Huh...me too. Call me when you're ready to dig the basement and footers. Have excavater, will travel. ;)

Gotta remeber the Amish are tax free ,,, so 4 bucks a foot is about 5.35 for a regular framing contractor ...


1300 and change .... yea it is a low incom area and most of the drywall cantrators here are illegals, Most drywall companies have either went to that labor or went out of business.

not sure what paint goes for these days but if I go this way I would pay extra for a good painting contractor as you know a good painter can hide a multitude of sins .... :laughing:

drywall work is very poor indeed, durabond two coat is the typical here.
cheap waterd down paint..... been in some homes that you can literally rub off the paint with your finger .... sad state of afairs

the strong suit of this area is Framing & millwork ...

mechanical contractors cough cough ....... :laughing: That's me

Thanks Scott, PA for work? that's a lot of deisle to get here my friend .... :)

just make a bunker live under ground haha

party at wd :)

You will do well if you demand they hang that sheetrock with drywall screws instead of nails. ;)

Do they still sell drywall nails?? Now that would suck for sure.

lol .... i Don't think so .... LOL

Hoping to have all the info back by tonight , but there are some existing properties I am looking at as well ....

Time is on my side ........ :thumbsup:

Congrats Witch!

As for the floor plan, the family room minus the optional windows and optional fireplace would make a decent setup for a LARGE flat screen witha desktop underneath for gaming.

That way you can have your home theater and gaming room all in one.heavy curtains work as well, and darker colored room paint will all help for that.

Wiring pre-drywall is sooo nice..

Make sure you wire up based on future needs. If you are going to have a home server somewhere out of the way... you could even setup up HDMI/AV/KVM/USB cables in the walls for remoteing into it or using it as your HTPC as well.

Also might be worth dropping in some empty conduit for simple future cable runs :)

Monoprice has some good deals on inwall HDMI cables :)

Thansk for the tips Rich,

Will be looking at numbers this evening, trying to keep my monthly under 8 bills

Good luck. The housing market is on your side. Interest rates or low. With the recent economy my home value has dropped stupidly. My lakefront property value hasn't done to bad though. It's decreased a few thou. But nothing major.

For instance, i was talking to a friend yesterday and he was telling me about some condos in florida. They originally went for 400k and now they're selling for 95k. Developers can't get rid of them. They alll built when the market was screaming. They couldn't put them up fast enough. So they doubled their crews and just cranked them out without buyers. Figuring on huge profit. Now they're stuck with them. Sucks to be them.

The south is just rediculous .... we took major hits here as well, but florida is basically a write off for anyone who had their neck out in the crash .....

yea with the options I wanted the house came to 211K

told the dude I would think about it for a while and offered him 190K a block off the lake , 60K being cash if I had a responce by weeks end, so we will see if they want to play ball, really depends on how bad they want to get off the lots as they are paying intrest on them,

so everyday it is cutting into their bottom line

They seemed pretty stout, but offered up some ameneties for penies on the dollar

let the games begin ............. :laughing: