Mapping Out Your Future With Mike
Custom Home Construction
After closing AAI in the late 1980's, I worked at various jobs to make bills: bartender, delivery service manager for USA Today, car repairs etc. One of my customers operated a small subcontracting business in the custom home building industry. He lost his workers and needed some help to finish some current committments. He installed roofing felt on the roof decking of new homes. The building strategy was to dry in the house so that the schedule could move forward. This strategy was necessary as the roofers are very unpredictable. Anyway, I helped him with a few roofs and found that I liked the idea of working outside with my hands, working physically. Several months went by and I continued to work with him until one week he decided that he didn't need to pay me.I thought about what I had been doing and decided that I could separate myself from the rest of the subcontractors by doing several things. I got my own workmans compensation insurance and my own general liability insurance. I also used a company to invoice the builders so that they did not need to account for taxes and withholding. The builders loved it. There was no fuss, just a single check to a company, no insurance, no withholding just a 1099 once per year. To completely separate myself from the crowd, then I overdelivered by always completing the job per my committment.
Flamingo Contracting Inc. became very popular with the new home builders in metro Atlanta and one year I actually did almost $500,000 in roofing felt alone. That would be about 1500 houses. That's 30 houses a week. At that time I had a number of subcontractors working for me... I expanded into housewrap, then framing, then cournice, then cedar siding and so on. During the late 90's the housing market locally was booming. I was providing quality work predictably with minimal complications. The housing market started to tail off and the builders started to use less expensive Latino crews. I'm not a linguist and I could not switch over to Latino workers so I lost some of the labor side of my business: felt and housewrap. About that time I was spending too much time in the truck and too little time physically working. My health started to suffer and then I slowly let the business wind down. I did not replace workers as they left and by 2001 I was down to one framing crew and 3 felters. I closed the home construction business December 31 2003. It was a great run but the marketplace changed and my health was failing.
An interesting side note to this activity is the work we did on DJ's property in Roswell, our house. Our house was built around 1970 and was the standard box with 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths with an attached side garage. Comfortable but not very modern. Actually we made three upgrades to the property: converted the garage into a family room expanding the size of the kitchen, added a large enclosed sun room onto the back of the house, and we built a freestanding oversized 2 car garage with a 750 square foot bathelor apartment above the garage.
The two car garage turned into a nice family room with a tray ceiling. We put a wall up to make a small laundry room off to the side and thereby moved the washer and drier out of the kitchen. It turned out that the kitchen was enlarged just because of the way the laundry walls and the orginal garage wall were laid out. DJ was happy with the bonus of a larger kitchen.
The 30ft. x 30ft. freestanding garage was built a separate pad. The walls were extended up to four foot about the garge ceiling joist to make a step wall for the second floot. It turns out that the living space is about 25ft. x 30ft. with a main room, a small room for either a small bedroom or a large walk-in closet, a full bathroom, a kitchen area which is part of the main room. A large deck was installed at the second level around two sides of the garage with stairs down to the ground. There are no stairs from the inside of the garage to the apartment above.
My pride and joy in this project is the sun room. We stripped the fascia and gutters off the back of the house. Then we sistered rafters onto the existing rafter tails from the house. The 4 pitch roof meant that the sun room extended about 18ft. from the back of the main house ending at a 9 foot wall. The whole sunroom sits on an addon concrete pad. The walls of the sunroom are mostly windows. There is a porch attached to our master bedroom on the second floor, this is DJ's pouting porch. Two thirds of the porch has a wall for her privacy. The ceiling is exposed rafters but not really. The rafters are clad in finish highly grained wood with overhangs. It is a very unusual effect. The overall impression of the room is size and light.
The modifications to the house were made to add living space but also to modernize some of the rooms. Note that sunroom and the garage-now-family room both have expanded or open high ceilings. Even the apartment above the garge has a special effect in its high ceiling. Today the trend of open high ceilings is very prevalent and we attempted to update the house with the look of our new rooms.
During the 10 or more years I was involved with the home construction industry I worked very hard. I build a large business only to see it voluntarily close partly because of market pressures and partly because of my health. My ideas for the renovation of our personal house were challenging but the results are very satisfying and actually present commercial opportunities for the future.