Week 3

We've chosen a house design which we like (see below). It's basically a one level house with a big bonus room above the garage. It has a 70' x 70' footprint. It'll be about 2800 sqft of living space. The thing we like most is the open floor plan, it allows easy access between the kitchen, family room and patio area. The design is called Southern Country, but some call it a bungalow.

The house has a swimming pool, which the primary living space centers around - the master suite, family room, kitchen and dining room. We'll enclose the pool under the roof so that it can be used year round, but will use accordian style glass doors that open to the outside so that you can make it sort of an in-door/out-door pool.

We intend to orient the house so that the rear has the mountain views. This results in a north-east exposure. It will get some morning sun, but by noon in the summer the pool area will be in the shade - and thus cooler.

We're hiring an architect to do the design. You can't just buy stock plans - like I show below - and build it. Each state and county has its own building requirements. One thing especially important around here is that it be engineered to somewhat handle earthquake motion. So, our architect will use the stock plans as a starting point of what we want, take our ideas and design and engineer a house that is totally unique for us and meets Washington state code.

Another important aspect of the property is the pole barn we'll be building. We've selected the Great Western design by Uncle Howard's Barns - see below. It's a 32' x 48' footprint. It has an upper loft which we will turn into a 1600 sqft living space someday - our son Tom has shown an interest in living there. The lower area is a large workshop area for me and Tom to work on cars and build an airplane in (the airplane build will be another blog someday :-) ). The back section of the lower level is where Bev will have her arts and crafts studio. The barn will be oriented so that the loft - which has a terrace on one end - has the mountain views like the rear of the house.

You can learn about the barn here.

Last weekend I downloaded a great CAD program called progeCAD Pro - it's derived from the famous IntelliCAD application. It appears to be fully AutoCAD 2008 compatible and from what I've seen so far it is. It even uses the ACAD menus. As a former AutoCAD user (R14) back in the mid-90's, I found the app completely familiar. It only took me about 4 hours of playing around to be back up to speed. It's not free - it costs $350, which is less than half the price of AutoCAD LT!

I intend to do all the design work - excavation plan, site plan, building design, engineering design, etc - in an ACAD dwg file. I've already started - I went to the county's iMap site (as I discussed last week) and copied the aerial image of my property then inserted it into the dwg file. I carefully scaled it so that it's easy to see the correct relationships between the house, barn and adjacent properties. See the ACAD plot below, it shows the Home Site and Driveway in black; the Excavation Area in red. The cyan arrow shows the direction to Mt. Si.

Here's a PDF that shows some more information about the property and house.