Hell, nearly 30% of the house is unfinished and underground. Like I said before, we had a whole slew of problems during the construction of this money pit. One of the first ones we encountered was the fact that the architect at one of the local building supply places didn't draw the house to scale. In other words, AFTER we had finished the 1st floor, my builder figured out that the ROOF WAS NOT going to fit on the house due to the mess that the architect made of our blueprints. NOW, how in the hell would you have liked to get that call in the afternoon? I nearly chit in my pants when he told me. I was under the assumption that the majority of the 1st floor was gonna have to come down to accomodate the roof. I honestly felt like I was gonna have a heart attack! Well, after much deliberation and a few new sketches of blueprints, we decided to improvise and put an entirely new roof on the house. Doing this, meant an additional 850 sq. ft. to the 2nd floor. I DID NOT want this costly extra space, but we honestly didn't have any other options besides to tear the whole 1st fukking floor DOWN!!
One of the other real kickers was prepping the lot to get it ready to build on. Before we started, there was a lot of brush and trees on our lot that kind of deceived us on the grade. To avoid water problems, we needed the house to be level with the street that it ran horizontal to. Me, my wife, my builder, and even my parents thought it would require NO MORE THAN 40-50 truck loads of dirt. I soon found out that a compressed load of clay dirt doesn't go as far as I thought it would. After 382 loads later and an additional $35k out the door, we were finally ready to build.
Although this was the MOST unexpected expense, I had LOTS LOTS more just ahead of me. If I would have known then what I knew when we finally got done, I would've said the hell with it and bought myself a fukking doublewide down by the river
