Plans vs. Budget

Bryan and I have been discussing the layout of the house and the modifications we will have to make to our ideas to make this house affordable for us. I have had to give up on my desire to have both the master bedroom and the guest room on the main floor; that would make the upper floor quite a bit larger than the lower floor. One thing that will have a great impact on our cost is minimizing our roofline (the skin of the house is where the largest expense is), so to minimize our skin we need to make the two floors as similar in size as possible. After some thought, I've come to realize that having the master on the bottom (with the boys' bedrooms and the game room) and the guest room on the top (with the great room, kitchen, office and entries) would have benefits of its own -- if we do it right. For now, we could have our bedroom near the kids' rooms, which would be better for Cole for a couple more years, and when my parents visit they could stay on the main floor and not have to deal with stairs. (To be clear, they can manage stairs, but I don't want them to have to manage stairs.) Then, when Bryan and I are older and less able to get around well (much, much older, of course), we can move upstairs to the guest room and live comfortably on just that one level. However, to make that work we would need the guest room to be essentially a second master -- which makes it bigger. Which adds more square footage.

Last Thursday we met with Sid, Rick and Sam at the Hammer and Hand offices to discuss our plans. We hammered out (ha ha!) some of the basic concepts for our plans: Extra storage space built into the hill (north) side of the downstairs area (we need as much storage as possible, and hate to waste that potential space), bedroom sizes, adding an upstairs powder room, adding a pantry with room for a second fridge (we have hungry, growing boys and athletes in the house!), and the need for a real, actual office, as opposed to a nook. In addition, Bryan had sketched out some thoughts on an entry that's shared by both the front door and the garage access -- a way to access the mudroom from both entries, to minimize our piles of shoes and coats -- and we discussed that at length. All in all, the things we discussed will probably add at least an extra 100 square feet or so to the house, which of course will increase the cost. And this is on top of the fact that, as the plans stood last week, we were at our maximum budget and hadn't included paving the driveway or purchasing the appliances.

As we discussed the plans, we repeatedly mentioned the furniture that some of these rooms will be built around. We spent ten years in Asia, and during our six years in Indonesia we acquired quite a few large, teak pieces of furniture, as well as a few very cool pieces of hanging art. One piece of furniture is a huge desk, which is part of the reason we need an actual office. (But also because: 1. Bryan needs a place for his stuff, too, and therefore the office needs room for two people; and 2. I need to be able to close a door to keep the "Moooommmm!!" at bay while I balance the bank statements and buy Christmas presents online.) Although Sid and Sam have been to our current home and seen this furniture, Rick has not. We realized that it would be helpful if Rick could actually see all this furniture to cement the style and scope of our belongings in his mind. Since he wasn't able to make it out to our home this past week, I sent him photos of many of our furniture pieces (as well as some hanging artwork, for reference) with dimensions. Rick says he hopes they'll look like "little toys" on the plans. I can't wait to see it!

Partway through the meeting Skylar joined us to discuss the computer models of the solar options on our site. His job has been to run our site through his computer modeling and see what our solar gain is as the site stands currently and with various amounts of tree removal. Not surprisingly, our best bet for a low-energy, passive-style, southern-exposure, bright (which I need) house is to remove quite a few trees directly south of our build site. We understand this and even agree with it, but we're also battling our inner tree-hugging tendencies. We hate to take out trees! Thankfully, there are plenty of trees on our land and there's no need for all-out clearing -- but still we struggle with it.

Things are definitely coming together, and I'm getting more and more excited about our potential house. I'm relieved that our furniture and other art will be considered in the plans -- I want to make sure that we have good placement for at least the major items. Of course, the huge consideration now is the budget: We were pretty much over budget at the beginning of the last meeting, and we only added expense at that time. We did agree that we could take space from the really big great room and use that for the office and pantry, because although we want space for the extended family in the great room, we also don't want it to feel cavernous when there are only the four of us. (And, realistically, when the whole family is at our house, chances are good that the kids will be mostly downstairs anyway.) One of my jobs before our next meeting on Friday is to go over the budget again and figure out what is really possible. Naturally, when we returned home from our meeting last week and I looked at my budget notes I couldn't remember what I was doing, so I'll be re-crunching the numbers from the beginning. A call to our lender may be in order ...

Our next meeting is set for Friday the 16th, and I can't wait to see the plans. Of course, my very realistic fear is that our budget won't mesh with new plans -- I just hope the guys have some great ideas to make it work!