TILTL why builder special houses are almost all you can get... Or 50's bungalow.
Trying to sort out how expensive it will be that we only have two available slots on our load center/ breaker box. I thought it was just one... We've had to put in one circuit and I think a previous owner may have added one... and never looked till now to realize you can get boxes with more than 40 slots, and they're not a lot more...

Current expansion plans call for at least five, plus we really should do a proper charging circuit to the garage and I really should have multiple circuits to the office, and more to the workshop.

Then again I wonder if 200a service is adequate...
Infrastructure is outdated I'm afraid.

Depending on total load, there are double breakers that come in 15 and 20 amp. Pick two circuits with light loads and put them on the double thus freeing up an extra slot.

8 1100 lumen led chips driven at 1.5A/ea(12A total draw), with no more than 2" of clearance to the back of the housing.. would need at least a 2' x 5' heatsink for doing passive cooling

my reverse light is going to need an amp wiring kit!

i pushed myself a little too far on this project...

They have what are called “spec houses.” They are easier to build them a custom home with a modern layout, but are not cheap track homes.

houses are an area that is consistently nickel and dimed everywhere. it's common for a lot of contractors to only install a panel sized for their immediate needs without consideration for the future because the large majority will outright refuse to pay for it, even if it only amounts to a $500 increase.

just had a fight with yet another customer that was absolutely convinced that despite the fact that we were barely charging over our discounted cost for the materials, that we were 'raping them with costs 4x's over what i could get things for'...

we encouraged that customer to price out their own material. at non-wholesale costs, it'll end up even more expensive than our estimate...

Yes. The layout is barely adequate (and in some places outright unacceptable), the assembly quality questionable, and the corners cut occasionally a little scary.
The problem is that these guys learn about lots before anyone else has a chance; unless you spend a fortune with plans to do a tear-down (i.e. buy a house which isn't condemned and therefore considered value) it is simply not possible to find a place to build if you WANT to.
I get that most people don't know the difference. It's fair that the kitchen is designed for microwave cooking nearly everything I guess; at most it's a one-person kitchen (38" aisle is the BIG one). Designed to look pretty and sell. And never be changed till it's torn down, I guess. :(
I get that 25'x125' lots present some layout challenges. I've had fun solving some of them when I get bored.
I just lament the cost of trying to make it nicer is exacerbated by just barely good enough building. Also buy stuff failing well before it should be failing (roof! wtf, top-nailed with only 3 nails each?!)

I bet it'd be $15k+ to get the electric sorted, and likely rather invasive as well. Might be more, depends how much drywall would have to come out. I'm not even sure the panel is up to code as far as location. How does that pass inspection? oh, it's Chicago - I know exactly how. (ex) alderman's wife owns the company which... well, they farm out the building work I think, but I guess they buy the 'lots' and flip?
So instead I run a fat extension cord to the bathroom if I need to print something. I grumble about the kitchen layout a couple times every day, minimum. I cheat (definitely would fail inspection) to get a second circuit to the workshop 'cause it's a really bad idea to have the table saw on the main light circuit (unless I've *really* messed it up there isn't a safety issue, but it breaks a rule.)
Why do people settle for this shit? Why did I settle? oh right... someone wanted to move to the city, and I thought it might be nice to have the (much!) shorter commute. Not that our old place was better; it wasn't.

Want a job? I get the "friend because we hang out on the same internet forum" discount right? ;) Though depending on the whims of the stock market, I might have some shares vesting for sticking around and being treated like shit after a company buyout which I've been pondering turning into a solar setup (if they actually have any value; depends on issue price being lower than today's price, and by enough margin to at least cover tax...) so that'd require a whole lot more rethinking. Starting to get nervous about grid stability.

I get building to the bare minimum, and shouldn't assume that just because you can get a 40 slot 60 breaker box today, that you could in '03. Not sure if that's actually what I'd want but it'd fit...
Just the minimum vs decent cost on the stuff I know about is easily 2+ weeks of grunt worker salary so it does add up.
Also the newer versions of our place are now going for $1.2m+ and are including upscale appliances; I haven't paid attention to the shingle choice, but some of the other exterior materials are higher grade now. Doesn't mean any of the work was done right though (roof! that one will piss me off till I die.)
This Sunday is off to a grand start. :mad0259: I should do something productive.

“Specs” in your area must be a lot different then what they are over here. Generally spec houses over here are what the custom home builders do if they come across a lot for cheap. They are usually well built open floor plan homes. Everything is done in standard sizes to make it simple. Exterior footprint is usually close to square with a single ridge line on the roof, again to make things simple. It is all about building something quality without doing the things that take a lot of extra time. No vaulted ceilings, no transom windows, no sidelights, minimal amount of windows,

Today I like to learn why the UK can't get it's act together. Since leaving the European Union and Covid shutdown we've gone from one crisis to another!!

Shortage of food, loo paper, now shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers.. due to the shortage of drivers we are running out of fuel at our petrol stations!!

People are panic buying!! Heard a story of one lady filling up her plastic shopping bags at the pumps!!

lol truth!

Dude, you are building a laser pumping array. WTF

One of these...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ds0wYpc1eM

How do you squeeze your new car charger through a 20 amp screw fuse 4 circuit panel and out to the shared parking space on the street?
I'm drawing a blank. There's no more blanks to punch out.

i remember we've talked about it before.. i think you're just too far north to make anything worthwhile-- i'd spend 4 hours a day driving just to get there and back...

and now, and potentially the next year or three (crystal ball says 'signs are unclear, check again later') is a horrible time to be doing pretty much anything in terms of renovations.

as we're all learning, manufacturing for everything worldwide had been running at 75%-95% capacity. and then all of it, including the shipping channels were shut down for a month. it takes time to spin everything up, and now they're somewhere between 50-75% behind on production, all the while everyone's been sticking around at home coming up with projects that need doing, raising demand for things that no longer exist even further.

the supply houses for everything are starting to run into significant problems-- they used to rely on tier 1,2,3 suppliers for 100% of materials that were prompt and helped keep costs low, but have had to resort to tier 4,5,6 suppliers for the last year-- costs overall have gone up, but they're generally less reliable suppliers that charge more. so costs from all the supply chain shakeup's are just absolutely running away. contractors have told me that a $250k new house 4 years ago would currently cost in the neighborhood of $1.5 mill now if built to the same spec... and that's assuming all the materials can even be acquired at all!

my boss doesn't hoard material due to our shops space constraints, but he's been starting to hoard specialty stuff, otherwise it's 3-6 months out when we actually need it. meter boxes and panels especially right now are like theme park cue lines...

very different. 'spec grade' in the midwest is the lowest, cheapest material, pre-fab walls, roof rafters, and re-using the same plans dozens/hundreds/thousands of times.

walk around home depot, find the cheapest of any category, and that's what makes up a new spec-grade house in this area, sometimes they manage to get stuff that's even cheaper than home depot's versions of spec grade...

there are contractors around here that will build spec houses to a higher standard, but of course they cost more, build slower, and generally don't have as large of subdivisions. and when the typical house in the area starts at $250-300k, it prices most people out of the option to even consider anything more than spec grade. the biggest names in housing around this area don't even give customers an option to change stuff without upgrading to various packages that cost significantly more..

covid exacerbated things, but the EU exit really messed things up. there were some reasons, but not enough to justify it..

truck drivers have always been in demand in the US. main problem is that it's a hard job, for less than stellar pay(which, pay must remain low otherwise goods costs would need to increase significantly to pay for it), and for the last many years, it's been promised that they're all going to be replaced with self-driving trucks in the next year-- parrot that same story for 5+ years, and it really ruins the desire for any new recruits to join the ranks.