One more complaint

I'm back out to West Virginia tomorrow morning to supervise the buildout of the roof eave. But first one more note about things that haven't gone quite right. My rough budget numbers for the siding and deck were premised on the rough numbers in my contractor bids. And because I never walked though the details of the bids with the contractors (cause I knew we were going to do lots of it ourselves), the numbers for the siding and the deck were, it turns out, rough. Nobody (least of all me) priced the cost of the materials spec'd in the drawings into their bids for those items. But it turns out top-grade cedar and ipe are - surprise, surprise - very expensive. So the cost of the siding and the deck materials alone are approaching the contractor bids for those parts of the job. Good thing we're doing it ourselves...

So that's really a complaint about myself. I could/should have priced those materials beforehand. It wouldn't have changed anything, I don't think; though we've kept costs down on our finishes on the inside of the house, the mat'ls for the exterior are really important to us. I just wish (as the balance in our operating account dwindles) I'd been more meticulous about planning out each and every cost. One thing about DIY is that you're gonna spend more money than you think, so the more costs you know about beforehand, the more predictable the money will be.