Floor plans

Good morning,

I've had a request to see the floor plans in SketchUp to help with visualization. At present, these 2D plans are the best that I have, but I'm working on getting a SketchUp version ready. I'll keep you posted.

As a side note, it would be helpful if you all would post comments directly to the blog. It'll be much easier for me to follow up if they're in one location. Thanks!

The beginnings of walls

Today, we drove by and saw no activity on the lot. Thinking "uh oh", we got out of the car to be certain and--to our joyful surprise--saw that the forms have been filled with beautiful, smooth concrete! The extremely warm Kansas summer is surely helping to cure the concrete quickly. What you're seeing in the photos below is before and after images of the forms and the channels that occur. The one to the left is the "after" with the concrete filled in, while below is the empty "before" image. At the bottom is the back end of our house with the forthcoming "guest suite" at the far end.

Things have been quiet with the GC since last weekend. He's out of town this week, so it's nice to see that substantial progress is still being made in his absence.

For the interior planning, I've been spending a lot of time trying to think through the layout of the kitchen and bathrooms, focusing mostly on the kitchen currently b/c I have to order materials soon. As I've mentioned before, we'd like to go quite Modern in the styling of the kitchen, but right now I'm working on determining a layout that will make it highly functional. As it is on the floorplan, we're showing a wall with a bank of
cabinetry and the stove/hood; an island with a sink and dishwasher; a second island with towers to the ceiling that serve as a break/focal point/connector to the great room; and finally a second, but unconnected, wall to the left of the "galley" section. with the refrigerator, pantry door, and small bank of cabinets. We also have a breakfast nook to the right and by the rear windows. My thinking now is that we should probably eliminate the second island and make the one larger. While it may be nice to have a visual break b/n the two rooms, I'm unsure that it'll really be used enough to warrant the cost and space. I think I'd rather focus on making the rest work for us.

Do any of you have thoughts on this configuration? Any kitchen nightmares or successes you want to share? If so, I'm listening...

Too close for comfort?

I had a nearly sleepless night last Thursday as I worried that the angle of the house wasn't what we had wanted. We're on a big lot, but in my half-awake state, I felt certain that the house was too close to the road and to our neighbor's house. In my mind, it was only about 7 feet away from our neighbor. Coming from a house in the middle of four acres, that was much too close for my comfort. I kept waking up worried that we'd have to redo the excavation and repour the footings, but once I finally made it to the site again two days later (no work was done over the weekend, so I didn't get there as quickly as I should've) and reviewed the engineer's drawings, I realized that it had indeed been placed where we asked. The problem and my reason for overreacting was that we really should've asked again to see the final placement, but let that ball drop in our eagerness to finally get underway. Huge lesson learned there. The position on the lot is not as close to road and neighbor as I feared, but still, we would've preferred that it be rotated about 10 degrees more to the north. However, I'm certain that it will work out well where placed.

Pouring the footings

Exciting progress over the last two days. Yesterday, the footings for the foundation were placed and today the concrete was poured and rebar installed.

When we just had the big hole in the ground, the house looked tremendously large. Now that we're seeing how the rooms lay out in real space, it doesn't seem so dauntingly large.

We've been going by the site so much that we've already made friends with our neighbors, whose house you can see in the bottom photo. It will be wonderful to be in a neighborhood with lots of other families. This will be a first for us.

We intended to make it out to Goddard today to look at cabinetry, but ended up bowling instead. I came in last. I guess it's a little too unsporting for me to use the bumpers, too.

Our GC says that, for now, we're the only house he has going. That's good news for us, since it means that our schedule should be pretty tight. He is thinking about putting in a spec house across the street from us soon, but has no plans until the framing is up and we're well under way.

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Given that we've moved to a large town in comparison to the town we're coming from, it's been surprising to have a few of those small town connections pop up. Our aforementioned neighbors are friends with our builder, and today we learned that our new doctor is a neighbor to Patrick's boss. Sometimes Manchester, VT, felt a little too small, but those connections--once you made them--helped you feel a part of the place. It's nice to feel that happening here. It's starting to feel like home.

The Big Dig

No noticeable activity on site today, just a giant hole in the earth from yesterday's dig. The kids had fun playing in the pit and especially enjoyed the tunnels that run through where the garage eventually will be located.

Our contractor will soon get us a list of area suppliers so that we can start choosing garage doors, exterior brick, stone, windows, entry door, etc. We've already purchased laundry and kitchen appliances and need to get the specs to the contractor so that he can plan the spaces appropriately. We've begun looking at cabinetry for the kitchen and selected plumbing fixtures for the whole house, but have yet to purchase them. We're eager to begin making some of the harder decisions because we've been working on the plans for two months yet just broken ground. The last thing I want is to slow down the building because we're not timely in making selections.

I showed our GC an image of a kitchen that we admire yesterday. He said that he did a similar one recently and is working on getting us a look. It's very modern with clean lines and broad expanses. We're thinking about black stained cabinetry with either stainless steel or near-white countertops on part and butcher block on the other. The kitchen will have three long sections and one short. There will be an island in the middle and an island/peninsula with towers on the side that visually separates the kitchen from the great room. My goal is to have the kitchen meet our personal design aesthetic, be highly functioning, and warm and welcoming, all the while working within the parameters of the house's traditional style. Too much to ask? I don't think so.

Evening update: Woo hoo! The rebar and first 2x4s have arrived! GC says that tomorrow they will set the forms and try to pour the foundation.

Breaking ground

Today we broke ground on our new house in Kansas. It's something that I've always wanted to do, but never quite like this. I always imagined that (when the kids were grown and gone), my husband Patrick and I would design our dream house and fill it with all new non-scratched and non-stained furniture. Something very Modern, very simple, very not-what-this-will-be. What we're building is a two-level Ranch in a developer planned community. I also thought we'd be hiring an architect, but that will have to wait. But, we have a good builder and I'm optimistic that we can create something wonderful from nothing. Overall, I'm happy that we're doing this.

First, some background. After living in the gorgeous Green Mountains of Vermont for four and a half years, Patrick was offered a terrific job in Kansas. Not exactly a place that was high on my list of places to live, but still, we're always up for adventure. He moved out and I stayed behind to sell the house. Months passed and finally that offer came. Great! Now came the hard work of finding a new home. I flew out in early May for a week of househunting, but only found one house that I loved. Patrick hated it. We spent our time in our last two homes fixing them up and then promptly sold them once all the work was done. It was exhausting and hard to walk away from them once we put so much of ourselves into them. Plus, we gave up many, many weekends to fixing up houses when we could've been having fun. I promised him that we wouldn't do that again. So, of course, the only home that I fell in love with was built in 1977 and needed a good bit of updating. There were other minor issues, but that was the killer. I like the character of old homes, plus it had four bedrooms on one level, and a pool in the back! Oh, well.

As the week was nearing its end, we realized that we weren't going to find the house we wanted in the school district we wanted for the price we wanted. We quickly (probably too quickly) decided that building a new home was a good option and met with a local builder. In about two days we hammered out all of the details of the house that we possibly could and came up with a price that we could live with--if you could forget that the basement wouldn't be finished. Then, I found a mold clause in the contract that stated that the builder wouldn't be responsible for mold, even if they were at fault. And that was the end of that.

Our experience with that homebuilder left us a little gun shy, but we decided to test the waters again with a builder that Patrick's boss recommended. At this point in time, I was back in VT waiting for closing and packing up the house. We had a few phone calls and lots of emails back and forth, but I didn't meet our builder until I actually arrived in Wichita the weekend of July 4th. Since that time, we've tweaked the exterior design, but otherwise things have been very smooth.

We've started purchasing appliances for the house and, finally, today we broke ground. We should have concrete poured for the foundation this week and maybe even basement walls by the end of the week. Our builder tells us that we'll be in by Christmas. Here's hoping.