Good News (at last)

After about two months of searching, we have hired a builder. His name is Bud Haworth and he is a local who has been working with timber frame structures (including barns) for many years. You can view his website here. We have wanted to hire Bud from the very first due to his expertise with antique timber frames as well as his interest in our project and willingness to work with us creatively to make it happen. Over the past two months we have gone back and forth about how, exactly, we were going to get Bud's price down to where we could say "yes" . In the end it was a combination of open-mindedness, flexibility, simplification of the original plans (which included some cuts), and a transfer of a number of tasks from Bud's crew to me. That he would be open to me taking such an active role in the construction and finishing of the house is another reason why we were eager to work with Bud. Many builders, I'm told, don't want the owner anywhere near the jobsite. Currently we are in the permitting process, awaiting bank approval of Bud as our builder and of our loan application...and hoping that we might have a mild December. If we do there is a chance we will have a hole in the ground and a barn raising before the end of the year. If not, it will have to wait 'till the Spring, which as I mentioned in the last post, wouldn't be all bad either.