Placing the house....

Alese checking the plan.

Last weekend we went to the lot with the latest set of plans.  On that day, the most important plan was the one showing the placement on the lot.  We had the architect, Taylor, move the house to the East from where he had it in a previous plan, and we wanted to be sure we were happy with the revised location.  And it's hard translating the drawing to the actual, without looking at it.

We are pretty well set on the floor plans.   We'll show those when we get the next digital version.  For this adventure Taylor had  printed our plans on 2'x3' paper.

We stopped at Lowes on our way to the Island for a 100' tape measure, stakes, marking paint, and some orange tape.  Then we went to the lot.  The back of the van became the on-site office.  Plans spread out and scale ruler in hand, we tried to figure how to locate Taylor's exact placement of the house.  I won't go into the geometry, and luckily we decided we needed to only be close, not exact. Have you ever tried to use one of the triangular scale rulers?  Ours has 12 different scales, and on earlier plans we'd been using a 1/8 inch = 1 foot scale, the printed 2x3 floor plans use 1/4 inch, but the site plan uses 3/32 = 1 foot.  Needless to say, we had to remeasure a number of times.

Once we got the 4 corners located, we ran orange tape the the length of the North and East side of the proposed location.   Alese, after getting a feel for the position of the house on the lot decided it would be better to position it 5 feet to the West.  We both wanted it moved North 10 feet.  That moved it closer to the middle of the lot side-to-side, and a little further from the street.  But the footprint for the house is about 24 x 50 and the lot is 185' wide and 130' feet deep at the narrow (West) side.

So we put a stake in at the new location, Alese walked around trying to envision her plants, and I painted a line for the location of the driveway.  We had a good idea of where the house will be on the lot.   Of course, Alese then had "locators remorse" and spent a few hours on Monday rethinking the location and trying to see if we were right.  She was thinking she would tell Taylor to put it back at his prior location, or somewhere in between, but in the end decided she would be fine where we positioned it.

Taylor is doing some final work on the plans -- moving a few windows to the perfect locations, and moving the location of the outdoor shower.

Nick (our builder) is now working on preliminary pricing for the house.  That will tell us what we have to give up to be able to afford to build.  We'll also get the digital plans and send those on to the Architectural Approval Committee of the Home Owners Association.  We can't build without their approval.  And being the first house in the development we don't know exactly what to expect.  Expect that my next post will include floor plans.