You've got to be KIDDING me!

One I neglected to post from the Parade of Homes. Another disco ball.

Is this is competition for the Columbia City Discotheque? I guess everyone wants to be a DJ these days. They did throw a gratuitous guitar in there. Oh, and don't forget the trumpet on the bed...because anyone who plays a Randy Rhoads style Jackson guitar is bound to also be interested in trumpets and mirror balls. Seems like they should have gone all the way and put a Copter-Sphere in for the lighting fixture. And how about a fog machine? Jeez...

The Parade of Homes

An annual event in Fort Wayne, and probably a lot of other places, the Parade of Homes is put on by the Homebuilders Association. When Liane worked for the architect she used to have to work the booth for it, and one year I helped her (still wondering how I got sucked into that). We thought it would be prudent to check it out this year.

There were seven homes in it this year. Admission has gone up to $9. I'm still trying to figure out how they get so many people to pay $9 to walk through houses and be sold to all day. Gotta' hand it to 'em there. And we did, $18 for the two of us. A lot of other people did too. It seemed very crowded to me. Almost difficult to walk through and see the houses. You'll notice a line to get in one of them above. It turned out that was mostly caused by the lady with a builder working the door who had to tell everyone ALL about it as they walked in.

We've seen some pretty spectacular houses in the past at the few of these we went to. This year, not surprisingly, the entries were a little more down to earth. It struck me this time that it seemed like more of an interior design show. The houses were nice, but for the most part pretty basic in terms of their design and construction. What appeared to set them apart from one another in many ways were the little things that had been done -- the extras, and the decorating. I can look past most of that pretty easily though, and get right to the design of the house while still enjoying the decorating ideas.

A few highlights below...

A fairly attractive kitchen. I especially liked the hood over the stove top. Not sure I'd want that one for me (glass hood, hard to keep clean?), but it looks cool here. Undecided, but I think I might like the high contrast colors.

I had mentioned a while back, when we were first struggling with how to keep my shower flush with the floor, that both the tub area AND shower could be raised, and I was okay with that. I even did a mock up showing the tub at an angle like this, with the shower off to one side (as this one is -- to the right) and Liane didn't like it. But she liked this bathroom. Go figure.

Not totally dissimilar to the way part of our kitchen may work. For us the sink will overlook the dinette, but I wonder if we should consider the angles like this, and maybe even the bar vibe? Ahh...decisions.

I kinda' dig the three side fireplace. Liane isn't enthused. Guess that will be another debate at some point.

I like it. Liane didn't. Big surprise!

Cool sidewalk. Practical?

Kind of a nice vibe here.

Seems like a smart and functional way to use the area under the steps. This idea might be worth stealing, except I think my studio will be in that area on our design.

Ultimately I didn't see a house I would want to buy, even if the price wasn't as over-inflated as these were. However there were aspects of each of them I really liked. I think we got a few good ideas.

Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding...

I think we've arrived at a workable plan! Nicole really is good at this stuff. She's done the impossible, and gotten us everything we asked for with minimal compromises. She even came up with some other really good ideas in the process. Hooray!

Click on the image for a larger view.

It looks like the garage had to be moved out some, and the closet shape is slightly weird, but those are things we think we can live with. There are still some minor things we want to move around and change, and still quite a few little details to be worked out, but the basic floor plan is finally ready...we think. We do want to sleep on it a couple of times first. I've started a list of little things to think about and change. For the most part it's not stuff that would cause any major walls to move or anything.

After a few weeks of getting increasingly discouraged about this project I'm excited again, and looking forward to pushing this train down the tracks to the next stop, whatever that is. Obviously the next step is to get the floor plan for the loft and basement done.

If there are any opinions, thoughts or concerns from the peanut gallery it's time to start submitting them as we very well could be just a few weeks away from submitting this thing for bids.

Cannot Defy the Laws of Physics

The meeting with Nicole went well. The good news is that she really does seem to understand what we want. The bad news is that doesn't change the problem. I think she wants to tell us, in the voice of Scotty from Star Trek, "Captain, you cannot defy the laws of physics." We're trying to feed three rooms (bed, bath, closet) from one point (the end of the hallway) and we have an arc of about 110 degrees (more or less) in which to do it. That's going to make for some odd shaped rooms or a longer hallway. If we push the garage forward the job becomes easier, but I'm not a fan of houses in which the front facade is dominated by garage so that concerns me. I'm also somewhat hesitant to push the rest of the house further down the hill on the lot because it will make it harder to be able to see the lake at the back and cause more dependance on a retaining wall between the front and back yards. We could also maybe look at a way of moving the kitchen out of there to make more room, but that pretty much blows up the rest of the design and causes a total do-over. So that would be a last resort I guess. If either the kitchen or the garage moved out of the way the available arc of space at the end of the (short) hall could be a full 180 degrees (like most normal houses) and it would be a lot easier to get it all in there. Barring any change in the laws of physics the answer may lie in some compromise involving all of these things: slightly weird shaped rooms, slightly longer hallway, slightly more garage on the front, and somewhat moving the kitchen.

The ball is in her court now, so we'll see what all she can come up with.

Workin' Them Pixels

Don't pay the ransom. We're still here. Liane started school a few weeks ago, and we've had a few other things happening that caused the house to go onto the back burner for a bit. We're back at it now. In fact I've been doing some drawing of my own. We came to a standstill on a few issues, the most difficult of which has no easy solution in sight. The east end of the house has to hold the garage, master bedroom, master bath, and a huge walk in closet. And the only way to get to it all is through a hallway near the front of the house.

It makes for a really long hallway and some odd shaped rooms, the latter of which doesn't bother me...up to a point, but the long and circuitous hallway gets me down. It's a problem that likely can't be entirely solved unless we blow up the house and go in a different direction. But we're trying.

Rather than continue to have Nicole go through gyrations I wanted to try a few ideas myself, just to have a better handle on it, and also to let her see a little of what's in my mind's eye. We meet with her tomorrow to go over my drawings. I hope she can come up with something better than I've been able to. I'm really not that happy with any of it. This is really a tough challenge. And it's frustrating because otherwise we're very close.

Boogie Nights

This takes the cake. We're continually fascinated and amazed at the things we see in people's basements. This house we looked at today evidently serves as the Columbia City Discotheque. What you can't see very well at the bottom is there is an actual hardwood dance floor built in. We were pretty much speechless when Chris fired up the lights and disco ball motor.

We looked at several houses today. All of them had potential on paper, though in the end only two stand as contenders. And like all the rest they have their faults. They could be made to work after several tens of thousands of dollars in remodeling and fix up. We'll keep them on the list while we try to finalize a draft of the house we want to build that will be suitable to find out how much that's going to cost.

Today, for the third time since we've been looking, we arrived at a house only to find the owners still home. Today's incident was by far the most exciting. We had been walking through this house for about 10 minutes when we made it to the master bedroom. We heard a radio on in the bathroom so I let Chris take the lead...and sure enough, you can about guess what happened. Ooops!! The owners and Chris shared a moment you can only imagine. They thought we weren't going to be there until 2:00. He had arranged for us to be there between 1:00 and 2:00. This type of time discrepancy has occurred twice before, far less dramatically. Not sure where the communication breakdown is, but suffice to say we were extremely careful entering the rest of the houses today.

Not too Soggy

Drove out to the property we are considering at lunch yesterday. It had rained like cats and dogs the day and night before so I thought this would be a good time to check and see how warranted our concerns over the drainage are. I haven't mentioned this before, but after the initial drop-off the property is pretty flat all the way out to a common area behind it, then it rises again before getting to the drop off for the small lake. We wondered if water might stand in the lawn after a rain. I am happy to report that it didn't. Well....it may have for a while, but by the time I got there (several hours after the rain stopped) there wasn't any standing water. This is very good sign considering I still saw water standing in quite a few other places in town.

As a side note, I finally measured the distance and time between it and Sweetwater. There are several slightly different routes that can be taken, but on the one I think I would take most of the time it came out to 9.6 miles and took me about 13 minutes. Not bad considering it will shave about 20 minutes off the drive for Liane.

Something is Missing

Notice something different?

(Don't you guys love it when your wife asks you a question like this? Nothing will freeze you in your tracks faster, because of course the real answer is, "No, but if you'll give me a minute to look around and think about it I might be able to come up with something." Guessing is a pretty dangerous undertaking though.)

We're in the process of making our house ready to put up for sale. Of course we still have no idea when it will actually go up for sale. Too many steps in the puzzle have to happen before we get there. Those of you who've been here before will recognize that we tore out the two cabinets over the peninsula. There's still some finish work to be done, but this is close to what it will look like. Definitely more open.

Funny thing about selling a house. That seems to be the time where you're supposed to fix and upgrade all of the shortcomings. I don't get it. We've been living here for years and it's been fine, but now that we're thinking of putting it up for sale we have to spend thousands of dollars upgrading things. Why wouldn't we have done this stuff before...so WE could enjoy it? It's like company is coming over and we have to suddenly clean up and fix everything.

Whatever. I go along because the prevailing opinions of the experts is to do this stuff. New countertops are next.

Hang in There

If anyone is actually reading this I just want to let you know that the real excitement hasn't started yet. So hang in there. I promise it is going to get more interesting at some point. Just how interesting remains to be seen...

And feel free to post your comments.

More Changes

Last night we spoke with Nicole to discuss some of the changes in the layout we are working on. There are a variety of issues still being sorted out, including: size of garage, size and configuration of master closet and bathroom, and mostly just how to fit all that stuff elegantly at the east end of the house. It's proving to be difficult, which I knew would be the case after having done some of my own sketches early on while I was working on getting some ideas more codified in my mind.

There's also the issue of the kitchen...and here comes the part that's embarrassing, and probably a sad commentary on our lives to some extent...but...we want everyone in the kitchen to be able to see a TV. Liane just loves to watch TV whenever and wherever she is working. She doesn't really watch it that much, mind you, she just has it on in the background sort of loosely following along with whatever is going on. Of course this is usually either reality TV of some sort or something like Oprah. Whew! Women yacking away or crying. Wears me out sometimes. In the kitchen space (which for these purposes includes three separate areas (not counting the screened porch)) she wants to have TV available in the hearth area, for her while preparing food, and for anyone who may be sitting at the bar. A look at the layout makes it clear this will be really hard to do with only one TV. We've been exploring alternate layout ideas to see if we can make it better (more on that to come). One of the more promising ideas has been to rotate the bar 90 degrees and change the kitchen dimensions a bit. Nicole is pursuing several variations at once right now. More to come...