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.]

FYI: About Port Aransas, just down the road from our future home at Mustang Island Estates Drive.

This is a description from a condo listed in Groupon.

 

Port Aransas, Texas: Sunny Beach Town with Excellent Fishing

Port Aransas is located at the northern end of Mustang Island, a narrow landmass that stretches for 18 miles off the Gulf Coast in Texas. The area gets frequent sunshine and is lined with sparsely populated public beaches, and it’s become popular with spring-breaking college students. They frequent the beachside clubs and bars, or rent kayaks and surfboards to paddle through the waves.

Fishing is a major pastime here; more than 20 fishing tournaments are based in Port Aransas, and you can catch tuna, kingfish, and marlin out on the water as dolphins jump nearby. When you return to land, bring your catch to one of the island eateries and they’ll often grill it for you on the spot.

There are 1,200 acres of tidal flats and undeveloped shore land to explore at the Port Aransas Nature Preserve, which features three miles of hiking and biking trails and boardwalks. Head up to one of the lookout towers and you can often spot rare and endangered birds such as the Piping Plover, a stout shorebird with an appetite for crustaceans.

Planning is underway.

Last Saturday we sat around a table in our builder's office going over details of the basic layout for the house.  We have a plan, but of course it's not quite the way we think we want things.  In preparation for this meeting we had done a walk-through of a couple of houses with basic floor plan.  One was a little larger and completed, and the other slightly smaller and under construction in the dry-wall stage.  Those 3-dimensional experiences were to help us visualize what was drawn on paper.

We made the greatest number of changes to the second (aka bedroom/office) floor.  As a reminder, the design if for garage and flex space on the first floor,  master bedroom and two offices on the second level, and kitchen, dining, and living space in one big open third level.  Of course second and third levels have porches on the Gulf side.  We added a small balcony off the offices on the bay side (that's the West side facing Corpus Christi Bay).  There'also a small deck off the kitchen -- which would also give us a view toward the Bay.  Then, over the living room porch, so up at the forth level is another deck.  That will give us a 360 view and a full view of the sky as well.

We had expected to go with the builder to his architect this week to get started on more technical plans, but the architect is on vacation this week!  So, that activity will wait until next week.  It may take two rounds with the architect, but that we'll get us to the stage of having plans we will show to the HOA Architectural Committee (aka developer).  Those will also be what we will show to the bank to get a loan.

(We just had a discussion about the difference between decks and porches...  Alese says a porch has a roof and a deck does not.  What do you think?)

Watch here in coming weeks as the action picks up.

A phone tip.

If you've been calling someone and they don't take your call, it may be because they don't have news and don't want to talk with you.  One thing you can do is use *67.  Enter *67 before you dial the number and it turns off caller-id for that call.  It means the person on the other end doesn't know it's you calling.  Of course, if they're like me, they may not be willing to answer a "blind" call.  But if they haven't been answering before, nothing ventured nothing gained.

It worked for us, and we got a status update.

Big Happenings on Mustang Island

On this past Saturday, we met with our builder, Nick Lorette, and rebooted the process begun last year to design and build a house on our lot. It left us both with a very giddy, giggly, OMG feeling all evening. He's even going to directly speak with the neighborhood architectural control committee to clarify some of the funky building restrictions. Given we'll be the first to build in the neighborhood, he's hoping he can push one of the restrictions to be a bit more logical.  We enjoyed showing him our design changes to his initial draft floorplan done sometime around August or September last year. Not only did he agree our ideas of moving rooms around and their layout were just right, but he thrilled us with his ideas of doing multiple bump outs all about to give the shape more charm. What fun this is. Afterward, we kept changing our votes on which part of that meeting was our favorite part of the day.   Once he settles with the ACC, he'll draw and present us with a new floorplan to react to. We'll take it to the existing house the original floorplan is based on, and will spend the afternoon comparing and contrasting the details for a revised, further personalized version. After a conversation and tweaking with Nick about our changes, it'll be ready for the architect, who will likely need to do tweaks before we're ready to roll.  How long will this take? Weeks. Could it be months long? Possibly.  Disclaimer: Ray will undoubtedly respond with a different version of his impressions of the meeting and timeline.

In other news, we enjoyed our weekend ritual of driving into our neighborhood, slowly inching past our lot, and then down the street to the end of the culdesac, a trek we'll one day routinely take up and back to the beach. We didn't get out and walk the property this time, but we did the drive-by version of checking out the lowering of the ponds' water levels, and imagining the changes in store for the hump of sand where our house will be.

Below are a few of the birds we saw on our drive-by. Yes, of course they're out of focus. There was a limit to how well Ray could drive and take photos of less than friendly birds who wanted to keep moving just out of range. There were at least another half-dozen types that simply left the area. The killdeer and egret are obvious, but help me ID the last two on the right: a meadowlark and savannah sparrow?  The latter are small and wren-like, and number in the dozens every time we visit.

This is going to be a full week at work, so I can't predict when I'll show you my new native and adapted plants I'm gathering for our future landscaping. Later.