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WEB-EXTRA Contractor Profile: Francesca A. de la Flor; California Horse-Country Home From "Be Your Own Contractor: Vacation Homes" episode DBCV-106

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Following below is additional information on the horse-country vacation home and the homeowners featured in this episode of DIY's Be Your Own Contractor.

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	Francesca de la Flor

Owner/Builder

Francesca A. de la Flor

Bio

Francesca is a full time resident of Pasadena, California and has her own antique business. Before that she was an attorney. Francesca is married with one 19-year-old daughter. Her husband had minimal involvement in this project, but previously he acted as his own contractor on their present primary-home in Pasadena.

Francesca was no stranger to construction when she started this project. Her dad was a building engineer and her brother is a contractor. She has also supervised the physical moving of a couple of their homes, and she and her husband together acted as their own contractors on their present home. That home is about 90 miles away from the vacation ranch-house -- close enough for Francesca to get away frequently and spend time there relaxing.

Home Specifics

• 1400-square-feet
  
• Wood frame with scissor trusses on a poured concrete foundation
  
• Exterior: stucco
  
• Roof: Mexican tile

The house has a very open and simple floor plan. Francesca calls it a "little stucco bread box."

Location

Temecula, CA. less than 60 miles north of San Diego and 90 miles south of Los Angeles. The house is in the heart of the Temecula Valley wine country, the heart of California's South Coast wine region. It is also well known for its horse farms and Championship golf courses.

Why act as her own contractor?

"In a lot of ways it was a budgetary consideration," Francesca says. "I wanted to build the house I wanted at the price I wanted to spend. I didn't want to have a mortgage. I thought that would make it really un-fun. To have to come here and then have to calculate how much every night was basically costing in mortgage payments. So I had a budget, I had a certain amount of money to spend and no one would build it for me for that amount. If I could have hired somebody, sure, but people laughed at me when I told them what my budget was."

Hands-On Involvement

Francesca had collected house floor-plans over the years and knew she wanted to have an open floor-plan for this house. She did rough drawings and hired an architecture student to fine-tune them for her and she went through plan check. Francesca gave herself a very small budget to get this house done and when she went to get bids from contractors, they came back way too high. So she decided to be her own contractor. When she knew she was going to do it, she set a budget of $40,000.00. In the end, she was able to build and furnish the house for around $45,000.

She hired and supervised all subcontractors and researched and shopped for materials. She was on site about 50 percent of the time. It was "challenging getting back and forth to home and staying in hotels all the time." She had a good relationship with her building inspector. He knew and liked her father from the time he built a home and he was very co-operative with her, even signing off on things when she was not there. She also says that, when she was there, she made sure she kept a "really tidy" work site to keep him happy.

Francesca, her husband and her daughter did the tile work, trim, moldings, painting, and landscaping. It was work they felt comfortable doing and it helped save mone. Everything else was subcontracted out.

Interesting facts

• In 1989, while driving home from San Diego to Pasadena, Francesca saw an ad in The Wall Street Journal for land for horses in Temecula. She and her husband had horses and always talked about getting a place to house them with lots of land. They decided to make a detour in their drive and check out the land. They saw the land, thought it would be perfect for them and their horses and bought 43 acres. Francesca's parents bought half of the land from them and they built their "dream house" on it according to Francesca. Unfortunately their house burned down during a wildfire. A few years later, in 1996, the time was right for them to build their own vacation home. They broke ground in the spring of 1997. The house was complete 4 months later.

• When she went to get the material for her Mexican tile roof, she found that she could get the best price at a place 90 miles away; she rented a truck and picked up the material herself.

Challenges

• When Francesca and her husband purchased the land it was "in the middle of nowhere," with no water and electric service. Getting electricity and water to the new home would have been a big challenge, but her father had already taken care of it when he built a house earlier.

• "It was very time consuming finding subs," Francesca says, but she found ways to simplify the process. She would go to construction sites talk to people working at the site to get recommendations. She also pulled names out of the California contractors' "blue-book."

• Some subcontractors would give her and estimate and then say, "OK we'll give your husband a call." She would tell them "My husband works 90 miles away. I'm building this house."

• During the excavation, the workers discovered that the site sits on granite. Before they could pour the concrete foundation and slab, they discovered they had to jackhammer into the granite. This process took a more money and time then had been anticipated on for building the foundation.

• The windows and sliding-glass doors were installed backwards. (Francesca was not on site the day they were installed.) They decided to live with this one.

• The electrician did not do some final connections before walls were closed up, so some of the lights switches were not working. (This also happened at a time when Francesca was not on site. She had to open up the walls to access the wiring. Again, this unexpeced complication cost more money.

Francesca's Words of Wisdom

• "Do your research and shop around. You save so much by shopping around; you just have to put in the time."

• "Always be clear on all of your plans including, plumbing, lighting etc. Make sure things don't change, because that means money."

• Always keep a tidy work site. This keeps the building inspector happy and also helps out the various trades on site.

• "Always keep on top of things. Even when you're far away from the site you need to always know what's going on with the project."

RESOURCES :

Investing in a Vacation Home for Pleasure and Profit
Author: James H. Boykin
Order this book from Amazon.com
Publisher: South-Western Educational Pub (2005)
ISBN: 0324314116

How a Second Home Can Be Your Best Investment: New, Tax-Free Methods for Using a Vacation Home for Recreation, Retirement and Investment
Authors: Tom Kelly, John Tuccillo
Order this book from Amazon.com
Publisher: McGraw-Hill (2004)
ISBN: 0071429700