1) I'm loathe to admit it, but I think DC may, in fact, be the most cycling-friendly city. I don't mean the car drivers (they're mean, nasty beasts nearly everywhere on the planet) but rather the cycling infrastructure. In addition to a pretty big (and popular!) bike share program, there are a zillion bike lanes and tons of dedicated trails throughout not just "the District" (as the locals call it), but the surrounding Greater DC area. It's impressive...and so I packed my folding bike (my beloved Brompton - there will be a full dedicated blog on that at some point, including love poetry).
2) DC is more fun that I ever used to give it credit for. I can't say I like the weather (sticky is an understatement in the summer), but I do like its left-leaning vibe, the copious amounts of Ethiopian restaurants, a generally young, intelligent and informed populace, and the international flavour it has (despite being pretty whitewashed overall). While I'm not a big fan of the racial divide that clearly exists (all servers, cab drivers, wage-earners are either black, latino, or from MENA - yes, I'm acronymizing you). Other pluses are the cherry blossoms in the spring (though we've got that one covered here in VCBC - my friend Tim's term for Vancouver - which he seems convinced will earn him a mint one day...perhaps not now that I've published his genius online), the free museums (the Smithsonian...which goes by a singular, but in fact is a range of museums, zoos, etc. - confusing eh?)
3) As an example of the above, this past weekend had a "Solar house" theme to it. In addition to there being a city tour of "solar houses" - which was really just code for "green homes" - they also had this thing on down at by the Mall (the giant strip of grass in front of the White house that lines up all of the various monuments) called a "Solar Decathalon" (who comes up with these names???!). This time, however, there was a decent reason - these houses, which were entries from about 20 different universities throughout the world (Canada's entry was from the University of Calgary), were indeed "solar powered" and had to meet ten different requirements (ergo "decathalon" I'm assuming). It was a pretty cool event, and I toured about 7 or so of the houses on Friday when I had a couple of hours I could squeeze out of my week. Some neat designs - lots of heat exchange systems, massive insulation, air tight houses, passive solar orientation, and a few fancy bells and whistles to boot. I could go on (I'll fill in the details on the pics below later), but its getting late and I want to post about the other significant house happenings this past week.
While I had been away, Target Land Surveying had visited the place and done a formal site survey. This $1200 piece of magic provides you with the formal dimensions of your lot, house, neighbours place, etc. including elevations (again, both the site and the house itself). Basically it tells you how much contaminated junk you truly own (ok, well in our case that's what it tells us). But, it's an input required by the architects to start designing. So, with that completed on Friday (as I was busy decathaloning), we were ready for meetings this week. Drum roll....and here's what they look like:
So once I returned home to Kris and pup, we had our first "official" meeting with our architect, Ian. We sat down with our fancy new drawing and talked about what we wanted in our new place. We looked through some pictures that Ian had pulled out, and told him what we liked about them, and what we hated. In general, there are a few things that are emerging about what we want: lots of light, lots of storage (bikes, gear, books, booze - you know, the good things in life that are also clutter when not put away), lots of green features, universal design (accessibility), future-proofing (thinking about its use when we have parents, guests, dogs, kids, etc.), and a combination of modern and old design.
Tonight we went over the architect's contract (no we haven't actually signed it yet...but that's a formality really), which requires a few points of clarification. On Wednesday, I'll be sitting down with Brett, Ian and Bruce to go over some scheduling questions along with communications and a few other odds and ends.
And in my spare time, I'll book the hazardous material assessment, which I'm guessing will set me back another $650 or so. That's going to be a heart in throat moment when those details come back as it will be the difference between a pretty dreamy house, versus a bare bones thing.
It's 10:30pm though, Kris has been in bed for over an hour, and while she's up at 5am, I'll be up at 7am, so time to head to bed.
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