There is nothing going on at the build site right now. We are just waiting around for spring to come.
BUT we do have progress and big news! Paperwork is signed and the down payment check is in the mail to the builders! This first big payment covers the manufacturing of the airform and officially gets us in the builders schedule. We have only about 3 months left before they come to start the dome shell! So very exciting and really scary all at the same time. They are planning to get to our project sometime towards the end of April after their residential team is done with a house in Florida.
It is so much more nerve wracking to mail big checks to a company to create something from nothing than it is to buy something that already exists. The up side is that the contract is a set fee. We are paying a fixed amount for them to do everything laid out in the contract as "their scope". This makes us feel better to know that it is a fixed amount. This is not the case with many other aspects of the build. The well cost us an extra $1500 beyond the estimate because they had to go further down and use some other machine to improve flow. The engineer just had to be paid an additional 1k for their coordination with the rebar supplier back when we needed the shop drawings done. So now our engineering cost has creeped up another 1k. The bill is never cheaper than the estimate but we are finding that many estimates are low. This makes it hard when you are on a strict budget.
As the winter slowly drags we are taking our time planning for the spring and beyond.
This period of forced rest has given us time to do some serious planning to get a leg up on the interior build. Their scope is just the ring beam, interior floor tension beams and the superstructure excluding the flat exterior walls. This summer we will be busy doing all the under slab utilities, coating the exterior and installing all the straight exterior walls that contain windows and doors with the goal of making it weather tight before winter . We will need to hire a local company to pour the cement slab but otherwise it will be all us.
In the calm before the storm Mr. Dometastic is using his winter down time to play video games. Who can blame him since he spends full work days at a desk and then comes home to be a construction worker. I have been using the down time to ride my horse and create image boards for each room of the interior.
A digital collage of design examples, colors and materials for each space will give us direction and a leg up later on. This helps to see how materials and colors work together before you start buying samples. This will later turn into a physical collection of materials and color samples. The exercise is a throw back to my days working in the corporate world. In most of my design/art jobs we utilized image boards in one form or another to express, share and organize ideas. Words are great but pictures are better when dealing with visual arts. This step means that I also have to research what is out there and the general cost of what I like. This has then led to some rethinking and quite a few changes because we can't afford our original plan. The changes are easiest to do now before we start buying things. My goal in designing the interior is to create something unique and timeless that fits our lifestyle without super high cost. When I finish my boards I will share them.
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