Things were becoming a little more real. After the drawing process, which took a few months starting in April, and with the beautiful drawings in hand, we had to get estimates to build the actual room. Dan somewhat reluctantly suggested a couple of contractors and my sister had a contractor she recommended. I saw a house on the next block being remodeled and got the name of that contractor. We contacted five contractors, got three actual estimates - all circling around the $80-90,000 level - and I had thought perhaps $50,000. Not even close. When making decisions Jim and I operate on a combination of intuition and experience (Jim is an electrician so he has the experience part in this construction arena). I have a sense about people - but it's sometimes a flawed sense! At least we could both tell the outright scammers and the sort of snakeoil people. We were not particularly happy with the people we were meeting - until Rob Rye from his company Ryebuilt came to meet us and talked about the project with what appeared to be sincere interest, curiosity and lots of questions. He came back in a few weeks with a highly detailed estimate, unlike the other rather general estimates we received. In addition to his thoughtful approach we just liked him. He was very comfortable to talk to-and he was one of the two contractors recommended by Dan. So, even though the project now seemed incredibly expensive, we decided to go ahead and we picked Rob and Ryebuilt. The company is family with mostly their own employees, not a lot of subcontractors and it's not huge and impersonal. Now all we needed was the money.
It was now July and we had yet to experience the completely hideous process of getting a cash out refinance. Bear in mind we had a lot of equity in the house - it wasn't that expensive to begin with and, we both have pretty steady reliable jobs. Refinancing has completely changed since the financial meltdown. It took three tries - my own local credit union turned me down; then an online lender, Amerisave, turned out to be the worst potential lending experience I've ever had - a joke really. They delayed and delayed, asked for mountains of information again and again. At one point they said Jim's driver's license was expired-when I called to protest the woman on the phone looked at the picture and acknowledged she could see the license wouldn't expire for years. Finally we went back to Quicken, my original lender - and the nightmare stopped. By the time I went to them, interest rates had dropped really low and they closed the loan in 3 weeks. Getting the money took more than three months.
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