Pictures

We finally got around to setting up a gallery for photos of our house. We've got just a few for now — some pictures of the land before construction starts.

Back in September when we purchased the land, much of it was a big pile of dirt from the excavation of the neighboring houses.

By February, the dirt had been mostly cleared away as the neighboring foundations were completed and backfilled. This picture shows the main area that our house will be built. It is taken from the east edge, roughly in the driveway. The black fence marks the start of the critical slope where we can't build; that will be near the edge of the usable section of our backyard; we actually own the land for about the same distance again down the hill.

This is the buildable area, shown from near the edge of the backyard (before the hill starts sloping and becomes wild). The pile of lumber is roughly where our driveway will be.

This picture gives an idea of how long our lot is, and how much it slopes. I'm taking this picture at the south-west corner of our property; Erika (one of the black blobs in the middle) is near where the previous picture was taken. All the area between us is part of our land, but will be left mostly wild. The dirt trail will eventually be cleaned up by the city; hopefully they'll add in some stairs.

This picture is near the south-east corner of our property, where the street connects. Erika is down near the north-west corner of our backyard (on the right by the tree).

There are a few more pictures of the site. You can view all the site pictures, or view all the galleries for our house, which will be updated as we add some more pictures.

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!