Week 5

Not much activity this week. I got cost proposal from Architect (Eric). As expected the price is very high - $30,200!. I was expecting around $20,000, which is about $5000 over what I was told would be normal for a project like this. I thought that since the quality of his work is high that he'd charge a premium, and I was willing to pay a reasonable premium. But I didn't really expect it to be so high. Last time he and I spoke he said he'd probably have to run the project through his firm (AKS Architecture Design) because it would take too long as a part-time project for him. This fact alone was going to raise the price. The firm does excellent work, based on their portfolio, but I can't really afford $30K for architecture.

I have appointments with two smaller firms this coming week, so I hope the price will go down without sacrificing quality.