It’s been a while since we posted anything about the progress of the new Mudd Abode, the house we are building in Palm Coast. This isn’t by design, it’s more by laziness + lots of other stuff going on + lack of large amounts of progress on the build. The desired end result when it’s finished will look almost exactly like the sales brochure.

Building a house takes a lot of materials, a lot of labor, and a lot of time. On the part of the homeowner, it also takes a lot of patience. We already knew at the outset that there would be delays when they piled on the schedule caveats (“supply chain difficulties”, “labor shortage”, “permitting and inspection issues”), things they “had no control over”. The initial calendar provided by our builder was 16 months from the signing of a build contract (which happened on October 7, 2021) to final occupancy. This gave us an initial move-in target date of February 7, 2023. We generously added 3 months to that and set our expectations on mid-May 2023.

Then inflation ramped up and the Consumer Price Index headed for the moon, which triggered a clause in our build contract that required us to pony up an additional $40,000 to cover the increased cost of materials, primarily lumber but also virtually everything else needed to build our new nest. Then a tornado hit the large factory in Georgia that supplied about a dozen southeastern state contractors with their HVAC components. This turned out to be the only factory supplying these components, and it was damaged bad enough to put it out of business for at least 2 years. All home-building in Florida, and many surrounding states, took an immediate schedule hit. Our hopes faded for the May date, and our checkbook balance faded with the CPI hit. But we kept our spirits high.

While many times it looked like our project was hopelessly stalled, our builder, Seagate Homes of Palm Coast Florida, managed to scrape together enough labor and materials to keep their projects moving. They build about 250 homes a year (5 a week if you need the math done for you), and we supposed that they must have some serious clout. The start-stop-start progression kept us on a roller coaster and kept Wendy diligently texting our Construction Manager to let him know we were watching, and please don’t forget that we know the squeaky wheel usually does get the grease.

Weeks would pass without so much as a new footprint in the soil on our lot. They initially scraped the jungle off the lot in July of 2022, and the visual impact was stunning. Wow! We’re finally off to the races. This was followed pretty quickly by a guy with a Bobcat tractor and many truckloads of clean topsoil that rendered a flat, elevated building pad like we had specified in our contract.

Then hurricane Ian hit, and we got 17 inches of rain in 24 hours. Bummer, we thought, we’ll have to start all over again. Our building pad didn’t flood, in fact our neighborhood came through it pretty high and dry. But the pad that had been graded and compacted didn’t like all that rain, and it looked sad.

Our spirits soared however when a few days later, Bobcat Dude was back, and the pad was quickly resurrected so that an army of workers could attack it and place all the concrete forms for the foundation slab. The pace seemed dizzying as the forms went in, the plumbers got in to put all the under-slab plumbing and conduits in, the pad was re-graded and ready for concrete. Life was good again.

When the building is going fast, life is good. When Hurricane Nicole hit a few weeks after Ian, life was not good. Nothing puts a hit on your building schedule like back-to-back hurricanes. This is first-hand knowledge. Nicole, however, was not a Varsity team hurricane and didn’t produce the havoc that Ian did. She did, however, put a hit on our project.

The concrete crew didn’t see it as gloomy as we did, though. And a week later they had cleaned it all up and regraded, and before long the big concrete pump truck appeared along with another army of workers in black dairy boots that produced an absolutely beautiful foundation in no time at all.

Things got back to normal pretty quickly. It wasn’t long before big stacks of cinder blocks appeared on our slab, and then they too sat waiting for some labor. We eventually “went vertical” when a small army of brick layers descended and turned the cinder blocks into exterior (and hurricane-proof) walls.

And it wasn’t too long after when a truck full of roof trusses (also hurricane-resistant) and framing lumber showed up and dropped it all in our eventual front yard. Then, more waiting. And more waiting.

And then one day we drove by to take a look, and the lumber pile had been magically transformed into interior wall framing and trusses ready for plywood sheeting and shingles. It shocks your system to see that much apparent progress at one time. Your brain begins to think “wow, they’re really pouring on the coal and sprinting to the finish line!” “I should start getting ready to move!”. This is not logical thinking, and Murphy’s Law of Building Houses will be imposed to put those thoughts to rest. Murphy will send you to the House Building Waiting Lounge and impose a 4 week pause in any perceived activity to punish you. But, in reality, there are lots of things happening behind the scenes that we are never privy to. I have to believe that.

Over time you get a little used to the pace of the build process. A flurry of activity followed by dead silence, followed by a small, barely noticeable thing like a plumbing fixture being installed, then dead silence, followed again by a huge pulse of activity. It’s like doing emotional calisthenics, without any apparent beneficial aftereffects. Seagate has diligently plowed ahead over the last few months, and we are now at a state where the list of things our Construction Manager has to tell us “we are waiting on” is getting small.

We were waiting on a power pole recently, waiting for Florida Power and Light (FPL) to come and put in a pole so that the wires that are across the street can be brought over to our lot, and then down to our power panel. Because of the aforementioned 2 hurricanes, FPL has been very busy replacing power poles in south Florida, and they have become hard to get, along with the labor to install them. We took a weeklong trip to Seattle and Portland for a family wedding, and the day after we returned, not even a week ago, we drove over to have a look and ran right into an FPL crew with 6 guys and 3 big trucks installing a brand new power pole. I never thought something as mundane and ordinary as a wooden pole soaked in creosote would look so beautiful.

My creative muse was inspired by this, and I commissioned ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence engine, to draft a Haiku to it. (You may have caught a few others cleverly inserted as captions).

Fresh power surges dance, new pole stands, electric might, Illuminating.

Strangely, I think the AI nailed it. I then immediately thought how cool it would be to have ChatGPT write this whole blog, but quite frankly I’m not that well-versed in how to prompt a robot to do my work, and that it would likely be much more time efficient to just write it than to figure out how to get the robot to write it. Who knows, someday I might just become a customer to my own blog, and frequently wonder when the robot might put out another post.

We are now down to 2 major build steps and one appliance on the wait list. The landscaping is scheduled to go in this coming week (11,000 square feet of grass!), and the carpeting will be done about the same time. But our electric range is hung up somewhere in the supply chain. Even our house number has been installed on the front, something that usually happens just days before we close the contract and take possession. So, we are on the edge of our seats, thinking more positively about a late June move-in (maybe a little earlier, please?). Stay tuned.

Tippy is just as excited as we are and wrote a Haiku of his own while humming a variation of “Home, Home on the Range” but with words like “Range, Range in the Home”.