After the fire... part 3

This is the last in a three-part series by Tim and Margaret O’Leary, whose Fallbrook home was destroyed by fire in November 2003 and has since been rebuilt. This final installment focuses on challenges that can crop up during the rebuilding process.

The subcontractor must have thought it was odd when Tim joined them in pulling the rebar rods into place where the new slab was about to be poured. Yet that concrete beginning jumps to mind as we look back upon the 17-month ordeal of rebuilding our home.

Before the rebar, the 10-month path through the county’s obstacle course to our new building permit was difficult even though we were fast tracked along with the Cedar fire victims.

Although the IRS becomes a friendly partner when you have a catastrophic loss you will not realize those benefits for one to four years and in the meantime you have to start writing checks – big checks – often before you get all the insurance settlement, which for us was still a couple of hundred thousand dollars short of our rebuild costs.

When one builds a first new home when approaching retirement age, it is a chance to upgrade the quality of life for your family but also a chance to shape a future, as the house will be here after we are gone. Yet we are not wealthy and we had a budget and had to make tough choices.

Perhaps the most fun of all was the decision to take our relatively generous personal property settlement of $135,000 and use all but $15,000 for the house rebuilding.

Margaret re-equipped her home office. We bought a new bed and new TV and two couches and kitchen appliances. And then we scrounged for the rest of our stuff at Salvation Army and secondhand stores and a few estate auctions and garage sales.

In the process we both discovered our inner shopping gene, heretofore not in evidence. It was a grand adventure. We found instant heritage antiques for ten cents on the dollar.

The joy of the hunt, the success of the right timing or the lucky bid, Tim kept going on half-price Fridays to the Temecula Salvation Army store and found more than 15 oil paintings by a local artist. He tracked down the donor and in the process learned the interesting story of the artist’s life.

But let’s go back a bit here and share some of our experiences which might help our readers who are rebuilding or remodeling.

Choosing a contractor might be a little easier now since they are not as busy as they were after the Cedar and Paradise fires. We had a most difficult time finding a good contractor.

Initially, our insurance company, Allstate, had led us by the hand to their designated contractor, who appeared within a week as the official adjustor promising that his company would rebuild the house for what we had insured it for which we thought was full replacement cost.

After some false starts in April 2004 trying to buy some plans off the Internet in order to save money, we hired an architect to design a one-story house similar to the one we had.

We warn you to avoid buying stock plans not designed for Southern California. Our building codes are unique and very strict.

To show you how difficult it would be to adapt stock plans, our architect quoted us $12,000 to design a plan and carry it through approval. The fee was to be $16,000 if we gave him stock plans to adapt to San Diego codes.

We knew that because of the many other fire victims, construction costs were escalating by the week (up more than 25 percent from the year before). But we were still shocked when, in July, our designated contractor stopped returning calls and finally admitted he could not rebuild for anything like the budgeted costs of about $100 per square foot.

We shopped the plans that summer to two other well regarded contractors and found they declined to bid even though we were willing to pay more.

Finally, our architect suggested a quality contractor and even after making some compromises as to cost, we still ended up with a $175-per-square-foot bid, and that ended up not covering many of the costs we incurred.

So many details of our adventure might be of interest but we want to sort through the decisions we faced that might be of most interest to our readers.

Pick a good contractor and get a firm bid. Many of the fun decisions must be made at this bid stage and you will have to live with them as change orders are very costly and a major source of contractor’s profits.

Most of us have limited budgets so you always need to prioritize as to what you are willing to cut corners on and where you want the very best you can afford. Let us share some of the reasoning in our decisions.

Volume 12- to 14-foot ceilings are all the fashion now. It denotes opulence but think about your choice. Hot air rises and we did not want it up there when we were heating with expensive propane.

We decided that the most important thing we would spend money on was high-quality windows. Remodelers should seriously consider this upgrade.

We were lucky because we had a 95-foot south-facing exposure and light was what transformed our home and added beauty to our lives.

If you have not built or remodeled in the last 20 years it is worth doing serious research, as there has been a revolution in quality of building materials and technology. Windows are a prime example.

Windows are now dual-paned with the good ones including inert gases between the layers. They are insulated to save energy on hot or cold days and good ones have high R ratings and an e factor that cuts down on sun damage.

In rebuilding you will learn about Title 24, which sets really tough energy standards and requires that your submitted plans have an independent energy audit. For instance, only 18 percent of wall area can be windows, so we saved most of our allotment for the south exposure.

Margaret loves to cook, so money went into the kitchen with good-quality cabinets and granite counters. But we saved by choosing asphalt composite shingles over the sexier choice of tile. (But that roof is still fire-resistant and has a 25-year guarantee.)

Margaret’s Sierra Club roots led her to explore green solutions. Some saved us money, but some were costly.

With that 30-degree slope south-facing roof and San Diego’s mostly sunny days we had the ideal conditions and put in solar photoelectric. The system’s sticker cost was $39,000 but the State of California paid the installer an immediate rebate of $15,000 so we wrote a much smaller check. The federal government also provides a rebate for solar.

We researched flooring. Tile was beautiful and durable but also very cold to the feet, unforgiving if breakables are dropped and very expensive. Wood floors were beautiful but expensive.

We finally chose toasted bamboo floors. They are as hard as maple. They were less expensive and shimmer with the varying shades and patterns.

We love the choice and our desire to live “green” got a boost since bamboo is a grass and the materials we used regenerate in four years. The only negative is we contributed to the balance of payments deficit with China.

We are back in our house with a bigger mortgage but every day there is joy in our environment. Except for garage doors facing the wrong direction, we are very happy with our decisions.

We would have preferred never to have been forced into this rebuilding saga, but there are many consolations. We chose to paint our walls very bright colors different in most every room: violet for the library, bright – very bright – marine blue-green in the guest bedroom, medium green in the bedroom and tangerine orange and peach in the living/family room area.

Every day the play of light on our new paintings and walls reminds us of our good fortune.