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.

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.]

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.