Groundbreaking!

We are very excited to announce that we have officially broken ground on our house project. Hooray! The excavator came this morning and by noon they had cleared away the grass on the property and dug a nice hole in the outline of the house. Here are some pictures and a video for your enjoyment!

This is me with the gas line from the house that was previously on the property.

Here's a video that includes me with the builders. We're talking about our friend Adam who stopped by the lot earlier in the day and sent us a photo -- thanks, Adam!

Un-delay! Un-delay!

Arriba! Larry and Blake worked some kind of black magic over at the city and managed to convince them to grant us the build permit, even though the property line issue will take a few more weeks to finish up. This means we break ground on Monday - less than a week later than we originally thought! Not bad. They'll be getting started while we're at work, so no golden shovel groundbreaking ceremony. But I'll be sure to get some pictures of the carnage.

Delay

We have run into a problem getting a build permit from the City. Apparently there is a rule that you can't build a structure across a property line, even if you own both pieces of property, even if there was already a house built across the line before, even if the pieces are taxed and assessed as one unit, and even if you asked them months ago if there would be any problems building there and they said "no."

Actually, we can build across the line if we pay a bunch of money and file a document that says the obvious boundary is also the actual boundary. Seriously. This will take about three weeks.

Contract signed!

We met with Blake and Larry again today and finally signed our official building contract! So this is it -- no turning back now. I'm so excited because now things are really moving along. The builders will get their permit from the city to begin the build, and then they anticipate we should break ground in about two or three weeks. It's crazy to think that we're actually getting started soon. They estimate that once we start building, it should take about seven months to complete the home. Unless Stuart keeps asking for a bunch of changes to the plan, which he tends to do...
:-)

Final plans (almost)

I'm finally making another post on here. We're edging ever closer to our groundbreaking. The builders have (almost) completed the plans, so I thought I'd share the latest version. This is pretty close to final. Now the builders are sharing the plans with various contractors to get cost estimates and make sure everything still fits in our budget. Soon after that we should be able to start building!

We're both very excited about these plans. I apologize that you'll need to rotate them when you view them -- my pdf viewer would not allow me to save them in the proper orientation.

Exterior view

First floor

Second floor

The before shots

I'm finally getting around to posting photos of the lot. The idea is to document the progress of the construction by taking photos from the same spots each time.

From the NE corner:

From the SE corner (right at 16th and Nebraska):

And from the south side:

Progress

Sarah and I have had a few meetings with Blake and Larry since our last update. Above is a photo of Larry's exterior drawings. You'll be happy to see that we have windows and doors! We have already made changes to the southern windows on the first floor, along with a few smaller changes inside the house. It's not indicated in this drawing, but we plan to install a metal roof. Metal roofs last much longer and work much better with photovoltaic installations. If we harvest rainwater, the water we collect will be much cleaner than that from a composite shingle roof. And if you select the right colors, they look great, too.


This second photo shows the first floor. You can see we've pushed back the west kitchen wall and drawn in a sample kitchen layout. Notice the sweet kitchen island. Jealous? The bathroom and mechanical room have been slightly reconfigured, and will probably undergo even more changes. Also notice the stairs now have a 180-degree turn (before they were just an L shape). The office is still huge (yes!). And finally the garage has even more room for storage, though we might have to cut it back a bit depending on how much it encroaches on the backyard tree's root system.


The final photo shows the upstairs. As you can see, we (by "we" I mean Larry and Blake - they rock) have completely redesigned the layout. To allow symmetrical front windows, the smaller bedrooms were moved to the front of the house. This still gives us a walk-in closet and bathroom in the master suite, an upstairs laundry room, and a full secondary bathroom for kids and guests. Note that one person can be showering while another uses the sinks in the guest bath. Privacy! There will be a few more windows in the final design than shown here: one west-facing window in the master bedroom and a north-facing window in the north kids room. That way the two smaller bedrooms have basically the same features.

Even with all these changes, the layouts continue to maximize the use of the space, with very little wasted on hallways. The plans also show how thick we think the exterior walls will be - 10 inches! We're probably going to use a "double-studded" design, which is basically two walls right up against each other with staggered studs. This prevents thermal bridging (all the empty space is filled with insulation, and there is no direct non-insulation path from one wall to the other), and keeps us nice and toasty in the winter.

Today we got initial early estimates on the construction costs, and everything is within the expected range. The budget includes a solar thermal water heater, a sizable photovoltaic system, hardwood floors, porcelain tiles in the bathrooms, fancy carpet upstairs, custom cabinetry (kitchen and built-ins throughout), and tons of other great stuff. Of course, a lot can still change, but so far everything is going according to plan. Hopefully we'll be breaking ground in two months.

Bilyeu Homes website

I just saw on the McNamee blog that Larry and Blake (finally) have a web presence. I'm hoping this doesn't generate TOO much business for them, since I like all the attention we're getting. But the website looks great, and we're even mentioned on the "Recent Projects" page!

Toured the McNamee House

Wednesday evening Larry and Blake took us out to see one of their current projects, the McNamee House. The house is at a beautiful spot in west Salem, perched on a hill with a great view. The first thing I noticed when I walked in at around 5:30pm was the sunlight bouncing off the ceiling, streaming through a series of 15 small windows up near the ceiling and facing west. It was really quite striking. Although the house is style-wise very different from what we're building, it does share some similarities. Besides being energy efficient, it also has an open great room layout and a kitchen somewhat similar to what we are imagining.

It was great to walk through the house with Larry and Blake and talk about what will translate to our house. I got a better idea of how a lot of the green features will work. Well-insulated walls are much thicker than in most homes, which creates a deep window sill (Abby will love it). It also allows for some beautiful window woodwork. We got to take a look at the solar thermal water heater. It's pretty fancy looking, and I had to resist the urge to turn various levers and knobs.

Blake has me mostly convinced that we should install hardwood floors. Up to this point I wanted laminate floors, since the one we have now is so durable. But it seems that hardwood may be even more durable and has fewer environmental toxicicity problems (offgassing and whatnot).

We will likely be using the same cabinet maker, and the build quality of the cabinets looked great. In fact, the fit and finish throughout the house was great. Even though I never had any doubts about their ability to build a house, it's still reassuring to see quality work.

3D model

Here is a screenshot of our house model in Google SketchUp. If you follow the links in the previous post you can install it and load up our house. Obviously this is an early draft - it's a bit hard to get into the house right now.