Windows!

We have been working on a number of things in the past month, and we finally have something finalized to report on — windows. Window planning took several rounds of design and feedback, but was relatively easy from our perspective. The initial design was mostly good. We had a few comments, but most of the changes were suggested by Yuval and Markus to accommodate structural changes (a beam was added in the living room, which interfered with some of the windows) or to improve usability or decrease cost.

Our main point of concern was the stair tower. The initial design featured large windows over most of the west wall to take advantage of the views. These ended up being the most expensive windows, and we found the design kind of boring. In the spirit of Zen Views, we asked for less window and more interest.

Markus came up with a design which really delighted us. Wide windows punctuate the stair landings, where you can pause to take in a wider view. Vertical windows make for a dynamic view — descending from the top floor to the main floor, you see out from the highest point down towards the trees and water; ascending from the bottom floor to the main floor you see up towards the trees and sky. Going the other directions, you just have a small bit of horizontal window at the landing to focus on. From the outside it looks interesting but intentional (plus it reminds us of Tetris pieces, which is awesome).

The original design is on the left, the final design is on the right.

The rest of the windows were straight-forward. We have plenty of openable windows to get good air circulation throughout the house (look for the dotted Vs). The living room has lots of windows on the south and west to take advantage of the view and bring lots of light into the main floor. This is important since the dining room and kitchen do not have any exterior walls of their own to put windows in.

Now that the windows have been finalized, permitting should start shortly. We are working on kitchen design, and choosing appliances and plumbing fixtures (faucets, sinks, toilets, etc.). All the while, we are starting to analyze the budget and make sure our choices stay within it. We have been busy, but we'll post more as we finalize our choices.

Roof Form

As of a couple weeks ago, we still needed to decide on a roof form. After looking at different forms from different perspectives and in context of the other houses, we made a decision.

The two shed variants were eliminated fairly quickly — we weren't as fond of how those looked, either in isolation or with the other houses. The choice was between flat and butterfly. We liked the way the flat roof looked in isolation, but it didn't fit as well with the community (the rest of the homes have butterfly roofs). We decided to go with a butterfly roof. It matched the other houses and still looked good on ours. It also adds visual interest to the strong horizontal lines on our exterior.

Here's how the butterfly roof looks in the context of the neighborhood. In the top portion of this image, our house is the right-most one; in the bottom portion, it is the left-most.

We currently have lots of other things in process. Windows are being finalized, kitchen design has started, and plans for permitting are being worked on. It is keeping us busy, but there is nothing finished to report on quite yet.

Final Floor Plans

We have finalized the floor plan. The big decision centered around the layout of the upper floor. Initially, we had planned to put the master suite on the east side and the other bedrooms on the west.

This layout gives the master suite good light and access to the rooftop deck, but we disliked the layout of the other bedrooms. They did did not feel connected, and we felt that this pattern lacked a Children's Realm (a pattern which Erika is going to write about soon). We discussed adding a play loft over the stairs to connect the rooms. It would be a cool and unique feature, but it would negatively impact the view out of the stair tower on the upper floor, where we would have the longest views. Markus gave us a diagram with sight lines to show the impact. The dotted lines in the upper left represent the play loft. As you can see from the sight lines, there would be no view from the stairs on the upper floor if we had a play loft.

We considered the alternative of moving the master suite to the north and the other bedrooms to the south. This puts the bathroom for the secondary bedrooms right between those rooms and adds a bit of circulation space which strongly connects them into a children's realm.

This layout has some disadvantages. Going through the utility room to the deck is a bit awkward. The second bathroom is slightly smaller. The master dressing room is a bit smaller, and we have a bit more unnecessary circulation space in the master bedroom. The master suite also has less eastern light (although it will have more light throughout the day).

However, we decided that having a cohesive space for the children and preserving the western views out the stair tower were important. We can shift the deck to give access both from the utility room and the master bathroom. We hope that with access to the deck though the less private laundry room, it will get more use, since children and guests might feel strange going through our room to get to the deck.

The layout of the main floor has not changed much from the first sketches with western stairs. This level contains the main social spaces and our office. We are starting to flesh out the details left out of that initial sketch.

The exterior entry porch lies several steps below the garage and ground level (a couple feet). It has benches on both sides to increase the sense of enclosure and make the entry feel like an outdoor room. The fireplace is going to be open on three sides so that it can act as a visual connection between all of the social spaces on this level.

Downstairs is mainly the media room. We are aiming for the full home theater experience: raised platform to support two rows of seating, acoustic isolation, and few to no windows. We will install the plumbing for a future downstairs bathroom, but for now we will leave that as storage space. The lower level has access to the backyard, although you have to descend another half level to access it.

The total size is about 2700 sqft. It's a bit bigger than the 2500 sqft we had settled on (and much bigger than our initial goal of 2000 sqft), but we like the way everything came out, and feel that it is still an efficient layout with a lot of functionality packed into the space.

Our next steps, other than the already mentioned roof form and fenestrations, are working on mechanical systems, especially HVAC, looking at and choosing materials, and kitchen design. This will be the point where Yuval's expertise will go from useful to invaluable. We hope to have everything needed for permitting finalized within the next four to six weeks. Permitting will take another six weeks (during that time, we will work on design aspects which don't effect the permitting process). Hopefully, we will start construction in mid-May!

It looks like a house!

Design is progressing nicely. Markus modeled our house in CAD which brings us one step closer to permitting and construction. Moving from simple layouts to a computer model gives us our first views of the building's massing — how the house sits on the land, height, roof form, etc. This makes the building much more real. Clockwise from the top left we have the west, south, northwest, and southeast perspectives.

As the images show, our lot has a strong slope from east to west. The garage is actually elevated a few feet above the main level to decrease the slope of the driveway (bottom left image). The slope also gives us additional height: a limit of 30' from average grade gives us a total of about 35' on the west side. To take advantage of this, Markus added the 35' stair tower as a distinctive architectural feature (bottom right image).

We still need to decide on window placement and roof form. The images above show a flat roof. We like how the flat roof emphasizes the strong horizontal elements of the soffits and decks. However, all of the other homes in the community will likely go with butterfly roofs. We are going to look at several roof forms in the context of the neighborhood. As you can see below, in isolation the flat roof definitely looks best.

Computer models aside, we're not planning on having a home made out of gray, featureless pixels. Although we have awhile before we finalize the external colors and materials, we have found an inspiration for our exterior. It is another home from Whitney Architecture, the firm our architect works for:

We like the elegance and simplicity of the limited palette of materials and colors and the contrasts between horizontal and vertical, dark and light, warm wood and cool silvers/grays.

Short Update

Design is moving along, albeit a bit slowly. Between the holidays and some other deadlines, the architect has been kind of busy. But Yuval is aware that we're behind schedule, so he's going to make sure that the focus stays on the two houses in the Bellevue project for a while. Our house is currently being put into a CAD program, and that work is almost done. We should be able to review that soon (hopefully within a couple weeks). After that, we will hopefully be kept busy while the design is pushed through and prepared for permitting.

We're looking at an April-May target to starting construction. This is 1-2 months behind our original schedule, but it will still be a good time to start. All the foundation and framing and most of the exterior can be finished before it gets too cold and wet in the fall and winter. (One of the other houses under construction had its foundation poured during the winter, but they had to pay a lot of attention to temperatures.) So with optimal time of year, and lessons and processes learned from the other houses, we're hoping our construction will progress at a nice pace.

We also had a chance to see the first house in the project. It is nearing completion. We hadn't seen it since before the drywall went up, and it now has all the flooring in, walls painted, and is been sealed up and heated. The exterior is almost all complete, too. It is looking more like a real house, and you can start to get a sense for how it will look when complete; and how nice all the material finishes are (during construction, we found it hard to appreciate the quality — particle board, concrete and framing boards looks pretty much the same all over). It will also allow us to start seeing how various materials and finishes look in a real home, and hopefully help us as we start making decisions on all these pieces, too.

Hopefully we will have more exciting updates soon!

Size, Cost and Decisions

The previous post looked at just the layout of the floor plans, and some comparisons between them. Here we talk about some other issues that were raised by these plans, and what we've decided to do.

Size

After seeing these two sketches, we spent a while discussing size. The first sketch, with the fully built downstairs was around 2600 sqft. The second, with only stairs on the lower floor, was 2300 sqft. We decided that we could not fit everything we wanted into just 2000 sqft without feeling cramped. We do a lot of entertaining, and hosting people comfortably requires space — space for a dining room big enough to seat 10-12 people, space for a dedicated media room big enough to sit 10-12 people, space for a kitchen big enough to support both of us cooking regularly, etc.

Looking at projected costs, our budget, and our desires, we decided that 2500 sqft was a reasonable target. That would give us enough space to comfortably fit everything we really wanted without going outside what we can afford. This pushes total estimated cost to roughly $825k, which is a far cry from our original estimate of $700,000. However, as we get closer to starting construction, we have a better idea of how much money we actually have saved versus how much we need to borrow. Based on those numbers, things look fine.

Are we worried that costs will keep increasing like they have been? Yes and no. We are not in a situation where things are costing more than we expected in an initial budget. Instead, we are choosing to increase our budget to get more space than we originally planned.

Plus, now that we are close to locking down a layout, the size will be fairly fixed. The remaining unknown cost is construction, and that tracks size fairly closely, so our costs should be stabilizing. There is some contingency built into the construction budget, and other large budget additions can be planned as alternate additions (which we can choose to include or not later in the process). So hopefully, at this point, we should be able to manage the costs at a finer level.

Decisions

We had a good meeting with Markus (the architect) and Yuval (the builder) to discuss the plans, and work through some options. We considered (and eventually abandoned) an interesting design that attempted to combine the media and living room on the north edge of the main room; we could shut off a smaller media room or open it up to the main living spaces to get seating for larger groups.

We eventually decided to go with a modified version of plan two, with the stair on the west. Because we could not get a media room that met our criteria on the main floor, we decided to build out the media room downstairs. This allows us to shrink the north-west corner of the main floor (the media room in plan 2) and use it as an office. This should allow us to hit our target of 2500 sqft, and get a nice layout all-around.

With the general layout/relation of rooms locked down, we'll move to a deeper exploration in CAD to allow us to get sizes nailed down, and start getting a better idea of what the house will look like on our site in all three dimensions!

More Sketches

We received some sketches right before Thanksgiving and a second set right after. Now, a month later, we finally have a chance to discuss them. Our architect has graciously allowed us to share his sketches so you can see how the design has progressed. First we'll go over the sketches and discuss our thoughts on them. The next post will talk about some issues that these sketches raised, and what we decided to do.

Both plans share some similarities that come from the constraints of the site. The garage is on the east side. The house is an approximately 30' by 30' square to the west of that. The garage overlaps the main floor, causing an indent of several feet on the east edge, starting at the north and going down about 25'. This effectively turns the main floor into a rectangle, with a little jut out at the south-east corner for the entry.

The upper floor takes up the full square; we will use part of the space over the garage for an upstairs deck. The lower floor can run the full north-south length, but only about 15' or so deep (from the western edge) due to the hill on the east.

Plan 1: Stairs on North

Plan 1 is approximately an open floor plan interpretation of the traditional four square, although the stairs on the northern wall are separated from the entry in the south-east corner. The stairs leave a narrow space in the north-east corner; just large enough for a very small office and a powder room. The kitchen takes up the south-east corner; counter, pantry, cupboards, etc. run along the east wall; a north-south oriented island defines the edge of the kitchen.

On the south edge, cutting between the main kitchen area and the breakfast nook, a walkway leads from the entry in the south-east, along the south edge of the kitchen, then to the living room. The western edge opens the main living and dining space to the view. The dining room lies in the north-west corner and flows into the living room in the south-west corner.

On the lower floor, the stairs let out directly into the media room, which fills most of the space. The north-west corner, next to the stairs, has an office/guest that opens onto the media room. The south-east corner contains a full bathroom, again off of the media room.

The upper floor has a large gathering area in the center from the stairs to the south edge. To the west lie a pair of bedrooms; a play loft connects the bedrooms. The bathroom just to the east of the stairs services these bedrooms. The master suite takes up the eastern wall. The dressing room and closet space lie in the middle and provides access to the deck above the garage. North of this (the north-east corner) is the master bath, and the south-east corner is the sleeping alcove, which is just large enough to fit our bed and a couple of nightstands.

Plan 2: Stairs on West

Plan 2 moves the stairs to the west. They bump out so that the landings fall outside the main straight-line envelope of the house. In this sketch, the lower floor is not built out. The stairs go down to open space roughed out for future expansion.

The living room is still in the south-west corner of the main floor. The north-west corner contains a media/guest room. There is a full bath off of that room, located in the center of the north wall. The kitchen is just below the bath, oriented east-west, with the dining room as an open area between the kitchen island and the south walkway (which connects to the entry, same as in the first plan).

The upper floor is similar to before, but now the two bedrooms are split by the stairs instead of closets. The open family/play area has been converted to a smaller utility room with washer/dryer, sink, counter space, and storage. The master suite has been enlarged to fit a small office into the north-east corner, off of the dressing room, since there is no space downstairs for it.

Comparison and Issues

At first, we found the stairs on the west a bit odd; the western edge seemed best for the main living area: it has the views, and it provides the best connection to a deck outside. But western stairs provide some interesting advantages.

With the stairs on the north, there is a relatively narrow slice of space to the east (since the garage cuts into the east-west space on the main floor), and that space can only open to the south. This basically requires it to open into the kitchen, which is not great. With the stairs on the west, there is room for comfortably-sized rooms to both the north and south, and access to the bathroom is not directly off any of the main living spaces.

This layout allows for a nice L-shaped kitchen, which gives us a nice amount of counter and cabinet space. Western stairs provide a nice focal point for the interior layout, and they make the space in the northwest corner more private. However, the dining room in plan 2 is a bit small, and we worried about it spilling into the walk-way from the entry.

In contrast, putting the stairs on the north provides a large open space along the western edge of the house. There is less distinction between the living and dining rooms. It would be much easier for them to visually merge into one space (this isn't necessarily bad, but is different). The kitchen is more linear and, since the north end of the kitchen provides access to the north-east corner, has less space for counters and appliances. The office on the main level is too small for two people, and isn't really necessary if there is a second office downstairs.

Both layouts had some issues with the media room since we hadn't provided enough clarification. Neither was able to be closed off completely to block out noise, a key feature for us. In plan 2, the media room was not the right size.

Both sketches were interesting, and had some really good elements; but these are both larger houses than we had originally planned on...