building

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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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.