The comeback.

Welp, it wouldn’t be a Real Blog if we didn’t have at least one post that started with something like, “Wow, it’s been a while since we made any updates on here!,” so I guess we can consider ourselves a Real Blog now, and you can consider this the first of what are sure to be many “Wow, it’s been a while since we made any updates on here!” posts. Did we forget how to sign into Squarespace? Sure did! 

Anyway, while the blog has been quiet, things have been happening. There are lots of moving pieces to this: lots of consultants to find and wrangle, lots of work to be done and lots of timelines to try and match up, lots of refinements to the design based on feedback from those consultants, lots of new constraints to think about with every set of engineering eyes that looks at the lot. But we think we’re nearing the end of the road in terms of getting our permit package together to submit to the county (fingers crossed).

So, some updates!

First, the house! MAN, it looks good. Every time we look at drawings or renders, we get so psyched. Can we just become cartoon people and move into it in 2 dimensions until it’s built? Isn’t this all a simulation anyway? 

I believe in the 90s we called this a “great room” and WOW it really is a great room, isn’t it? That hearth is double-sided, so it’s a fireplace both inside and out, and that big 14-foot glass door to the left of it slides all the way into the wall. It’s also got an identical twin directly opposite it on the other wall, so we can open the whole house up and have giant medieval banquets with a 40-foot dining table if we feel so inclined.

I LOVE YOU.

The entryway, with public space off to the immediate left, the bedroom wing off to the right, and a door straight ahead out to the back deck. These interior walls are black to echo the exterior structures, and will be done in a real textural Venetian plaster.

If you are familiar with the bathroom situation in our current home this image of the primary bathroom will make you as giddy as it does us.

The drawings went to a structural engineering firm for a month-ish and we made some tweaks based on their input and some initial reviews with builders. Fortunately the general shape and structure are going to be good to go. We’ll get to have our beautiful high ceilings and that beautiful big open living/dining/kitchen space and our big huge 14-foot storefront doors that open up and basically make the inside the outside. We keep measuring rooms in our current house and then just giggling at the idea of how much MORE OPEN SPACE we are going to have in the New World.

Snippet of the structural drawings. Looks like a comic book! Reads less entertaining.

The hearth has really become a neat feature, with a fireplace inside AND outside. To accommodate the chimney and insulation for that, we needed to switch from wood-burning to gas. Originally our plan had been to have everything in the house running on electricity, since there’s no municipal gas line for us to hook up to. But the fireplace design really mandated gas for a simplified (and, uh, remotely affordable) construction, so we will have propane. On the downside, that means we have to figure out a clever landscaping technique to disguise Ye Olde AmeriGas tank. On the upside, we’ll have cozy fires at the flip of a switch AND we’ll have the gas in place to go ahead and do a gas range in the kitchen. I know it’s not the most environmentally friendly choice, but it is a little easier to get excited about cooking with, and knowing that power outages on the island are fairly common, it’s nice to know that if it takes a while for service to be restored we’ll still be able to have some heat and to cook some food. 

What else? We’ve made some material choices: things like birch tongue and groove for the ceiling, a really amazing triangular terra cotta tile for the hearth and the powder room, a cool aged brass for metal details, a nice light terrazzo-y quartz for countertops. We’re exploring pricing to help us decide between either a pine tar finish on the exterior cladding or sho sugi ban. We love the latter; it’s a centuries-old Japanese technique that involves charring the wood, which not only gives it a really lovely dark color and organic texture, it also makes it naturally weather-, fire-, and pest-resistant. The window package has been put together, and our design team is reaching out to lighting vendors to refine the lighting plan. It’s lots of moving pieces, but it’s getting so close! I can definitely imagine what it feels like to be inside and it’s good.

Ok there are also less aesthetically exciting but no less important elements in the works. Our original septic designer, uh, disappeared. It was a real bummer, because he was recommended by folks on the island and we felt like we had a good rapport-- not to mention the fact that at the time of feasibility (before we bought the lot) we paid him what was supposed to be a deposit toward a full design package. After a few months of unreturned phone calls we decided to cut our losses-- he’d already cost us two months, and the septic designs are required as part of the permit package for the county-- and we found another outfit. They were DELIGHTFULLY responsive from the get-go and were able to get us on the schedule ASAP. 

In addition to being responsive, they’re also very engineering-minded, which has meant that they are excellent at spotting potential problems but have needed a little creative needling when it comes to finding solutions. The first response we got when we shared our survey and site plan was, “This isn’t possible.” But there are lots of nuances in the code, and there’s some flexibility in our design (The driveway can move! We could go down a bedroom! We can lower the grade of the lot near the drainage ditch!) so after some back and forth we went from despair to cautious optimism that they could fit the two drainage fields and the tanks where they need to go, inside of our (admittedly constrained) site. More to come on the “creative needling when it comes to finding solutions” in the next installment of this saga.

One additional thing that we need to design and include is a fire sprinkler system with a tank, since there’s not municipal water to hook into and the well is a shared community resource with limited pump capacity. The code requirements are actually unclear here; apparently sometimes you need the full system design included when you initially submit for permit, sometimes you need to get the permit and THEN design the sprinkler system. If anyone knows what determines which path you follow, we’re all ears, but we’re also crossing our fingers that we can hire someone to do that design post-permitting, once we’re under contract, so that the expense can come out of our construction loan and not out of our pre-lended pockets. This all adds up! And obviously it’s all good and necessary work and we want as much to be happening as soon as possible, but we don’t even have a builder under contract yet. We don’t even have bids! Until those things happen, we can’t apply for our loan, so there are just pieces that have to be paid for upfront. Not the least of which is the permitting fees themselves… yikes. 

Along with the septic design, we need a stormwater drainage plan in place when we apply for permits. Fortunately we’ve got a good friend who knows how to do this (whaddup Andrew!) so we didn’t have to spend too much time hunting for someone smart that we trust.

 
Anyway, I originally started this blog post in October, a time of cautious optimism, and it’s now January. Since the first draft we’ve gotten Omicron and lost Betty White. And the septic design has been a WILD RIDE, y’all. It has literally turned our plans upside down.

UPSIDE DOWN. 

CLIFFHANGER, TUNE IN NEXT TIME, TO BE CONTINUED….