My wife and  have been managing scheduling of all the work for the last couple of months, hoping to try and get things done enough to move in sometime in May.  It is a seemingly herculean task to schedule all of the various trades to work around each other and that depend on each other in the order of work completion.

To the left are all the line items, with some color coding for status and urgency, and to the right is the week-by-week calendar view.  Green is firmly scheduled, yellow is loosely schedule, and the items in red either aren’t scheduled yet or we have yet to find a sub-contractor.  The purple item way out on the right of the weekly view (into June) is our elevator, which sadly will not be installed in May when we plan on moving in.

We are starting to see some serious competition for sub-contractors time and focus from the Montecito mud-slide area.  Just about any earth-moving equipment in the area is busy cleaning up there, and we are not seeing a lot of response from landscape contractors.

While we are seeing a tougher time finding sub-contractors, and higher costs towards the end of our project, I feel sorry for the people that will be rebuilding in the next few years.  There are about 1,400 houses that were either damaged or destroyed in the December fire or January mud-slides.  There is going to be some intense competition for local building contractors and sub-contractors for the next several years, and construction materials prices are going through the roof right now.  Take a look at lumber costs over the last 18 months.

And now there are transportation shortages that are also affecting lumber prices.  It isn’t going to be a fun experience rebuilding for those that lost their homes.