Every day should be Thursday

We meet with Kenner and Matt each Thursday to work on the house designs, and we spend all week looking forward to it. The meetings are long but exciting for us as we talk about the rooms in the house, how we'll use the different spaces, and how the flow of the building should work. (Again, big thanks to their families for loaning them out after hours.)

Last week was a philosophical discussion about how we used our home that ended with a rough sketch of floor plans. This week they walked us through the 3-d conception of the house.

(Showing the outlines of the rooms — second floor superimposed on the first)

A lot of the discussion was about how the inside of the house affects the outside, how the outside affects the inside, and how to tweak the layouts of the rooms so that everyone is happy (including our budget). We hit on the possible placement of the front door, the layout of the kitchen, the direction of our staircase (and a very cool window idea), the layout of the second floor bedrooms and bathrooms, location of a fireplace vs. location of a TV, use of the south side yard for outdoor living, and a hundred other things.

We think we have the layout firmed up. Here's the first floor...

...and the second floor:

Next week we'll hear about how this layout will fit with city utilities (sewer, water, gas, phone, cable, power) — certain rooms may shift slightly based on the distances to connect to those utilities or the best stacking for things such as plumbing — and we'll start talking about materials for the exterior of the house.