Interior Plans

To create open space and efficiency, the guts of the house are all in the left third of the house. Things like the bathrooms, utilities, stairs and kitchen. Although our original ideas coincidentally reflected this thought, I have to thank local architect Bob Pineo for confirming the idea as a good one. The exterior reflects the interior division of space: the left third is staggered and cladded differently than the rest of the house. We will be choosing a lot of the finishes with Jeff as we build.

BASEMENT: This will be unfinished. These plans are for the future. Because the only windows have to be in the rear because of the slope, we had to put the guest bedroom in the back.

FIRST FLOOR: The first floor is wide open. The only walls are between the kitchen and the front of the house. Lisa had the idea of making this entryway a huge circle. The front of the house will be the living room, behind that is free space for the kids and a built-in platform lounge bed. The kitchen is all Ikea. We pieced it together using the kitchen catalog. The rear patio is about 5 feet below the first floor. There is a small landing with steps down to the patio. We will have about 50-60 feet behind the house to the back of our lot.

SECOND FLOOR: There will be an open railing between the stairs and the hallway and a window in the stairwell. The laundry closet is toward the front of the upstairs to save a lot of lugging up and down. We love closet space. The large closets in all of the rooms act as sound buffers between rooms. The bathroom fixtures will be Ikea, too.

Decisions

In the past two months we've been kicking around what the inside will look like. Its a good feeling to wrap-up the general plans and know that we have considered almost everything. (Thank you Jeff, for your patience.) You only get one chance to make a lot of these decisions.

Lisa and I marked out the house on our lot last weekend using stakes and spray paint. It was difficult to visualize walls and feel the space, but we learned enough to decide...

...TO go for the basement. It will cost us some things (like cement floors and some Benjamins), but overall the basement was a no-brainer. For relatively little cost, we will get 900 more square feet, much needed storage space, a place to add a living room and a fourth bedroom with a bathroom.

... NOT TO subtract four feet off of the foot print. With the added basement cost, we thought about saving money on the finished space. It would have cost us 160 square feet. That made things too tight, particularly downstairs.

... TO only have three finished bedrooms. Our original plans had four. But because of the future guest room in the basement, we will now have three generous bedrooms upstairs.

... NOT TO have the master bedroom at the front of the house. Thanks to the Uhl's (our old friends and new neighbors), we were able to take account of the views off the front and rear of the house. The rear has views of mountains and downtown, and has better morning light. My only regret is that our house will block some of the Uhl's view.

See the next post to view the plans.

Design stage... so far

In our most recent design meeting with Jeff, he showed Lisa and I the latest floor-plan and facade renderings.

We really like the shape of the structure. It was important to us create dimensionality on the facade. The left third of the house protrudes roughly four feet toward the front. The cantilevered front porch is tucked into the facade and is 8 feet deep. The single-pitch roof overhangs six feet from the front door to provide cover. We're excited about hanging long-stemmed lights from the overhang.

Our favorite cladding options are hardiepanel siding (www.jameshardie.com) and corrugated metal (www.unioncorrugating.com). Both of these sites display the color options. So, in order to more easily customize the color and cladding of the facade, I re-rendered Jeff's design in InDesign – my native tongue (see image). We want to distinctly clad the left third of the house, both in color and texture to reinforce the facade's dimensionality.

There is a lot to say about the floor-plan of the house. The short story is that we've planned for: 1800+ sq. ft. plus a basement, four modestly-sized bedrooms and two full bathrooms upstairs and an extremely open downstairs with a front and back porch.