Sunday, August 10, 2008

A Bit About Our House Design

Another of the good things about our future neighborhood in Falls Church is that there's no one prevailing architectural style. Glancing up and down the street, one sees old farm houses, craftsman style homes, colonials, cape cods, ranches, and even some contemporaries. So our little house will fit right in -- it's yet another style (green modern, in the absence of another name to describe the architectural genre of our house) to compliment the diversity of the neighborhood.

Our house is one level plus a full basement. 2 bedrooms with 2 bathrooms. Each bedroom suite is positioned on an end of the house, with the master suite at the back of the house (eastern exposure, quietest part of the lot). In the center of the house is an open floor plan great room, with kitchen, dining, and living rooms. There are five sliding glass doors on the south side and three on the north side, with a deck surrounding the house to allow for an indoor-outdoor flow during parties, etc.

As you see from the sketch, there's a "shed roof" rising towards the southern sun, bringing the ceiling from about 9 feet to about 15 feet. This helps prevent the small house from feeling too small while allowing more winter sun to warm the house.

We are going for a modern look, without the coldness that some modern homes project. Our friends and family are welcome in our home and we look forward to (some day) opening our doors to you.

Not Much Action

Not much new to report. We're still shopping and pulling together the list of fixtures, etc. for the detailed budget. We had a conference call on Friday with Chad Hackmann from UBuildIt to touch base on the bids he has been receiving for the hard core house structure(framing, foundation, etc.).

While on the Eastern Shore for my cousin's wedding, we reviewed the list of licensed tree companies in the City of Falls Church and paid Dan (my sister's fiancee) $20 to call all of them for their email addresses and fax numbers. We sent the tree preservation plan to several of the companies and we're awaiting bids on pricing to cut down the trees that need to be removed. We've also asked them to suggest a sawyer or mill that could cut then kiln dry some of the trees to our specs so that we can re-use the wood in the house.

While we've been staying on top of these details, there's no major progress to report.