Designing our forever home...

So, last we left off we had closed on our lot. Just a few weeks before that, we had our first meeting with the architect. Apparently, before you can build a house...you have to design one. This isn't a normal, go to a builder, look at their floor plans, pick your favorite and go kind of thing like we did with our current house. It was a...you can have whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want kind of thing. Quite overwhelming - enter Pinterest & Houzz.

If you haven't been on either of those sites, go. Go now. Wait - finish reading this post first, then go. However, carefully reconsider going to those sites if you have important things you were needing to do. Otherwise, proceed. Both of these sites gave us plenty of ideas for how we wanted the house to look decor and "style" wise, but we had never found a floor plan that was "perfect". No worries, I guess that's what we pay architects for? Before we met with Dave for the first time (May 10th), he said to gather ideas for what we like...bring them to our meeting and we'd look at them on his computer and tell him what we liked and what we didn't, etc. So...with 400+ pins and ideas between those 2 sites and only an hour or two to meet with him, we had to cut it down. We took him a powerpoint slideshow and a list of our requirements. Some of which included - required passage way from laundry room/master closet, "hidden" room (you'd never know it was there unless you knew our secret floor plan), sliding barn doors on study, must be able to see TV from kitchen, no formal dining room, 3 bedrooms- 2 upstairs, balcony, master downstairs, media room, study, large patio, etc.

So off Dave went, drawing a floor plan and came back with one June 7th from scratch, out of nowhere. (Keep in mind, we didn't take him a single floor plan we liked). It was mind boggling, this was a house no one had built before...just for us! Ok, well not quite...it was almost there, had pretty much everything we wanted, but we hadn't quite thought through it all. So we got it back and decided we needed to go look at some houses and really walk through them all to get a perception of how big of rooms we wanted and all that fun stuff. We went out looking for new construction homes in the area, lo and behold we find this house being framed in a nearby Lucas subdivision (not the only house we looked through, there were several). But we both kind of walked out of it thinking...this could be perfect if we could just move this, this and this. So...with a little photoshop assistance, we went back to the architect with a better layout in mind. We nixed the idea of a two-story and went with a really wide one-story so it would look better on the space of the lot.

This was the first photoshop attempt at a sketch, using a floor plan to start with.

So, from there is where it all came together. We made a few tweaks bath and forth through e-mail, met with him again in person a couple more times and voila. We ended up with our perfect floor plan. It only took 5 major sketch revisions (moving walls/rooms around) and a few smaller tweaks (appliance/door placements/ceiling treatments)...I think that's pretty good, but who really knows. Reading over it, that sounds a lot easier than it really was. We debated on room dimensions, bathroom locations, door openings...all in all though, it still almost looks like that first terribly photoshopped mess. :)

He also drew the elevation based on a few photos we sent, but nailed it spot on with his first design. So for those who haven't seen it up close yet (other than grainy instagram/facebook photos), here it is! Ta-da. Grainy blogspot photos!

Now, at this point...we can't really change too much so if you think we should have moved something around just umm...don't tell us. Just tell us what you love about it haha. We're pretty pleased with it though and think you'll enjoy visiting us here, someday. Here's what it will look like from the front and the back too.

Next up in the blog series, how do you get a loan for something that's not built yet? And then what do you do? Stay tuned.