Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Meeting (part 1)

On the 15th, I received a call from Steve asking for the next draw request. However, I had been advised to not to release that money until we had an agreement in place with them that tied up all the loose ends. I would have been willing to release the money for the marble, which was apparently in dire need of being released so the work could be complete before the holidays as they shut down for 2 weeks. However the draw request was for 64k...

64k put the total money that we would have released at 349 something. Obviously I couldn't sign off on that. So I told Steve that I had been advised not to release it at this time. He got pissed and told me I was holding his subcontractors hostage. Then he asked who advised us, I told him we spoke with a lawyer and we would be sending him an agreement. He stopped talking pretty quick after that...

So I sent him the agreement, and talked with Stacee (our loan officer) and asked her to set up an appointment with them so that we could all sit down and work this out. She was very nice about it, said the agreement I wrote sounded reasonable and that she would call and inquire "when they were going to have it back to me." Hilarious.

We asked for a meeting the next night at Stacee's office, which they couldn't make. They countered with a meeting Wednesday, w/o Stacee, which we declined. Eventually we agreed to meet Monday morning at 8:30am at Stacee's Red Wing branch.

The Lawyer

So for the past couple of months we have been noticing that Lighthouse has been over on quite a few of the line items on the draw logs. Needless to say this has been a bit concerning and we were worried where we stood on how much of the overages we would have to pay.

So I called the one lawyer I know (Luke) and asked for a good real estate attorney in the Cities. Luke gave me two names and using a coin I ended up calling one. We chatted for a couple minutes and he asked that I send some of the paper work we had collected over, but I asked for a face-to-face meeting as our situation is a bit complicated.

We had the meeting during which Tom (our lawyer) was pretty much confused and disgusted with the situation. We suggested that we set a meeting up with them and get everything down on paper in order prior to releasing anymore money to them. He gave us some pointers on how to write the agreement that we proposed, and said that it was in our best interest to handle it directly with them.

I wrote up an agreement and sent it to him to look over, then sent to Lighthouse.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Lights going in! Fireplace done.

As you can see the lights are going in today and the fireplace stone is pretty much done, as far as I can tell. The trimmer was there as well, finishing stuff up. I am thinking we can probably install the ceiling speakers at this point, so we might try and do that tonight to show we are doing our part ;)

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Woodwork going in!!!


Jen and I took Steve and Amy out to the house to show it off and we were met with this. WOW we are totally excited about them. They look really nice. Only thing is that the fireplace woodbox is not utilizing some of the room that should have been available. Oh well, I don't think that wood is going to last that long anyways...

Winter wonderland

Monday, December 8, 2008

Doors and Trim


The doors are up, the trim is being put on, and the garage doors are on.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Progress


There has been some activity at the homestead the last couple of weeks. Steve has been putting up the front porch and railing as you can see. Monday they started getting ready to tile, mudded over the floor in the bathrooms, and put down tile mat in the laundry and mud room. I guess the laundry room is getting tile too...

Steve told me yesterday that the trim would be going up today and the doors should be up on Sunday. By next week the inside should look very different I guess. Oh also the cabinets will be going in next Monday.