How Much We’ve Spent So Far

We have arrived at our first moment of financial reckoning. I’d budgeted $30,000 of self-financed work to get us through rezoning.

Here’s what we’ve actually spent:

• Building & Landscape Design: $14,000. This includes two early concepts and a redesign; a full set of architectural drawings suitable for rezoning, plus Landscape Plan.
• City Fees and Associated Costs: $4,500. This includes the rezoning application fee, the public hearing fee, plus a lot of printing – $787 worth of paper and signage! Forgive us, trees.
• Site Survey: $1,350. Required for the application, as well as for our architect Mark A to create the Site Plan
• Tree Preservation Plan: $500. Required for the application, completed by an arborist.
• Existing House Stuff: $1,900. Includes hazardous materials survey so we don’t unwittingly poison anyone, plus a fee to get rid of our above-ground oil tank. Good riddance!

Total spent through approval of rezoning = $22,500

So, we are currently under budget for the items I had accounted for – woo, party!

Hold the phone, don’t send the invitations out just yet. There are a few asterisks and things I plain neglected in that innocent early budget.

The biggest of my omissions is the Building Permit fee at 1.25% of the construction budget. I’d thought somehow that this fee would be much smaller. Russ our builder is working on the budget as I type, but with my current, ever-escalating working number, we are looking at $11,000-$12,000. Half is due when we apply for our permit and the other half is due when we pick it up.

A few others:

• Landscape Deposit – this one was a surprise. It’s required of any project that needs a Development Permit (determined based on location of the project from what I understand), and is equivalent to 120% of your landscape budget. Ouch. It’s a way for the City to ensure we follow through and finish up the landscaping. We’ll get the deposit back, but it hurts to have to come up with this at the front end.
• Design package for Building Permit. The design drawings need to be fleshed out in more detail for our Building Permit application and for construction.
• Builder Deposit. This goes toward actual construction costs, and provides assurance to Russ before he starts ordering stuff for our project. A reasonable expectation, but something that must be planned for.

For the sake of completeness, there are also some items that I handled myself but would have a real cost if we hired someone else to do them:

• My general project development time, which I did not record consistently enough to provide a meaningful total (perhaps better not to know?). Let’s just say a lot of hours – planning the concept, coordinating with the team, consulting with neighbours, coordinating with the city, putting together presentations etc.
• Passive House modeling costs. So far, I’ve spent 45 hours on the model. This includes a fair chunk of learning time, reworking, and remembering what I’d done when I put the model aside and came back to it several months later. The model still needs to be updated before we start construction, again after we change anything significant, and then finalized after construction is complete. As the project Passive House Consultant, I will also need to document the construction to show that we built what we modeled. Actual certification requires that we hire someone independent who is qualified, and we’re expecting to spend $5,000 for this piece.

So, overall we are doing OK budget-wise. We are not completely blowing the budget, but I missed a couple of key items in my first pass. This is nothing if not a learning process after all!

We’re working on financing now, so we hope to answer very soon whether this is all going to fly – stay tuned and thanks for reading!