After some (ahem) mildly uncomfortable budget discussions, we’ve thrown our house plans into the dryer and pulled them out somewhat shrunked. After starting out at 2,863 square feet and creeping to slightly over 3,000 square feet, our house is down to an affordable (knock on wood…) 2,360. We lost a bedroom in the process (there goes the exercise room!) and the walls crept inward in almost all directions, but we’re happy that the spirit of the originally designed home (including the sandcrawler) is still intact.
We hooked up with The Architect yesterday at Captain Quack’s to discuss window placement and cladding (the stuff that goes on the outside of the house). The Architect surprised us with the last batch of PDFs by including some color realizations of the house. These aren’t the final colors, but good-golly-gee look at that sucker pop! I now know how folks felt when they got their first color TV…
I’ve noticed driving around town that the building business is picking up. That’s great for the economy but perhaps not so great for us. Less competition equals higher building prices. We’re going to start talking to some builders to get guesstimates on how much it might cost to build our house. If the costs are too high, we may be back at the drawing board…
Looks fantastic! Can't wait to start following the construction!
ReplyDeleteKudos on a great blog! We're in the middle of building our house as well, and had many discussions about how much we really need. In the end I think we'll have a house that's more livable and better designed while also being smaller. We ended up with just shy of 2,200 s.f. It's fun stuff though figuring how how to do more with less, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteIn the immortal words of Mies Van der Rohe: "Less is more"!
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