Can't forget the landscaping

Our wild wooded back yard goes on forever.

I had a meeting on Friday with Cara and a landscaping group who has been given the chance to propose some simple landscaping.  We have an entire acre of land, but fortunately most of it is the wooded back yard -- which abuts a nature preserve so it's really quite private, given we're in the middle of the city.

Overview of the proposed landscaping + footprint of the house

The guys from Avant Garden (see link on the side viewer) are pretty reasonable, and their proposal costs the same as what we spent on our 5000 sqft lot in Houston!  

These trees would replace the ailing trees that currently exist in the back.  We're actually going to try to push for fruit trees.  Perhaps a persimmon tree.

Tree cover is a big deal in Atlanta.  One has to attain a permit to cut down any tree with a trunk the diameter of which is >12 inches.  And the city charges a fee for every tree.  There's a complex calculation, however, which gives consideration to how many trees currently exist on the lot.  There's a tree diameter (inches)/acreage ratio that one has to maintain somehow.  Again, Grizzly Adams knows more about this than I do.

This is only the beginning of the process!

I think we may do Ginko trees out front.  They are Nina's favorite tree.  Any other suggestions?

Finding value in rubble

This old house.  I can't wait to post the video of the demolition!

Cara had an interesting idea after we found this property.  "We can see if a non-profit group I know would want to come in and salvage some of the stuff from this house."

A couple of months later, Life Cycle Building Center came in -- just before Thanksgiving -- and with a crew of volunteers they broke down the house.  Essentially they grabbed the kitchen appliances and cabinetry (from IKEA) as well as some doors and storage systems.  They keep stuff out of the landfills and sell the materials at a pretty low price.  So it's essentially a way to reduce the waste involved in tearing down homes to build new ones.

At any rate, you can see all of the pictures of the teardown via this flickr link.  They claim to have saved >1000lbs of material from the landfill that weekend.  We got a small tax write-off for the donation of materials, and everyone wins.

For now, just plans....

Today we met with Cara, our architect, to plan our kitchen.

We are actually tweaking the submitted plan for our home.

Officially, a full set of plans was already submitted to the city just after Thanksgiving for approval.  Apparently it should take 6-8 weeks for the city to review and (hopefully) approve the plans.  Mainly, the city cares about what happens to the plot, and how our home would interact with the neighbors, etc.

I certainly never imagined that a city employs an arborist -- and certainly never imagined that the arborist would have a say in plans for home building.  (I imagine someone like Grizzly Adams would drift towards that type of job in today's economy.)  Fortunately, the arborist assigned our project just approved our plans today.  So check that box!

Not much demand for bearded bear-guys in today's workforce.

Here are two fly-throughs that you can look at to see how the house might look.

Overview of the house in 3-D

In-depth view of the revised kitchen

You may notice that there are two versions of the kitchen.  One has 2 islands, one has a single larger island.

This is the original (well, 3rd) conception of the kitchen area, with a main island for cooking (that's a cooktop there on the main island) and a second island for barstools, eating, and also food preparation (although one would be further from the sink, while closer to the wall-mounted oven and microwave).

In this version, there's a single larger island with a cooktop.   Barstools would be on the other  side (the 3D flythrough above gives a sense of how this would lay out in real life).

We spent some time at a kitchen cabinet showroom today too.  Aside from the fact that it was 2 hours we'll never get back, we did learn that you can pretty much divest your life's savings into a kitchen if you aren't careful.  The cabinets we'll probably go with are nice, well-built, but beyond that we are just happy that someone else cares so much about that sort of thing.

Making something from something much older and decrepit

I decided that while we go through the process of building our house, I would post our experiences.  I will try to share all of the pain/suffering/joy that the process has bestowed on us.

This may as much serve as a corrective tool for us (me) when we want to look back a few years from now.  If we are ever tempted to say "Building a house?  It wasn't too bad.  It was pretty easy!" we can look back at this blog and be reminded of the real story.  Humans, and especially optimistic ones, tend to forget negative experiences.  

Anyway, I digress.  Way back in the fall of 2011, before we even moved to Atlanta, we had the idea that we would build our own modern house.  This was based on our love of our previous home in Houston as much as it was based on the lack of modern architecture in Atlanta.  So I did some research online and found that there was a modern architecture tour in Atlanta in June -- just 3 weeks before our 2nd boy was to be born.  Hooray!

Based on our impressions on that tour, we interviewed 5 residential, self-professed "modern" architects.  Choosing among them wasn't actually that hard.  There were two we really liked, and Cara and Jose of TaC really seemed to get what we were striving for.  (In truth, we had no idea what we really wanted.)

Cara and Jose of TaC Studios

Finding a spot to build a house seemed like it would be pretty straightforward.  However, it turns out this was very challenging for a number of reasons.  First, the Atlanta housing market isn't that depressed it turns out.  At least, in town things are pretty pricey, and even tear-downs are fetching good prices -- at least by Houston standards.  Secondly, we began to realize that we had a number of "top" priorities.  Our goals grew to include:  (a) proximity to work (b) good public schools (c) flat lot (d) enough yard space for our boys to safely kick a ball without being run over by city buses and (e) lenient local zoning that would allow for construction of a modern home.  Oh, and (f) cheap enough that after purchasing the property, we would still have a few bucks left over to build said house!

We began the process of searching for a lot in June, and finally found a lot in August.  Writing that out just now, I realize how quick that seems.  But during the process, it felt like...at least twice that long.  And the process of finding land was depressing enough that we definitely questioned the wisdom of going through all of this.  "Why not go out and buy an existing home on a nice street around here somewhere?" we'd say to ourselves at night after searching Zillow and the MLS for a few more hours.1    We rode around with 3 different realtors, and actually had others searching for us as well.  We ultimately put in offers on 8 different properties before we came to our final lot.  Eight is a lot of offers, a lot of signatures and a lot of "this is it" anticipation.  Of course, after bid number three, we wouldn't allow ourselves any optimism and were certain something would fall through.  We'd be outbid, or our bid would be "just an hour" late, or something.  Other times we were the ones killing the deal: a bad elementary school, an awkward home that would be an expensive teardown, but a quirky remodel, and restrictive local zoning all made us reconsider.  Still, 8 bids is a lot of bids and we were fairly close to going with one of the myriad 1930s Victorian renovations that seem to be on the market.  

Finally, one property, which had been on the market all summer but had escaped our (realtors') enthusiasm became more obviously appealing.  Cara and Jose came out and gave their approval, and we closed on the property in September!

A is our property.  Lots of woods behind us.  I don't know what that Chamber of Delights is all about.  Sounds like something from the Nutcracker.

So here's the property, pretty much as it still looks today, three months after our having closed.  Nothing has been torn down yet, and we are still quite a ways from breaking any ground.

Spoiler alert: the nice big oak tree in the front is probably going to be timber in the spring.