Rebuilding Our House

You may have noticed we decided to sprinkle some more excitement into life by changing the theme of the website to something a little more hopeful.

But that’s not all. They’re a ways off from being ready to submit to the city, but we’ve started drawing up *actual blueprints* for the house we want to build.

Last fall Laura took a residential design, codes, and standards course at UAS. The students in the course planned out a theoretical house. Laura used our real one. Students drew up theoretical floor and foundation plans. Laura drew hers from our existing foundation. Students had right angles and square dimensions. Laura had our existing foundation, which is anything but plumb in the mathematical sense.

The product of her course left us with a basic design for the house. Since the foundation isn’t a standard rectangle, Laura had to make a number of considerations to come up with a plan that would work. She did and we’ve begun working with Ken Huse, a draftsman who is helping us hammer out the nitty gritty details and produce the official prints.

The design is pretty much the same as before with a few required changes in the floor plan. We’re also hoping to add a dormer to the attic and of course are looking forward to having a properly insulated and efficiently heated home. We won’t have enough money to finish the whole thing, but our HOPE is we can finish enough so it’s habitable by winter.

We’ll be taking two copies of the finished plans to the city for combing through within the next couple weeks. They’ll check all the calculations for load and weight and support and beams and angles and codes and a seemingly endless pile of mumbo jumbo written in a huge book.

Once the plans are approved (2-4 weeks after submission) we’ll be free to put hammer to nail. Which brings us to our next hurdle: lining up all the muscle to get the job done.

We’re still working with an uncooperative budget, so the future is… interesting. But in the midst of what’s been a busy/stressful year, it’s really exciting to see and be a part of *something* productive, even if it is still theoretical at this point.