Planning the reconstruction

Ray and Alese are planning
the post-construction reconstruction
of their half-acre wildscape

Life has been happily existing for many, many generations in the dunes and prairie that make up the neighborhood now known as Mustang Island Estates.  Now that we're planning our home on our little half-acre, we'll be inviting dozens of destructive people and their equipment to disturb much of the happy ecosystems that have been living there in peace.  

But eventually they'll go, and we'll be left with a beautiful home and an enticing blank slate of beautiful white sand surrounding it.  

Our plan is to help mother nature repopulate it with the very same plants that were scraped away, plus add a few pretty cousins from down the highway.  The primary goal is plant native Texas plants and, in particular, coastal South Texas plants.  And not the pretty things from Hawaii and South America and China and Japan, which don't taste good to butterflies and caterpillars and birds. 

Below are pix of some of the plants I've been taking note of lately that grow along our little neighborhood road. I've already identified some of them, but it's sometimes difficult.  Please let me know which you recognize and can put a name to.  Today's newly found site, the Kika de la Garza Plant Materials Center, looks useful, though I ran out of time before I could get through the Plant Fact Sheets page. Do you know of other resources with photos of coastal plants?

Plants of Mustang Island Estates

First Look: Front elevation

So, this is what we've gotten from the Architect.  It isn't perfect (of course, it's the first draft) but gives you a general idea.  We will have more windows and we may move some of these.  Alese wants a bigger front porch.  This does give you the general idea of the house though.

Another Design Meeting

We meet with Nick (builder) and Taylor (architect) today.  It was a productive meeting as you can see from the photo.  It looks like there were lots of changes, but not really, a lot of the red is clarification. We did make the most change to the master bathroom.  We also were clarifying pop-outs, and adding details. Taylor was also making notes, the next set of drawings, in about a week, will include elevations, so we can see windows and roof-line.  (You can see Taylor's explanation of the roof line on the lower left.)  Corpus Christi building code limits the building height at the mid-roof-line to 35 feet. 

We met for about 2 hours.  It felt good, but I'm now concerned that all the windows Alese wants are going to make the house more expensive than we will be able to afford.  None of the things I want will impact the costs.  :-) [Maybe that will get her to comment.]