Parallam

The architects and structural engineer think that we'll need a beam or three in the house to keep the fairy-tale wolves at bay. Steel beams are typically the most expensive beam option (and therefore, probably too pricey for us), so we'll look at a couple of wood options instead. Traditional old-growth timber is not a great choice if we're trying to use materials from sustainable sources, but reclaimed timber may still be an option.

Another option, which I hadn't heard about, was Parallam (and similar structural composite lumber, like Glulam), but I guess that it looks a bit like wheatboard (which I had seen, and liked):


We'd look for a source that doesn't use formaldehyde to hold it all together. If we end up using this as a beam, we might leave it exposed. Has anyone out there seen this application? Does it look good exposed? What works?

Master bath update

We may be ditching the full tub in favor of a shower only. I know, I know...I said I didn't like showers only. But space has become a bigger issue than it was before, and in order to get everything else in there in a way that makes sense, we may be relying on the tub in our second bathroom instead.

Our schedule has morphed a bit as we approach the end of design. We met with Kenner, Matt and Stephanie last week for our penultimate design meeting. Our next meeting isn't until May 7, but in the meantime, the team is finishing design and starting construction documents — blurring the lines between the two phases ought to keep us on schedule for bidding and permitting during June. We'll be firing up the chainsaws for some "brush clearing" on the lot around mid-June, and we're still hoping to start construction somewhere between mid-June and early July.

Cathouse

Last night's meeting was great — we know what our floor plans will be, we have an idea of what the exterior will look like, we're all on the same page for materials, and on and on. (If you know us in real life, just ask to see the exterior elevation sketches next time we run into each other.)

A new and welcome wrinkle for us is the addition of Stephanie Kooyman from Architectural Nexus to help with our interiors. She comes to architecture by way of an interior design background and now works with Kenner and Matt at the firm. We talked last night about generally what we like for interior fixtures and finishes.

Stephanie's caveat is that no, we won't be able to afford everything we like (sad, but old, news to us!), but she can help us find similar things that will still look great in the space. She already has some interesting materials such as cork-infused bamboo and connections with suppliers that will help us understand what makes sense for our budget.

As part of that conversation, we touched on paint preference — light? dark? strong? any that we actually hate?

After a few seconds to think about it, my reponse was, "I'm not really afraid of bright colors. I would even do a bright purple, pink...whatever." Kenner: "Pink?! What is this? A cathouse??"

Kenner gets bonus points for being under 80 and using the word "cathouse." I get negative points for briefly considering a hot pink wall.

Batter up

It's been two weeks since our last meeting with Kenner and Matt, and we are suuuuuuuper excited for this one.

Things that we hope to learn about our house tonight:

• final floorplan (including whether the master bedroom mash-up works)
• exterior treatments (tweeted earlier this week — btw, check out the new feed on the right!)
• window placement

I feel like we've been hearing great things about this house for a while, but tonight is the first date when we finally get to meet in person.

Structural Engineer

Turns out that structural engineering is a pretty important step in the process of designing a home, especially a non-traditional home, since a structural engineer essentially figures out a way for your house to not fall down. I don't really know enough to sound intelligent about it, but basically lots of things want to make your house fall down. There's gravity, live load, dead load, snow load, earthquakes, wind, and fairy tale wolves. After getting recommendations from the architects, the builder and one of my clients, we interviewed several and had them submit proposals. I found the choice to be a bit stressful because I was trying to balance several priorities, budget being a pretty big one, while still feeling confident that they could engineer to everyone's satisfaction what will end up being a pretty unique structure. 

Since our house is not going to be a traditional structure we needed to make sure that the engineer understood this and was prepared to interface with the architects and brainstorm with them to figure out how to make certain of our design elements work. Since steel frames are probably out of our budget, it is important too that they figure a way for us to do this with traditional wood framing. We finally hired our engineers yesterday and they are meeting with the architects today to get going on the process. This is good, because it really was the next step before we could go much further with the design. We need to know where and how big the shear walls need to be before we can make meaningful decisions on the windows and door openings. Our hope is that after their meeting today, the architects will have a good enough idea to have those things ready for us to look at at our meeting on Thursday.

So, after architects and engineers have worked together a bit and we generally know what is possible and settle on our final design, the engineer will take the plans created thus far and figure out how to support the structure so that none of the above referenced forces can make the house fall down.

Shaking my faith

I learned a little while ago that photos such as these...



...are about as real as these:


Why can't we have a little more of this?

Here's the slc202 promise: we will never touch up our house photos! (You'll be lucky if we even clean first.)

We didn't have an architect meeting this week, so we'll have to wait until next week to get another update. In the meantime, enjoy your spring — we're spending ours thinking of a yard.

The master bedroom mash-up

After looking at the different bedroom options, we realized that a great solution was probably going to take a bit of mix-n-match. We're not totally sure that what we want to do will actually work, but the design process has involved some dreaming for us, so why not a bit more?

This is what we'd like the master bedroom to look like — we pulled elements from three different sketches to get to this option.


If you can't read our scribbles, then the bedroom portion is from Option 3, our preferred toilet-linen combination is from Option 2, and the rest of the bathroom is from Option 4. We're not quite sure that our preferred drawing will work, hence the (2), with a slightly smaller linen closet and re-oriented toilet room.

Also, kudos to Lisa for her two-sided linen closet idea. We will henceforth call it "The Lisa." (Other naming opportunities still abound.)