Jumping back into the design phase

During the week of Jan 11, things started to really get rolling again. At this point we were armed with the Sams' bid on our current plans, and also I had called a lot of references who had built with Kevin Vegar before. It was very difficult to get anyone to say anything negative about their house. All of them were overjoyed with the work that had been done. Many of them gushed about Kevin and his friendliness and work ethic. I understand that the reference list they provide is going to be be people whose experience went smooth, but everyone was so extremely positive that it was a big plus in our minds.

On Monday the 11th we met with Mark and Jamie again to go over some questions that we had, but more importantly to have them show us a couple other houses that Kevin Vegar had built. Much like the Sams' home, these homes looked wonderful. The attention to detail was really good. I'm no house building expert, so I figure when I look at a house the things I'm going to look at is if the detail work is done well. Trim, paint, tile, etc. These homes looked great.

One of the homes had a great room modified somewhat from what we were planning. Instead of vaulting all the way across the living/kitchen/dining it just vaulted in the living section. It looked great. Plus it had the added benefit of much smaller (and cheaper) beams.

Kevin met us at one of the homes and we all went over to the local Caribou to chat. Here I droned on endlessly with a typed-up series of questions ranging from "nearly trivial" to "irrelevant right now". But hey, that's how my brain works.

We agreed the next step would be to meet with a designer (Heather Hiner) that they work with a lot. Mark knew he would need better plans drawn up anyway (even if we didn't change anything) plus this would give us a chance to perhaps change some things in the design to lower the cost. In fact, if we end up building with them, they will eat the costs of the re-design work. That sounded like a good deal to us!

We met with Heather and the Sams on Fri January 15. It was sort of a frantic discussion as we tried to jam all of our ideas at Heather, while at the same time she had a lot to say too about the design. We discussed some great ideas. For example, she knew right away that if we turned the garage so that all of the foundation angles were at 90 degrees, that would be a big savings. Christina and I both said "OK!". So after what at times seemed like a "who can get a word in edgewise" match, Heather said she would get to work on her revision late the following week.

Soooooo....

Late on Sunday the 31st, Heather emailed us her plans (below). At first I was really discouraged as there were some key things missing/wrong -- mostly because we didn't really spend the amount of time needed to cover everything.

But...the more I looked at the plans the more I liked them. There definitely needed to be some changes. Here is what she sent us, with just a few comments. She did a GREAT job of reducing the size of the house (cut about 400 square feet) while leaving us with essentially the same room sizes and functions.

Full Main Level:
Note the change in the garage angle (big foundation and truss savings), the vault only in the living space, and the return of the closet foyer! There are some kitchen space/arrangement issues that we will need to fix however.

Main Level (living space only):

Lower Level:
clearly some things to change here (she doesn't realize at this point the crazy big AV/Media wall I need!)

At this point, we (and by "we" I mean "Pat") went into a frenzied pouring over of the plans,nitpicking every little thing we wanted changed, and re-drawing most of the lower level...but that is a story for another post...