to time!