Appliances. Over many years, we’ve thought about features we’d want in a new refrigerator or cook stove and, since the purchasers of our last house wanted our appliances, our imaginings of modern appliance features opened up to becoming reality. While we were shopping around, comparing features and prices, we had the good fortune to meet Dan at Leon’s in…
Budget Clarification and Trimming. Met with Architect Vincent and his Architectural Technologist, Dan, today. We looked at the numbers again and realized that we weren’t exactly comparing apples to apples on Sunday. My calculations were a little off, so here’s how the numbers really break down to dollars per square foot: Angie’s 18′ x 20′…
On this snow-stormy Sunday, I turn my attention to the ‘B’ word – no, not blizzard… budget. Michael and I are still in a daze after Wednesday’s budget meeting with Architect Vincent and Builder Nick. Last night was our first opportunity to talk openly with friends about our budget, plans, goals and compromises to our dream home to-date. It…
Lets head upstairs for a look at the upper level floor plan. An excellent design technique for building small is to create rooms which serve more than one purpose. This ties in directly with being very honest with yourself about how you really live. For instance, do you seldom have overnight guests? Then perhaps a guest bedroom…
Design touches are what make a home your built-for-you home. In this post, I’ll introduce our lower level house plans with a walk through of a few of the design features. Let’s start with the exterior: We dream of achieving minimal outdoor maintenance and maximum outdoor living and here are a few design elements to take us there: Planting…
With only 3 to 4 months to go before building starts, we’re beginning to feel a little pressure to get all our choices made and quotes in so we can finalize our budget. I’ve completed the lighting plan, including budget, and received two thumbs up from both Michael and Architect Vincent. We’ve made our decisions on…
We’ve felt like there’s a chorus of circus poodles dancing around in our heads as we tapdance our way through the options on how to heat and power our home. We would LOVE to be off-grid – meaning our home would not be connected to any utilities and we would generate our own power and heat and not rely on municipal sewer…
So far, we’ve been working on the concept development with Vincent, our architect. This is the stage where Vincent takes our ideas for our perfect home and morphs them into a house plan that will meet building codes and be logical – with stairs that lead to landings and not bathtubs… well, I’m sure you get the idea.…
The plan was to collect photos right from the start, but it’s easy to forget to snap pictures during initial meetings when there’s so much that’s new and exciting! So, I’ll start with yesterday and backtrack just a little. The purpose of this blog is to document the planning, design and building of our perfect home.…