Our new house project, August 2000 to December 2005

Pictures

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House Plans, newest at the top (See more comments on plans below)

Try looking at the GIFs first, then if you want a more detailed image, see this about viewing the PDFs and WMFs.
NOTE: I think downloading of the WMF and DXF and 3D Home Architect formats is working correctly in Netscape now, as of 11/26/2000. Please tell me if you have any problems with them.
QUESTION: Does anyone know of Mac software that can view WMFs? If so, please tell me.

Plans after talking with the builder, and with tweaks to lighting plan, February 4, 2001

We met with the builder on 1/31/2001 and thrashed out all the remaining changes except for the home automation/lighting control/security system. The main changes are the living room bay window was deleted and some of the doors got changed back to be more like the original plans. We have done yet more researching of lighting and kitchen appliances. These are some tweaks to the lighting layout, mainly in the kitchen. Here is the current plan for the LiteTouch controlled lights. The outside storage room door and shape are modified to match the poured concrete. (Yes, the lighting circuit labels on the GIFs are 2 different sizes, for mysterious reasons known only to ACDSee.) I am adding PDF format plans, which will display if you have Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™ installed, on a Mac or Windows. (Except Acrobat Writer stubbornly refuses to make a legal PDF of the basement for me. Grrrrrr.)

Plans with mostly final kitchen layout, and with lighting plan, January 14, 2001

Over the last month, we have been busy researching and selecting kitchen cabinets, appliances, and lighting. These plans contain an all-but-final kitchen layout, and a mostly final lighting layout. 3D Home Architect colors the lighting plan in red, and the green labels ('L' and 3 digits) next to the lights are the circuit numbers for our LiteTouch lighting control system, which is being designed and installed by the excellent people at Total Home Control. Circuits with switches (the red dollar signs) and without circuit numbers are not LiteTouch controlled. 3D Home Architect has a rather small set of lighting symbols - the plain circles are recessed ceiling ("can") lights, the stylized double floodlights are just that, the fans are just that, the circles with infinity signs are bathroom fans and fan/lights, the double slashed circles are electrical outlets, and the circles with 4 lines sticking out represent every other kind of light - overhead, sconce, bathroom vanity, undercounter, and exterior. You can mostly guess which is which from their location. The lighting plan detail is a bit too small to read fully in the GIFs, but it's quite readable when you zoom in on the WMFs. Only the LiteTouch controlled outlets are on these plans - the regular outlets are not. And I left the furniture out this time, because it just gets too cluttered with that AND the lighting plan. Oh, and I added dashpicpagedired rectangles showing the locations of the skylights in the breakfast area and sitting room.

'Pictures' of the mostly final kitchen layout, January 14, 2001

Here are my first attempts at showing some 'pictures' from 3D Home Architect. The colors are not very accurate, especially the cabinet color - 3D Home Architect has the worst color picker widget that I have EVER used, and it took over an hour to get it even halfway close. And, no, those are not the real trim and wall colors - those haven't been chosen yet. The protruding box above the stove is the closest I could get to showing an exhaust hood. The empty space in the upper cabinet next to the refrigerator will hold a microwave. The double doors right on the counter at the base of the peninsula are an appliance garage, but done with swinging doors instead of a tambour (vertical sliding) door, because the tambour doors on our current appliance garages don't work well enough. The gray cabinet doors above the appliance garage will be glass, but the appliance garage doors will NOT be glass, despite being gray. The actual cabinet doors will have a raised center panel with a roman arch at the top, and will be in a medium tone maple with a ginger glaze. I expect that the pillars will not actually be as large as shown here, and will not be 12 sided. The odd looking lines on the surface and back of the peninsula are just bugs in 3D Home Architect's rendering logic.

Plans for the kitchen, first pass

  • First Floor, in GIF and WMF and DXF and 3D Home Architect.
  • Enlarged kitchen, in GIF and WMF.

    Plans with elevator OK'ed by builder and elevator installer, December 4, 2000

    I met with our builder and elevator installer on 12/1/2000, and they OK'ed the elevator location, and the alternate elevator door location for the basement. The elevator machinery will be in the attic, along with the heat pump that serves the second floor. The elevator shaft has to be 4 inches larger front to back, so the adjoining closet now protrudes another 4 inches into the sitting room on the second floor. The elevator car size will be 3' x 4'7".
    We met with our home automation installer on 12/2/2000, and he asked that the back part of the utility room be wider, to allow placing equipment on both walls, so I resized the adjacent bedroom closet a bit. The basement bathroom door moved back into the bedroom, as that just seems more convenient for someone living there. I'm not happy with the kitchenette layout in the basement yet, so that will almost certainly change.

    Plans with tweaked doors and alternate basement elevator opening, November 27, 2000

    I tweaked the door to bedroom 3 and the removed the door directly from the basement bedroom to bathroom. We would like to have the alternate elevator opening, but that remains to be seen. Also note the possible larger outdoor storage room, in the alternate elevator plan.

    Plans tweaked to match the blueprints, with outside dimensions, without furniture, November 26, 2000

    No functional changes this time, but I spent hours adjusting my plans to match the blueprints exactly, so the outside dimensions included here are correct to the inch. This including setting the proper wall thicknesses, so you'll see lots of 8 and 12 inch thick walls in the basement now. This produced minor inside dimension reductions in some basement rooms. Note that the storage rooms and the far right wall of the utility room have unfinished foundation walls, which is why they're thinner than elsewhere.
    I was pleasently suprised that I could get 3D Home Architect® Deluxe 3.0 to do all the necessary wall thickness tricks in the basement, though I had to turn off dimension snapping and zoom way in and try it a few different ways to make some of them work. It just will not put 2 parallel walls right next to each other, so I had to combine the 8" foundation walls and 4" stud walls together into 12" walls. I gave up on adding the 2" stud walls the blueprints show around the basement stairwell, though I'm sure I could have made that work eventually.
    It looks too tight between the kitchenette's range and the microwave cart across from it. And I'm not happy with that range being where it is, right on the end. Any ideas?

    Plans after talking with the builder, November 25, 2000

    I figured out a way to squeeze the powder room, coat closet, and door to the garage all in, while keeping the garage door in the foyer. We met with the builder, who is OK with the more central elevator location and the consequent rearranging of bathrooms and closets and such on the first and second floors. He pointed out that there is a steel beam just forward of the elevator in the basement, and the elevator machinery (It'll be a winding drum, by the way) should best go right next to it, in the utility room. That means we need a 2 door elevator, so it will open from the end on the basement and first floors, and to the side on the second floor. Now to talk to the elevator vendor (Area Access) to see if they can get the configuration we want. And the builder says he CAN fit those 5 foot double doors for the Sitting Room in the 5 foor 2 inch hallway.
    After that meeting, I fiddled with door locations and swings some more, then started figuring out how to fit a kitchenette into the Recreation Room now that the elevator has taken out the corner I was expecting to use for that. The kitchenette will just be roughed in for later. The door swings in the basement bathroom and elevator area are still a bit awkward. The Foyer sure is traffic central, with 6 doors, 3 archways and a stairway opening into it.
    I shifted the door to Bedroom #3 back about a foot, so that from the hallway you now tend to see the windows more than the television, which we plan to exile in there.

    Plans with a different elevator placement, version 2, November 24, 2000

    This plan switches the elevator door 90 degrees, to the long side of the elevator, which puts the door in a much better place on the second floor, in a slightly better place in the basement, and in a slightly worse place on the first floor. Also, the Study (Yea!) and coat closet are returned to their original configurations, at the expense of moving the garage door into the dining room. And the large linen closet is back, using some space taken from the laundry room and the Bedroom #2 and #3 closets. The hallway into the Sitting Room still isn't quite wide enough to fit that double door.

    Plans with a different elevator placement, version 1, November 23, 2000

    This plan moves the elevator to the middle of the house, forcing the second floor laundry room and the first floor powder room to get squeezed in elsewhere, which causes further changes to the garage door, coat closet, etc. The elevator gets out of Bedroom #2, and the impact on the Study is reduced. The big linen closet disappears, because we didn't try hard enough yet to wedge it in, Unfortunately, the hallway into the Sitting Room really isn't quite wide enough to fit that double door, and the interaction with the elevator door there is pretty awkward.

    Plans with the original elevator placement, as of November 23, 2000

    I was wrong before about how to read the door and window dimensions. I now understand it correctly - see the first item under Notes. A number of the door sizes have been reduced slightly because of this.
    This plan adds built-in bookcases between Kitchen and Family Room, enlarges the living room bay window slightly, rearranges the powder room fixtures, moves the big linen closet, moves the bathroom door from Bedroom #2 to the hall, enlarges the Sitting Room doors, and adds some furniture placements we're thinking about.

    Plans as of November 12, 2000

    The elevator really hacks up the study. Anyone have a better idea where to put it? (No, not in the midddle of the stairs.) Expanding the existing first-floor outside house walls probably isn't an option, for several reasons, so we can't stick the elevator on the outside.

    The original Plans, before we started changing them

    Notes

    Comments on plans

    Schedule

    Last changed 10/15/2002
    One way to contact us is at: zenroom@toad.net