(Steve Coyle) babbled and bored us in
m:

Howdy folks,
I've found a lot of good information on building costs, and folks
to use in Travis county by doing advanced google searches on "Groups"
using keywords ex: "metal roofing travis austin"
Most of the searches take me to the austin.general group which has a
lot of archived postings by people building in Travis county.

From my experience in construction, be wary of the rock bottom
bidders who 1) may be underbidding because they don't know what they
are doing and might bail out midway through the job when they realize
they are losing money .
2) Underbid on the expectation they can finagle 'change
order' charges or some other dubious fee.

Most times if you use a reputable contractor you get what you pay
for but if you don't use a good contractor you won't even get that.

We are off topic as far as gardening goes, but given some of
the other threads and the fact it's too darn hot to be gardening I'll
also mention that HGTV on cable is running a series in the afternoons
called "Dream House" which happened to have been filmed in Austin two
years ago about the time of the Labor Day Weekend Heatwave that hit
112 degrees. The show is a an excellent cautionary tale on what not
to do when planning a construction project. The series is in the
middle of it's run and the cliff hanger yesterday was the folks
building this huge place on Lake Travis just discovered that a giant
condo was being planned blocking their view between their windows and
the Lake. The homeowners were under the assumption that since the
land between them and the Lake was in the flood plain and had flooded
twice in the nineties no one would build there. But what the hay,with
Federal Flood insurance you can get the tax payers to rebuild your
structure every ten years so why not put condos in the flood plain?
I've been setting my VCR to record each day , the show is like the
suspense show "24" for do it yourselfers.

take care,
Steve Coyle


You would be ever so appreciated if you ripped it to VCD and posted it all
weekly on alt.binaries.vcd !!!

See: www.vcdhelp.com for details..it's easy.


mapi

--
When we go to war over religion, we're basically killing each other to
see who's got the better imaginary friend.