The Direction

As promised here is an image showing the current direction. Sorry it's so crappy, it's still in development and I honestly didn't feel like cleaning it all up before posting. This image shows how I draw on top of what the drafters give us in order to give them some direction for where to go. This seems to be working much better than trying to explain it to them. The overall orientation is actually backwards from what it will likely be, but you can still get the general idea. As you can see it is very scaled down from where we were before.

We've been playing with the orientation of the garage relative to the rest of the house. The covenants of the neighborhood where we want to build require a side facing garage, but that's difficult to do without either making the house a lot bigger or pushing it way back into the lot. And the way the lot is situated (and its topography) it actually makes just as much sense for it to be at an angle like shown (remember it will be reversed from this image). We are seeking approval for that. There are already one or two other houses in the addition that don't employ side facing garages so hopefully it's okay. I never wanted a garage that stuck out in front of the house so much, but...compromises must be made.

Feedback Welcome.

It worked

My drafting was a success. We finally got something back that resembles what we want. It's not perfect, but now we're down to tweaks rather than major stumbling blocks.

Two concerns at this point:

1. Square footage is creeping up again. We're up over 2700 on the main floor (from 2400), which doesn't sound like much but is tens of thousands of dollars. We're going to try to trim a few inches here and there to see if we can get it down some.
2. We haven't totally figured out how the garage is going to work. It's going to have to sit on the front of the house, which is something I was very much against going in, but one of the many compromises I've made to get something reasonable. It has to be side facing. That's in the covenants for the neighborhood. But...should the doors face in towards the rest of the house or away, off to the side? Many pros and cons for both here. I'll spare us all from the details of that decision for now. Suffice to say we're going to have to work through that soon.

Here's the part where I start whining

So....drafters. We speak, the words go out into the air to be received by the intended recipient for the sake of communication, but communication doesn't occur. We tell them what we want and instead they do...well, I guess they do what they want. I don't know. They must think they are doing what we want, right? I've always said the burden of communication is on the communicator, but the recipient has to do his or her part as well.  They seem to want to throw stuff at the wall (figuratively) and hope we'll like it. I'm afraid our vision is much too specific for that to work.

So, this week I am learning to become a drafter again. I'm working up my own version of what I think we want. And in fairness, it is difficult. The way we want things to work together is extremely difficult to do without increasing the square footage quite a bit. So we'll have to compromise too.

All of this to get to a design we can live with that will be in range of our budget. It is not easy, but damn, I wish people would just listen and understand, or at least communicate if they don't understand. Don't just take a shot at it, especially if you want to charge $50 per hour for the work.

What's been happening?

Wow, it has been quite a while since the last update. What has happened? Not enough. For starters we have both been traveling quite a bit, and there have been a variety of other minor distractions as well. Things are actually moving forward though. We've had more discussions with builders and have zeroed in pretty close on a plan that's way scaled down from where we were before.

I'll be posting more details soon.

We just drove by the lot again the other day and it's still for sale. I'm mildly surprised by this. Not sure why someone hasn't snatched it up. Hopefully we can get this thing off center and make an offer in the next month or so. At this point I am skeptical it can all be culled together in that amount of time. I mean...heck...we're coming up on the one year anniversary of this blog, and we had already been working on it before then.