Sticker shock

Nearly a month ago, we gave our builder the plans that we'd developed with our architect.  We knew they weren't perfect as is, but our attempts to downsize the design had been frustrating, and we needed to know how close the current design was to our budget.  The bids were finally in, and we met with our builder last night to discuss the details.  In short:  ouch.

The quote he gave us was about $50K more than we were hoping for, and that wasn't including the big deck, low voltage wiring, basement finish, and a few smaller things that we were already planning to do ourselves to save money.

I can probably do most of the high voltage wiring myself, which will save about $10K in labor.  Stacy & I can do all the interior painting, too, which is another $5K or so in labor.  I can lay the hardwood floors, which is a few thousand more.  Still, we're getting to the point of nickel & dime paybacks for a whole lot of my time, and that's on top of all the other decisions that will have to be made when building a house.

So I guess we need to revisit our floor plans and try to figure out which features of the new house we absolutely have to have, and which features we can do without to get down under our budget.  That won't be a fun process, because we've got justifiable reasons for most of the significant design decisions in the current plan.

Either that, or we need to start buying lottery tickets.