Money

It’s sure nice to have money when you’re doing construction. Too bad ours is nearly gone.

Here’s the original plan:

1. Do a few extra jobs to get some cash, buy a container.
2. Save a few hundred dollars, buy some wood.
3. Work for a few weekends with that wood.
4. Repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 over and over until the first unit is done.
5. Rent the first unit, use that income to do steps 1, 2, and 3 over and over, a little bit faster.
6. Rent a second unit…

You get the idea — it’s called bootstrapping.

Along comes a pile of capital that suddenly allows all four units to be built at once, with real tools and professionals who know what they’re doing. The project advances with lightening speed. But all that capacity has a voracious appetite for supplies and supplies cost money.

Here’s how we’ve spent money, by month:

You can see that we bought the first two containers in February, then didn’t have much money for three months (during which time I pulled the containers around the yard.) In June, we got money and started spending. Today is July 15th, so we’re on track to tie June for cash burn.

Here’s where the money has gone:

We haven’t done permitting fees, siding, roofing, windows, doors, insulation, flooring, electrical, plumbing, utilities, fixtures, lighting, fencing, sitework or marketing yet.

I’m hoping that we’re halfway there for this building, but somehow I doubt it.

It looks like we have enough remaining to do the OSB sheathing and Tyvek wrap on the walls and roof. Then that’s it, back to the bootstrapping method. We’ll re-focus on getting one unit complete and go from there.

Lesson learned: This stuff is expensive.