Progress Report 4-Richfield
Last night was typical of several of my “last nights”, I was up until 3:30 am working on creating new brochures ,and art , and plan revisions for our big current project , for building 3 elaborate Miracle Homes all at the same time. If you have read any of my recent series of Richfield Reports, then you know how this is both an exciting time as well as a time of some intense moments. This past week, the intense has overshadowed the exciting moments. Things seem to be coming faster and faster. I have, unfortunately, not been very current in my blog postings lately, so I wanted to bring you all up to speed.
The toughest project of the 3 is our all new design called the “Hybrid Wonderhome” (spell-check will alert this fictional name for sure), which is surely to be one of our most amazing homes we have ever built. This is a home which I have come to self-categorize as being one of our “spectaculars“ (another fictional use of a questionable word), is a home we have tried to take a notable Disneyesque( Help, I am trapped in fictional words and can’t get out!) slant to it’s presentation. If you want to see the basic “wild ideas” that went into this home, go all the way back to my very first blog ramblings to get the picture on why I wanted to create this unique home.
Beyond the essential reasoning for the design, this home has something new in every area from the front landscaping to the final exit. As homes go, this one is a theme park attraction “E” ticket ride of a home with an open front porch which allows you to air condition it(and keep out the bugs) even though the sides have no screens or windows. Even as we are gathering all the items to make this happen for the first time in any home, we are working on a basement night club where we can mentally transport guests into exotic and fun differing environments via multiple projection screens. This little item alone involves us having to make one part of the basement(I won’t be pretentious by calling this a lower level, …which it is) 12 feet tall!
Today, I spent most of my morning with an appointment for selecting the 3 home’s doors, patiently waiting me to drive back to my office, which is only 2 minutes away. I was nearly an hour late! The delay was in trying to explain to our rough carpentry crews just how and why they needed to build many unorthodox and unusual things that not blue print could ever adequatly show. One such item was a bar counter top that could change to fifferent colors on cue to match the rest of the room’s color changes. There we were,as we were sweating a half inch here, and a quarter inch there, so that our guests would all be able to see the unified images on the three 10 foot wide movie screens. When finished, we will have a 30 foot long continuous image which will transport you visually into the exotic or peaceful, or exciting locations.
Yesterday, I was in active conversations with a music composer I have worked with , who now lives in Nashville , to have him compose the musical score for Club Wonder . That is the name we are calling this special place. Today, I was on the phone talking to a local Piano shop owner to find out how I can reproduce the piano section of Club Wonder’s musical score , so it can be played live (on a baby grand piano)while the rest of the music plays over speakers to pre-recorded music. Boy, the price is a bit more than I expected but…we will see.
Last night, I was up, as I said, to early in the morning working on the last details for a full color preliminary “sneak-peek” for this weekend’s opening for Reflection’s Village(The Richfield location for this Miracle-only event) so everyone can get the layouts and concept art in short form at the Saturday/Sunday 1 to 4 event. As an aside, I will be there along with my electric blue golf cart to take folks on a quick tour of Reflections Village grounds. This week, I had the cart brought into Milwaukee to get tuned/cleaned so it was ready. Tomorrow morning, I have to get the cart over to our “INFO- DECK”. This is a temporary cedar deck which is at the development with three huge photo-mural signs as a backdrop. Tonight, I was installing the signs and getting some patio furniture so folks can sit on the deck. I wonder, serving some lemonade or bottled water might be a nice touch…if I can find the time to make it happen tomorrow morning.
Two nights ago, I was up, again, very late-early , to get at least some form of a web page set up to support Reflection’s Village and this weekend’s kick-off event. The page just went live a few hours ago. Not bad but we can improve it for next week. Please feel free to check out that site. Yesterday morning, I was out of bed early to the audio studio in Brookfield to cut our radio commercial for this event. This radio commercial can be heard on our Miracle Reflections Village web page and is running all weekend on WKLH, WISN, and the Polka station WTKM(?). Next week, it will add WTMJ to the mix.
So much has happened on the 3 homes as far as construction and while I am surely there every day, I am most grateful for our crack staff including office support and our special construction manager Mark Scheel, who has been an absolute God-send. Plumbing , electric, and heating-cooling , as well as audio-video, were all completed on 2 of the projects(Our Little-Big House 2.0 and our Rent-Buster Elite. not the HYBRID Wonderhome ) so we can now insulate on Monday and Tuesday of this coming week. With any blessing at all, we will be dry walling by the middle or end of the week on at least one of the 3 homes.
This week, we also found the siders and had our ups and downs with this process. If you do not know, the siding on a home is usually done more on the rough or , let’s say, casual side. I don’t care if you are the highest-end or lowest starting builder, the job of siding a home (including all the trim wood around windows and the various posts and vent details) is not usually a job of finishing quality. that is why siding has usually a rougher wood-grained look of rough-sawn cedar. Commonly, large headed galvanized nails are used and simply painted over later. Rarely do you see finishing nails anywhere near a sider’s tool belt. Another thing is that no sider I have met seems to measure the spacing of those nails since the nail heads can’t be seen from a short distance away.
I approached this project by drawing an object lesson for out siding crews so they might not forget. I drew a quick sketch of a grand piano and next to it I drew the wooden crate that the piano is shipped in. The rough constructed crate represents the way most siding today is done. On this home, I went on to say, we are NOT building piano crates, we ARE building the piano. I went and I did the unusual thing of hiring , not siders, but a more pricey finish carpentry crew. After a few hours I checked back to see their results. I was amazed to see they were doing a good job of a good sider but not a good job of a finish carpenter. I again explained, we are building pianos but so far, all I am seeing are crates. They said they would make changes and get it right. You see, we are using smooth sanded woods not the common heavy grained woods. We had a tough time special ordering smooth Hardie Plank cement board siding. Lumber suppliers don’t seem to stock it. The look I am going for is the smooth furniture look you might see on an old Victorian home. Believe me, you need to pay a much higher cost to get the look we are trying to achieve. I hope someone besides myself notices. I fully expect many home shopers may just not understand why these homes may cost a little more than the common discount builder offerings. I have always wanted to build a home with a highly polished exterior look , hopefully, I will get it.
It is now about1:30am Saturday morning and I could write many more paragraphs but I will close with the biggest smile this week for me. Most homes that compare to the HYBRID WONDERHOME square footage, would take about 10 days to 2 weeks to do the rough carpentry phase. Nothing much else can happen until this phase is done. The builder cost to do this phase is usually between $7,000 to $10,000. The Hybrid’s rough carpentry is still not completed and it is now a a 5 week job at about $30,000(or…yikes..more!). The roughing phase took a dramatic turn for the better in the last 2 days.
I saw that since the excellent (I sincerely mean that) crew I had on the job were not yet even started on the basement, and I need this whole phase done by next Wednesday(3 business days from now). I was sure i would not make schedule. So, I convinced the present crew, and negotiated to have a second larger crew come in and tackle the entire basement. I am blown away by the fast and highly detailed work that is now gracing our basement. No, it is not done yet , but I suspect, they will be done in another day and a half, by mid-Tuesday! Unfortunately, the basement is a disaster zone as far as being a mess . The crew worked late and did not clean-up. Since I need this home to show for appointments and our opening Sneak-Peak event tomorrow by 1pm, crews will be coming early tomorrow to stack lumber and sweep up.
I am so looking forward to letting folks see just what we are up to, so I hope you will join me this weekend to get your sneak preview special brochure. If you want to see the homes, as I hope you will, You may have to make a “quik-appointment” on our INFO-DECK so you sign a waiver agreeing that this is, after all , a construction site and you need to be careful in the homes at his point. If it is not too crowded, I would love to give you a personal tour and golf cart ride through this magical development.
There I go, getting all excited, all over again!
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
