Our pattern language

For once, I (Erika) am writing a post.

A Pattern Language provides the classic reference for defining the qualities that make buildings work and houses homey. My own sense of what I want from a home developed largely from reading and rereading this book. The book is massive; it contains 253 patterns which can be used to define everything from an entire geographic region to a corner of a room. Such complexity seems overwhelming, but fortunately the authors provide a way to get started. In the words of the book:

[E]ach part of the environment is given character by the collection of patterns which we choose to build into it. The character of what you build, will be given to it by the language of patterns you use, to generate it.

For this reason, of course, the ask of choosing a language for your project is fundamental. The pattern language we have given here contains 253 patterns. You can therefore use it to generate an almost unimaginably large number of possible different smaller languages, for all the different projects you may choose to do, simply by picking patterns from it.

To generate your own pattern language, A Pattern Language, suggests the following steps:

1. First, find the pattern which best describes the overall scope of your project. We chose pattern 76, "House for a small family"
2. Turn to the starting pattern and read it. Add the patterns mentioned at the end and any other interesting patterns mentioned and add them to your list of candidate patterns.
3. Repeat step two until all of the connected patterns have been read. 
4. Remove any patterns you aren't sure about. The list of patterns can easily get too long. We ended up pruning over 30 patterns from our initial list.
5. Add your own materials. If there are things you want to include that aren't captured by patterns in the book, add them.
6. Change any patterns that you want so that they are appropriate for your situation and desires. Change the name of the pattern so that it captures your changes clearly. 

We have gone through all but the last two steps. In a future post, we will  talk more about the patterns that make up our personal pattern language.

Status & Inspiration

The beginning of October was a bit slow for house design.  We were both sick and had several events during the weekends, so we didn't get a whole lot done.  What we have been spending time on is collecting a lot of inspiration photos and notes.  We compiled a document with links and photos to things we like, and made some notes about what especially we like in each photo.  If you're interested, you can view the document.

We also have written up a lot of notes about what we liked and didn't about the initial proposed design, both by ourselves and meeting with Yuval.  Right now we're working to get the overall layout, sizes, orientations, etc. set; and then go into more and more details of each piece.  Hopefully in the next couple weeks we will have a firmer idea of what the rooms will look like.

Setsuzokuya

With our decision to switch to the Bellevue project, 'Taltree 4' no longer works as a name. As we pondered new names for the blog, we decided to come up with a name for our house, which we could then use for the blog.

The theme of our house is connection: we want to facilitate connection between our family and guests and the outdoors, between our family and the community, between our family and guests, between guests with each other, and between the family remembers living in the house. The idea is to design it in such a way that these relationships happen naturally, and are encouraged by the layout of the house.

We wanted a name to reflect this theme. A name should have a meaning, but it should also be a distinct identifier. Calling our home 'House of Connections' sounds a bit strange; it is more a description than a name. We decided to use another language, since we can use a word that has an appropriate meaning; but will not be immediately understood or interpreted by most people. We both have connections to Japanese, and will probably have some Japanese influences in our house, so it seems appropriate to look there. We found the word 'setsuzoku', meaning 'link, connection, union'. We appended 'ya' to that, which means 'house, shop' to get 'Setsuzokuya'. This has the same meaning, but sounds more like an appropriate name or identifier.

As you can see, the blog has this new name already.  The blog URL will be updated to reflect this on November 14th.  At that point, you'll need to switch your RSS feeds and bookmarks to point to http://setsuzokuya.blogspot.com.

Architect Pre-meeting

As part of the land purchase process, we had an introductory meeting with the architect who will be working on the project.  The purpose was to get a feel for what a house might look like that fulfills our program, on this piece of land.  I call this a "pre-meeting" since at that point we had not officially purchased the land, or signed a contract to work with anyone on this project.

The architect YS Development has hired for all of the Bellevue 41st project is Markus from Whitney Architecture.  We spent about two hours with him going over a proposed design for our house.

The lay of the land and orientation towards the street pretty much fixes the garage to the east with entrance from that direction; but the front door to the house on the south east corner (well, the front door could be moved around, but it doesn't look like there are many other good locations for it).  The advantage to this is that for guests, the front door from the street will kind of by-pass the garage, so our house should be more inviting, instead of having a big garage door greet you, with the entrance tucked off to the side.

With the land sloping down from the east side to the west, we're probably going to go with the main floor on the same level as the front door and garage, a second floor with bedrooms above that, and then a partial floor below the main floor on the west side (probably just one larger room).  This bottom floor won't be a basement, since it will be at ground level on the west side, and probably tucked into the hill only a little bit.

The exact layout, size, and orientation of the rooms will certainly change throughout the process; but we had a really good discussion, and I think a lot of good ideas were brought up.  Markus was very willing to let us throw around ideas, and talk about what we liked and didn't like about this design.  Overall, the meeting was really good, and talking with Markus was awesome — we're very excited to be working with him.

Land: Acquired

As of last Wednesday, September 29th, we officially own the land in Bellevue for our house.  This is the first full commitment to the project, but also means that the whole process and timeline is now a go.  We will be starting design very shortly (as soon as we recover from various bouts of busy and sickness over this past weekend), and spend the next few months on that.

The land acquisition ended up being a bit quicker than we thought.  The lot was owned by the bank, so we would be negotiating with them on the price, and doing the actual purchase from them.  We informed Yuval of our decision on the Bellevue 41st project, and he told us he would work on our land purchase in about a week and a half, after he had finished closing a transaction on another lot in that same project.  However, less than a week later, I got a call Monday after lunch from Yuval that someone else had put in a bid for that parcel!  This would have a couple of potential problems: obviously it would put our project back into limbo; but as this was someone not involved with YS Development, a one-off house along with the other four houses from the Bellevue 41st project could throw off the continuity of the community there.  So we had to get an offer submitted ASAP that could beat this other offer.

We met with Yuval that evening, and he had an offer prepared to submit to the bank next morning.  It was for an even $200,000, which was $25k-50k above what we hoped to be able to negotiate down to; but we felt this should be enough for the bank to accept a competing offer; and while it was at the same price as the other offer, we had the advantage that our offer was all cash (therefore a quicker process not dependent on getting financing), and did not have any brokers or agents involved (avoiding the extra commission the bank would have to pay out of the proceeds).  Unfortunately, this did bump up the overall price to around $730,000.  While not great, this project still offered the best timeline; and a 4% increase is not terrible.  Since we've been waiting around 9-10 months, we decided that with the extra savings we've accumulated in that time, we could cover the increase, so we decided to go ahead with the offer.

Late the next morning we heard that the bank had accepted our offer; so in under 24 hours we had gone from biding our time, to having a pending purchase in place!  The offer was set up to give us about 10 days to cancel if we decided the lot really wasn't feasible for us; and a few more days beyond that as a buffer so that we could maintain a closing date before the end of the month.  Since YS Development had already planned on using this parcel, a lot of the work for assessing building, permitting, etc. feasibility had already been done; so it was mostly a matter of verifying that it would work for us in particular.

The first piece of this was an initial meeting with the architect to get an idea of what our house might look like.  I'll cover this in more detail soon, but the short of it is that we got a good feeling for how the land would constrain our design, but also showed us the possibilities that it offered.

The next piece was to make sure everything else was in order.  For the legal part, we used a benefit from Google which is (essentially) a subscription legal service, where we pay a fixed amount every month, but can use the service at any time to have a lawyer take care of standard things, such as reviewing real estate documents.  A few good points were identified, and prompted us to get a title report in enough time to have it reviewed, too. There ended up being quite a few things on the title report; which isn't entirely unexpected, given that this is a recently-subdivided part of a lot in Bellevue proper which has been privately owned but not yet built on since sometime in the 1960s or so.  Along with all the expected utility easements, there were also claims for a road (which has since been built and is the main access to the parcel) and similar.  But nothing was objectionable, and the review pointed out a few items that weren't relevant anymore and could be cleared.

On Monday the 27th, two days before the scheduled closing, we gave the go-ahead for the purchase.  We were going through Chicago Title for the title insurance and escrow/closing, since Yuval had worked with them and knew they were good.  We got a closing statement and wire instructions that day, and the next morning we sent a wire transfer from our bank to the escrow account.  Then Tuesday afternoon we went in-person to sign the documents for our part of the closing.  On Wednesday the 29th, the bank completed their part of the transaction, and the land was officially transferred to us.

This was our first ever real estate transaction, and overall went relatively smoothly.  It was fairly quick; luckily most of the hard work was done by others, especially YS Development. I probably learned the most from the lawyer's comments — while in some ways they felt like extra complications, they did help to point out issues we weren't really clear on, and helped to clarify some vague points.  We also learned that in a cash transaction, the amount of documents to sign is actually pretty small (apparently that changes completely if you have financing involved); the purchase offer to the bank was a half-dozen pages (one of which we signed and the rest we initialed), the title policy was maybe 10-20 pages total (but none that we had to sign), the closing statement and documents were about 15 pages, of which we signed seven.  The only large part was the supporting documentation for the title report, which was over 100 pages; but that was all copies of county and city documents and I certainly didn't read through it all.

Now that we own the land, we do have a bit of recurring expenses for it: taxes and utilities. Since it is bare property, the taxes are not too bad; about $1600 for the whole year (this will obviously go up a lot once we have a house on it).  For utilities, the city bills for storm drainage for all land, though the bills should be small since the land is undeveloped (0% impervious coverage).

I will admit that the financial and business transaction parts of this process are not my favorite.  I'm glad that this portion has been successfully resolved; and now we can focus on the more enjoyable design process for the next few months.

Bellevue 41st

We're moving to Bellevue! We decided to buy the last lot in YS Development's Bellevue 41st project.

Location

We can give a list of place descriptors, but unlike Seattle or Kirkland where geographic labels mean something to us, we do not really know what these labels entail. The good thing is that even you folks outside of Seattle will have only slightly less understanding of our description than we do.

The site is on Somerset Hill (this one makes sense; it's a geographic feature), near the Factoria Mall (but what is the Factoria area?), but also in the Newport area (the high school and library near-by are named after this), in the south part of Bellevue (the actual city). One thing we know is that people react much more positively when we say "we'll be living on Somerset Hill" than when we say "we'll be living in Factoria."


View Larger Map

Basically, the site is just south of I-90 (major east-west freeway that heads west into Seattle, and east out to the Cascade Mountains and Eastern Washington) and just east of I-405 (major north-south freeway that parallels I-5 on the east side of Lake Washington — this is the main corridor for the Eastside).

This area seems out-of-the-way to someone who lives up in Kirkland.  From there, we rarely have any reason to go south of I-90 unless we're going all the way to the airport, which is another 10 miles beyond Factoria.  Shopping, stores, and most other activities we frequent are either in Seattle or in the Kirkland-Redmond-Bellevue (downtown) area.  We don't go down to Factoria regularly (we've probably been down there less than a half-dozen times). We only pass by it as part of a longer trip south. That makes it seem far away.

But in driving distance, it isn't far.  If traffic on 405 is good, we can make it down there in about 15 minutes; taking the back roads is maybe 20-25 minutes.  Coming from Microsoft, downtown Bellevue, or even downtown Kirkland is less than that. The only awkward part to the location is commuting by bus between there and Kirkland; which is, unfortunately, what Erika does (however, we've already discussed alternative options for her, so we can hopefully find something reasonable).

Project and Site

The project consists of five custom homes; the others are in the range of 2300-2900 sq ft. and $800k-$900k in price.  We're going to be coming in a bit below that at closer to 2000 sq ft. and a bit over $700k (which was the high end of the Taltree project).  The houses are arranged with a short driveway down the middle and two houses on the upslope, three on the downslope.

The houses will probably all be oriented toward the west to take advantage of the views — a few trees close in on the lot, then across Lake Washington to some hills in the south part of Seattle.  The upper floors should be able to see some of the lake, too.  This development won't have the same major community features as Taltree, but there is already discussion of putting in some shared amenities near the end of the driveway.  This development is well along; as of several weeks ago, the first house was fully framed; the second had most of the foundation laid; the third was in design; and the fourth is close to being sold.  I'm guessing we'll start design on a similar schedule with the fourth house.

We are taking the fifth lot, which is closest to the (very quiet residential) road, but is at the western edge of the group (on a western slope, so there will be one house behind/upslope from us, but we shouldn't have anything besides trees blocking our view).  There is a trail that we are hoping the city will develop into real stairs that lead down to the Factoria Mall.  The trail goes right by what will be our backyard, and leaves a nice gap in the trees for the western view. We do have a view of the freeway, and there is some noise; but I found that as soon as you stopped paying attention it disappeared; inside it should be completely quiet.  There should also be enough flat space between the house and tree line to the west for a backyard, which will be below street level.

Design

What does this mean from a design perspective?  We're not as familiar with the lot yet (we'll be meeting with the architect soon for some preliminary layout); but a three-story house has been suggested to take advantage of the slope, with the lower floor being just one room; potentially a media room or guest room.  We're assuming that the entry and garage will be on the east side at the main floor, with the major social areas there; and private living spaces upstairs.

It will probably be mostly west and south oriented; since north is closest to the next house over, and east will be towards the driveway and another house.  West and south are more private, have good light, and have better views.  But we don't yet have a good idea of what the overall shape or layout of the building will be.  The backyard will be at the lowest level, which may be below the main social space, so we may have a larger deck off the main floor (one of the houses currently under construction has this setup).  Overall, though, we want the same functionality and general relationship between areas as we discussed for the Taltree project.  On the upside, now we will have a personal garage right next to our house, instead of a shared one in a different area of the site.

Personal Thoughts

In the end, how do we feel about this?  Well, it is a shame that the Taltree project wasn't coming together in our time frame.  While there is no hard limit in our current location (in fact, we've been quite happy here and could probably stay a lot longer), after more than nine months of waiting, we are very ready to finally have our project underway.  This has the best timeline and least uncertainty of all the options; and also gives us the best value — being part of a project that already has agreements with various manufacturers, we will get those same deals.

We are not familiar with the neighborhood down there, so that is a source of uncertainty.  We did a little bit of exploring, and there are ups and downs.  While it is considered very walkable (an 82/100 on WalkScore), that is pretty much all to the Factoria Mall.  This is not exactly the most pedestrian-friendly areas, but there is a good variety of businesses. Certainly more than Taltree which only had walking access to a (much smaller) strip mall. Being up on the hill is nice. It provides psychological separation from the mall even though it is only a short (though steep) walk away.

Jeff's commute will improve; he may not even need to drive to the near-by park and ride to catch a bus into downtown Seattle. If he ever ends up working on the Eastside, he'll be a short drive away.  Erika is not as happy, since the best bus is a route that takes about 50 minutes from Factoria Boulevard up to Google Kirkland.  On the other hand, she knows there are co-workers who live in that area which might make car-pooling an option; or if she is willing to drive, it will be fairly reasonable, even avoiding the freeway.  Certainly not as good as Taltree would be, though.

While the community will not be as extensive as it probably would be at Taltree, the existing members have formed a good community already, and it sounds like a nice group.  It is difficult to predict what will happen; but even at the other development, nothing is assured.

One disadvantage is that we'll have to change this blog name... (any suggestions?)

Overall, we're happy.  We've both decided it is the best decision; we are happy to be moving forward; and still happy to be working with YS Development.

Update: Site Changes

Apologies for the infrequency of recent posts; we haven't abandoned this blog, but not much has been happening until just recently.  First, a little catch-up for some proposed Taltree changes; and then some information about a choice we have to make now.

A few months ago, we got word that the garage plan for the Taltree site was changing.  The underground garage was deemed too expensive, and changing it to above-ground parking would allow for a change in unit mix.  There was little demand for the largest units, and more demand for the smallest units. A more cost-effective parking setup would the largest units could be eliminated in exchange for more small- and mid-sized units.  The exact details of the proposal kept changing; options included: parking directly attached to most units, parking mostly at the front of the lot with some attached parking along the south, and parking spread out (with a garage for us at the south-east corner, nearish our unit).  This change had some advantages, so we were fairly happy with it; but wanted to wait until the change was finalized before posting details.

However, a few weeks ago we started talking about some alternate options.  The Taltree project still has an indefinite timeline due to difficulties finding enough committed buyers for the project.  Talking with Yuval, we came up with a few options to consider: take the last lot at the Bellevue 41st project, reduce the community aspect of the Taltree site in such a way as to allow that project to happen in stages, or find a stand-alone lot elsewhere to buy and build on.

Bellevue 41st

The Bellevue 41st project is five lots, each with a single-family home with personal garage (no shared parking) down in south Bellevue (it is in Somerset Hill, right next to the Factoria Mall, but several hundred feet up).  The homes and lots (and therefore prices) are bigger than Taltree, and the location is further south than we would prefer; so we originally weren't considering it as a possibility.  However, this project was started earlier than Taltree, so is much further along; in fact, the first house is already framed, the second has a foundation laid; and the third is in design already.  If we decided on this, we could start design right away, and be ready to move in roughly 12-13 months later.  The trick is meeting our budget: we're aiming for $100k-200k less than the other homes in this development; however, we also want a smaller home.  If we can get the lot at a reasonable price, we could be a home there within our budget.

The main site is nice, up on a hill with some really great western views and trees around it.  The neighborhood is pretty nice, and has some of the best schools in the area.  The general location, however, is not ideal.  It is further from Kirkland, where Erika works, and further from where most of our friends live now.  However, it is quicker to get into Seattle, where I work, and driving the backroads between Kirkland/Redmond and Factoria does not take as long as it seems like it should; it's even faster if you take I-405 (as long as there isn't traffic).  There are more restaurants and stores within walking distance (even if they're all in strip malls or the main mall).  The community wouldn't be the same as at Taltree, as there is no group parking, and there is a (short) driveway between the houses.  However, the current members have already started to form a good community and are talking about adding some small shared amenities at the end of the driveway.

Taltree (phased)


Another option is to change the plan at the Taltree site. One proposal was to subdivide the land into several lots. One half-acre lot would have a smaller community of four houses; the other half-acre would be divided into two or three lots with a single home each.  The individual lots could start development before the community section, and they would be developed independently. Since the number of total units would be reduced, this change would would depend on getting a good deal for the land from the bank. However, it would allow parts of the project get started sooner and allow the builder to stage development. It would also make it easier to hit the threshold of the community section to start development on that.  For this option, we'd get our choice of lot and total time would be maybe 14-16 months.  On the downside, this setup would probably not have the same kind of community as the original Taltree proposal. Plus, since we would be in the first phase of building with others at indeterminate times, we might be living right next to other construction for a while.

Compared to Bellevue, this location continues to have the same advantages it did before: it is close to friends, it is a good commute for Erika, and, although it is not quite as walkable as the Bellevue location, it is still a pretty walkable location.

Separate Lot


The final option is to find a separate lot in a different neighborhood, and build a single house there.  This would require more work to find the lot, and get it ready to build. The timeline would be more like 18 months.  Since this would have no community at all, the main advantages would be finding the best location (preferably within walking distance of Houghton, where Erika works; and/or downtown Kirkland; both locations would put me within walking distance of the main bus that would take me to downtown Seattle for my work), and maybe a slightly larger lot for more gardening/play space (since we won't have shared spaces for these things).  Unfortunately, it looks like all the lots that even meet the location criteria are going to be more expensive than we like, and would probably push our overall cost up by around $100k.  Between the cost, longer timeline, and difficulty of finding/developing a new lot, this option is the least-feasible right now.

So...

We have not made a final decision yet, but we will soon.  In the next few weeks, we will find out if we can successfully get a good-enough deal on the land at either Taltree or Bellevue 41st to make those options possible.  At that point, we will need to make a decision (or have already decided), since there are other potential buyers interested, too.  Once we've decided, then actual development can start relative to the time frames listed above.  By the end of the month, we should know where we'll be living!