Scheduling for Ground Breaking

We had a brief design meeting today at ISA to finalize the plans that we will have quoted next week. We’ve been so focused on the design lately that we haven’t discussed the schedule in a while. We originally had discussed breaking ground in March when the ground was hopefully beginning to loosen up after the winter. This may be a bit optimistic but we should be able to begin not much later than March if things go well. Here is a basic outline of our timeline in the coming weeks:

1. Plans and full window schedule will be ready for quote next Tuesday the 15th.
2. Plans will be sent out for quoting and we should have figures back within 1-2 weeks putting us at the 29th of January.
3. We will make any necessary tweaks to the design in order to meat our budget goals which could take 0-2 weeks. This could put us at the 12th of Feb.
4. We will submit our tweaked plans to the city for zoning approval in mid February. If all goes well, we will have zoning approval in 2-4 weeks as we have not designed anything that would require a zoning variance. This puts us at the 11th of March.
5. Building permits can be applied for as soon as we get our zoning approval and this will take another 2-4 weeks to get back. Once we have the building permits we can break ground as soon as we want.
6. This puts us at April 8th for breaking ground if we keep on the ball and things go reasonably smoothly. The homes will probably take 3-6 months to build depending on scheduling and could be ready to move in by the summer of this year.

The key factor here is obviously our need to hit our strict budget of $100K. We will most likely make changes to the plans in order to hit this target once we get our initial construction quote back. If we make any changes to the envelope, elevations or lot coverage after we have submitted plans to the city for zoning approval we will have to resubmit out revised plans as the old ones will be obsolete. This is doubly important as our plans that receive zoning approval must match the plans submitted for building permits.

Hopefully with the new administration taking office this week in Philly we will soon have incentives for green building, including a streamlined zoning and building permit approval process. This coupled with the experience of this 100k house project should enable us to streamline the next development quite a bit.