Catching Up

It's been busy around here, mostly in a good way. The big news, such as it may be, is that we finally have signed plans in hand. The bad news is that this process has been bumpier than I think it should have been. Part of that is on us for not having a clear idea of how the process should have worked. We're having a post and beam deck and porch attached to the house. The plans from the designer included notional drawings of what those features should look like. We'd known from the beginning that that portion of the build was going to be performed by a third party. What we didn't understand going in was that most third parties are going to do their own design and engineering calculations. So we didn't communicate that to our architect, and he did his own thing that we have to pay him for, which we aren't going to use. That and some other things have caused a bit of a mess that's going to cost us a couple thousand dollars more than we'd planned; but this isn't the kind of thing any of…