How about that, another update to the site! Well, no big deal really. Our trusses were dropped off on Friday and we put up our first 20 foot wall. A new progress photo has beed added to show the wall and the finished chimney.

I guess I have been very bad about updating this web site. Sorry... To make up for it, here are a few photos of the house as it has been built up. More recent photos are updated in Sony's Imagestation picture album which you can find here (registration required).

Well, it is time to get things back on track. Hopefully rain and schedules will cooperate a little more than that past month.

Trying to line up some heavy machinery to clear the lot.

Time to get rolling on building the house! We have a building permit (#88624) and will getting the site cleared over the next few weeks. In addition, we have started the process of getting a temporary power pole from Dominion / Virginia Power.

Just a quick update. I was playing with the site plans and made a quick little 3D model of the land and where the basement may go.

Here is a scan of the entire plan if you would like to look at it. (720KB)

The site plan was delivered today. The plans are being tweeked and plumbing fixtures are being picked out. More later.

Moving forward... That's what we are doing. The house design is coming along pretty well. We have some good elevation drawings and are getting very specific with each wall. On March 2nd, we will be heading back out to the land to find a place to put the house. At that time, the surveyor will create a new drawing with house location and drain fields. That will be sent to the county for approval and they will place the well. While that is going on James O. McGhee and team will start to do some more detailed drawings and start to find builders with opennings this year to build the house. He has said that some builders are turning away a year's worth of work! Below are a few views of the drawings. I have also put together a PDF (1.7 MB) of the drawings with a few notes using the PDF comments feature. You can double click the highlighted areas to see the comments.

We have been to see the architect three times now and have a very nice schematic design. We will be thinking about the plans over the holidays. After our vacation in mid January, we should have some more formal plans and an idea of cost.

No real updates, just wanted to let you know that we are still working on the plans. Teresa has come up with at least 100 versions of the house plans. Looking at the plans below, we decide we needed at least 3 bedrooms upstairs. We also want to have an office and media room down stairs with the huge great room. The plans below would require lots of hallways to get to the bedrooms. So we are starting from scratch. We will be back later with more details.

It has been a while since the last update. We have just about finalized the plans and will be getting some price quotes over the next few weeks. Below are a few images taken with the software we have been using to design things. This is not an exact representation of what we want. Things like window type, flooring colors, railing design, roof overhang, will be changed, but for now, this should give a good idea of where we are heading. We have decided building the entire house is the way to go. Building the garage first and living there would require a second stair case and room for the heating/AC, hot water, etc. on the same floor of the living space (and taking up space). Building the entire house with basement will allow for a bit less square footage and move the mechanical stuff to the basement.

Time for another update. While eating dinner a few weeks ago, we thought we would work on the second floor, master bedroom. Just some ideas to put on paper (a paper towel this time). The bottom of the picture is the back of the house, over top the dining room. The purple color would be a deck. The two doors to the right are inside the house, and open to the curved balcony, looking to the first floor and the great room. The left side is LOTS of room for shoes (aka a closet). The bath has windows that look out the back, for morning sun hitting the trees. The front of the house (the side that faces toward the road) is south, so we are trying to keep the windows to a minimum in the back, facing north. It is rather hard though, with such a nice view of trees and steep hills.

Also, we are going to try out a bit of 3D computer graphics. It was mainly an excuse to buy Lightwave at an incredible price the beginning of the year (Yeah, I'll build the house in 3D, then we can walk through it, change the walls around, add the land topology, etc.) Well, I have not had a chance to sit down and really work at it for a day or two to get what I want. I did get some type of drawing done with some kind of dimensions and put it into 3D. Just basic shapes to start with. We'll get real fancy later. Below is the quick drawing we did on graph paper. Bottom is the front of the house. Left is the great room. Top is the dining room with a fireplace that separates it from the great room at the corner. The middle would be the kitchen and the right side is the office. Bottom right is the media room. There needs to be a half bath there somewhere. The area is very open, and will require lots of post and beams. We were also thinking of a mix steel / wood look (like the logo at the top of the page, which is an actual scan of a piece of red oak stained with Minwax - Cherry #235). Still not sure where a garage will go.

And below is the first 3D render. Now everyone say ooooh, ahhhh.

While finishing dinner at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, we put together some pretty good plans for the house. Trying to get lots of windows facing south (which is towards the road) but also facing the best view (which is away from the road) does not sound physically possible, but we are going to try and do it. After leaving the restaurant, we realized we forgot the office! This is a great start though. (Yes it is written on a napkin.)