We have pins!

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Today was our official start day for the remodel! Co-Del Construction was out today to put in the marker pins for the excavation. As soon as the surveyor comes and signs off and the township signs off on the placement (which is already approved in the construction permit, but just has to be verified before they start digging and pouring concrete), then they can come out and start digging for the foundation footers. That could be as early as Thursday, but more likely, it will be Friday or Monday.

Tomorrow, they’ll be coming out to get rid of topsoil and extraneous landscape obstacles (little tree, bushes, stump, corpses, whatever…), so the place will finally start to look like a construction zone!

PINS!!!
PINS!!!

 

Playing with Library Designs

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I had been using Chief Architect’s Home Designer Suite 2015 to do my house models to play around with furniture layouts and the like, but found it too limiting. The Pro version would probably be better, but I’m not going to shell out $495 to help figure out where to put my couch.

So I tried out Google’s Sketchup program and, after a relatively short learning curve, started making some models and had a go at creating a design for my library. I took the measurements from our actual Architect’s drawings and built the "room" and then went from there.

I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. This was just a first draft of a design and it’s all kind of rough, but SketchupSketchup made is really easy to visualize how things would look and how the colors would work together. Here are a few pictures of my first go-round (more pictures after the break). Click on any of them to get a larger view.

Library Design 001-06

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Waiting…

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Waiting... So as of the last update, we had gotten our construction loan and were hoping to start during the first or second week in January. However (of course there’s a "however"), the unpleasant, single-digit cold snap started right around that time. We met with the builder and he said he was willing to start, but wanted us to know what the risks were. Part of one of our additions is below grade for about half its length, so that part requires a concrete block wall. Since it’s also on the windiest side of the house, that means it’s at the highest risk for concrete cracking during the cold and, while you can take steps to mitigate that risk (cover it up with blankets, use a heater, etc), it’s a risk that we decided it would be best to avoid by waiting a bit longer. We decided to wait until the end of February as a possible starting time.

It’s now the end of February and there’s been quite a bit of single-digit, overnight temperatures, so we’re going to wait another couple weeks and hope the weather moves on to a warming trend here so the ground can thaw out a bit and we’ll have better conditions for excavating, laying pipe, pouring foundations, and building block walls. So as it stands, our anticipated target date is the week of March 16th.

I hope construction workers don’t need to take off for St. Patrick’s Day.

Virtual First-Floor Walkthrough

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I recreated (and I use that term loosely) the real architect’s plans for the first floor living area of our house-to-be in Chief Architect’s Home Designer Suite 2015. I got most of the dimensions correct (more or less) which is all I wanted to do initially so I could try out some room layouts and see what worked and what didn’t. The software lets me create a 3D Virtual Walkthrough of the plans, so… that’s fun! Once I got the first floor layout done, I threw in some furniture and kitchen cabinets and created the walkthrough.

The finishes are not correct and some features are wonky since I didn’t actually “build” the house in the software. I just created rooms. So as far as the software knows, the house is a one-story structure that is floating roughly five feet over a lush meadow… which also means the stairs up and down can go nowhere… and the ceilings aren’t correct in some areas. Regardless of that, it’s an interesting (to me) glimpse of what the inside of the house will resemble.

A delay… sort of.

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We got an official excavation timeframe from our builder. It’s not “NOW,” so we’re a little disappointed, but it’s for the best. With the holiday weeks coming up, it wouldn’t make sense to do all the excavation and then have big holes sitting empty, freezing, and/or filling up with rain and snow waiting to be filled with concrete after everyone is done with their eggnog. So our breaking ground timeframe will be the first or second week in January. This time, however, it’s an official timeframe from the builder, not one of our wishful or speculative timeframes.

And that’s really only about two and a half or three weeks away. After planning for six months, I think we can wait another couple weeks.

We don’t want to, but we can.

What the permit means…

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So this is hanging in our window now.

Our building permit

In case that doesn’t show up well on your monitor, the project description says, "Full home remodel, 2 additions, Deck, Detached Garage + Enlarge Driveway." To quote George Carlin (from a really obscure episode of his short-lived television show), "That seems like a lot."

And it is. So what follows is a visual depiction of the changes that are about to occur.

This picture…

Our current house

…is our house as it was on Thanksgiving morning (it’s the same now, too, but without the snow). It’s a little three-bedroom rancher with a two-car garage and a walk-out basement (the door’s around back). There’s some attic space, but it’s the kind where you have to crouch down and walk like a duck to avoid impaling your head on the points of old roofing nails.

Here’s the computer rendering from the architect of what our house will look like when we’re done. It’s moderately close to the same angle as the above picture.

Our future house

You can’t see the deck on the back or the detached garage (which will be off to the left), but you can pretty easily see the "full home remodel" and the two additions and the enlarged driveway. If the angles were a bit closer in the pictures, I could overlay the current house onto the rendering, but you can use your imagination to see that the current house fits snugly right in the center of the rendering. The front doors would align.

So… tick-tock. We’re counting the days to ground-breaking day which should be about the middle of next week. From that point on, we’ll be surrounded by mud for the foreseeable future. Hooray. Mud.

No, really. Hooray, mud!