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.

Inching Forward...I think

Jerry, one of the builders we're considering going with (if we end up building) took us to see another house over the weekend. It was cool. I liked a lot of it, though there were some parts we'd definitely do differently. The couple who lives there don't have kids (like us) so a lot of it was more oriented to their lifestyle, which means it fit ours fairly well too. It was built on a really cool piece of land, which sloped down to make way for a walk out basement, but also sloped left to right, which allowed them to have the exit off the screened porch at ground level. Very cool. Nice great room. I still think we want more separation than this, but their does flow well and is very inviting. I think I want to use their staircase idea (assuming ours only goes down, not both ways as on the original drawings). I like the jog in the hallway to get around it. It's the little things sometimes.

Drawings Again

We've been back at it looking at floor plans and making modifications. We've seen two or three that are workable, with a few mods we might be able to get something reasonably close to what we want. More details to come soon.

More Inspiration

We met Jerry today to look at this other house he wanted us to see. It was beautiful and on a beautiful lot. Miles out of our price range for sure, but the idea was to see how some of the ideas we've had look when implemented.

In our design we had begun to mull over what the staircase should look like. We've already looked at many catalogs of railing styles, step features, etc. This house had one of the few I've seen that was implemented in a way that I'd be happy with. Having noted that, we're probably going to have to end up going with a much more basic stairway design to get to our price point.

There were many other cool features to this one. The outer wall of the master suite was circular, so you basically navigate around a circular walkway to get into it. Very cool, and very much like my original vision I had for our house. That vision never materialized in our plans, and now that we know we can't afford to do stuff like this it doesn't matter, but it sure is cool.

Finally, this house had the pocket doors between the great room and the kitchen area as we have been wanting from the very beginning. It was good to see them in action and confirm that it looks nice. Hard to say how effective it is for blocking noise though. I'm sure it helps a little.

Another feature of this one is that the walk out basement is below ground level. So there is a little courtyard there, and then some steps to get up to ground level. It looked nice and didn't feel weird at all. This means we probably don't have to settle for a daylight basement even if it is below ground level.

As nice as all this is we're still a ways from getting the coolness of these great houses distilled down into something affordable.

A Jaunt to See Something Close

One of the potential builders we are working with drove us an hour north of Fort Wayne today to see a house he did. This is the builder that came back with what I thought was the really high bid on our plans. There is no question he builds a quality house. He very clearly understands most of what we want to do, which is a bit unusual actually. Sometimes I feel like people are looking at us like we're nuts when we tell them what we want, or highlight the differences between what's important to us as compared to their typical clients. Jerry builds higher end homes and was very familiar with the features we want. In fact, he's already built homes with the majority of them. I like this. It keeps him from wasting our time or his.

So he drove us up to an area near Crooked Lake to see one he had built on spec. Given that we can't afford to build the monstrosity we've put into our plans he had some ideas how we could pull it back and bit and still end up with a nice place. But he felt it was important for us to see it in person rather than just looking at  the floor plan (he dropped the plans for it off a few days ago for us to check out).

So we went, and it is a very nice house. Not everything is the way we would want it, but it was close enough that we began to see and speculate on some other ways we could compromise our wish list and still end up with a place we'd be happy with. So even though we burned up the entire morning the trip was worth it.

The picture at the right is of the kitchen from the great room. Looks nice. This isn't really what we would do, but it did give us some different ideas about what we can do. For starters we began to think we may be able to shrink the size of the great room a bit. Maybe not even have a TV there, but just move all of that to the basement. Liane would watch TV in the hearth room anyway, so maybe we don't need all that in the great room. That could simplify things.

This house had a lot of other nice features. Good master suite, a second set of stairs to the basement from the garage, and a storage area that opens separately to the outside in the basement. In those ways it really resembled some of the cool features of our drawing. Price? Definitely on the upper extreme of what we want to afford, and the basement is unfinished. The guy builds a nice house, but he's clearly pretty proud of himself if the pricing is any measure of it.

We meet with him again tomorrow to go check out a couple of other places.

Can We Make it Work?

We went back to what I am referring to as the "Corn House" today. I call it that because it is bordered on two sides with corn fields. Our goal today was to meet Jim there so he could take a look at it and consult with us about modifying it to suit our tastes. It will not work as is. Like most of the houses we see the master closet is too small, and the shower isn't nice/big enough. There is a small office type room at the front of the house. If we break through that wall and basically demolish the current bathroom and closet there might be enough room to expand into that office space and make it like we want. If we can do this for a reasonable amount of money then I think we have a serious contender on our hands. Jim sketched the layout as it exists now (see photo) so we can go to work laying out what we would want.

We'll see.

Another Builder

We met with another builder today. We got in touch with these folks from information on one of the houses we looked at over the weekend we liked some of (1611 Waxwing Ct.). We took our plans over and used them to compare with the floor plan of the house he had done. We met with Jeff, the head man, and ran him through our wants and wishes.

He seemed like a competent guy, in a "get 'er done" sort of way. He's going to come up with some ideas and run them buy us. I'm interested to see what he does because of the builders we've talked to so far his pricing seems a bit more reasonable. We'll see. We should get a draft in about a week or so.