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.