the staked plains, skewed

Beautiful weather today, so I set out to stake the skewed design which The Architect provided us last weekend before the modern home(s) tour. One thing I learned right off the bat is that staking a skewed homeprint is a heck of a lot harder than staking an orthogonal homeprint. Everything was just skewy! If we do the skew, we’ll need to keep a watchful eye on the foundation contractor…

I like the skew, although it’s hard to visualize what it will look like from the street. The head of the sandcrawler will be hidden from the street, but its plump rear end will peek amply out the north side of the house for street-side inspection. The Architect is presently working up a 3-D view of what the skew will look like.

The skew pulls the north side of the house away from the lot line more, but it still seems cramped over there. At some point I’m going to have to put on my big-boy BVDs and get over it, but I’m sure pouting about it right now. One thing that’s calming my nerves is that one of the homes on the tour had a similar get up and seemed OK with a nice fence backdropping the view from the living areas. But dag gummit, I’m still grumpy about it.

The Architect also worked up a “hockey stick” realization where the front module is orthogonal with the street and the rest of the modules set off on a skew. The hockey stick isn’t stirring my stew at this point, primarily because of my concerns of light in the living areas (I’m just a bundle of architectural ticks and twitches at the moment…). The hockey stick pinches off some of that light. Maybe 12-foot ceilings would help with that? The Architect is working up a 3-D view of the ‘stick, so we’ll see how that looks as well.

My bride is off to Louisiana for work and will return late tomorrow (with gumbo from Richard’s [pronounced “Ree. Shards.”] in Lake Charles). Since we’re off to New Mexico this weekend, I don’t know when I’ll get to show her the new stakes. Perhaps we’ll have 3-D views by that time. Nonetheless, she’ll be happy to hear that the tiny volunteer oak tree she fell in love with at the lot would be saved by these designs.