Back into the blogzone - the near-final house layout

Righty - I'm back in the blogzone - the zone between a beer at 8pm and the time to actually put up a post.

So what have a learned in the past 24 hrs about the house? Well - a few things:
1) We're actually closing in on a final design. Here's what it's looking like at present:

So - let me walk you through things: Starting on the left image at the bottom...

The front of the house has a series of windows and enters in on the ground level. The front door is in the bottom left (SW corner). Beside it is a closet, with a landing and a couple of stairs down to the main living area. To the right are the stairs leading upstairs. Looking out in front of you, there's the kitchen and off to your right is the main floor bathroom (full bathroom). Beyond those are the living room/family room/dining room - which is all open concept. At the back will be a full glass back end (8' high windows/doors) with two fixed glass panels and two doors (8' opening). We're guessing that there will be some storage on the walls, along with some storage possibly under the stairs. You can also see on here a set of dashed lines (tightly dashed and loosely dashed). The tightly dashed ones are our fancy new steel reinforcing beams...ooh black steel you say? You bet. We're high rollers. These will drop below our exposed wood joists (see last entry) and sit at roughly 9'. The loosely dashed lines are the new foundations that we need to add (ugghhh). Yep - those are the non-sexy expensive shit that you need to add so your house doesn't fall down (psshhaw..."fall down"...details). 

Upstairs (the right hand image), leads you to the landing which is currently an office/guest bedroom. It will be my primary work area which will have a good amount of light via some big windows. The thinking is that this will be able to be converted (when needed) to a guest bedroom - so for all of you reading this that's where you'll be when you come to visit! We're not walling it in for now, so we'll probably put some kind of privacy screen / curtain, etc. to provide the necessary privacy. Going right from the top of the stairs, there's the bathroom (right) and mechanical room and laundry room (left). We've had to extend the size of the mechanical room (as you see in red) to make sure we've got the necessary room for all of the equipment...and if we need more space we've got some of the area under the stairs and/or the attic. If we don't use the space in the mechanical room, we'll just use it for linen. Continuing on, there's the second bedroom (straight ahead). That's going to be the kid's room. On the left is the master bedroom, with...wait for it...a freakin' WALK-IN closet! I can't say that I thought we could squeeze in a walk-in in a house this small, but we've managed it. In fact, despite going over budget, I think we've actually managed to put in the vast majority of the things we'd hoped for at the beginning of this. We'll see how much we regret that in time! The rest of the master bedroom...walk out (glass slider) to a second level deck that is above the new extension. We probably won't build this immediately (being totally out of money), but it shouldn't be hard to do at a later point as necessary.

So - that's the general layout...what do you think!?

2) Contemporary/modern doors are tough to find in Canada!

For some god-unknown reason, it seems that the vast majority of people seem to like stupidly ugly doors with weird notching in it? Which ranges (in my opinion) from ugly...

...to absolutely hideous...

 or this...

It's like a giant ugly competition. I'm spoilt for choice of ugly.

In all honesty, front doors are ridiculous. Google them and you'll see! You find images like this:

Seriously??? A giraffe coming through your front door? "Honey, who's at the front door?", "Oh, just Fred Jones, the  Jehovah's Witness Giraffe". Really, who thinks up these things? And moreover, where can I rent a giraffe for a photo shoot?!

Google "ugly doors" and you get this:

I mean really... what's wrong with humans. First we make ugly doors, then we breed cats to have no fur. We should be ashamed.

But back to realty (ooh that rant felt good!).

So, what kind of doors DO I like. Simple, clean, elegant and timeless. Examples? Voila.

 Simple - elegant and pleasing. No need for silly lines or etching. Just a door.

If I'm looking for something more modern and contemporary, here's what I'm thinking:



Again - simple, and pleasing. Much more reasonable. And no giraffes or bald cats to boot. Weird thing about this particular door (from Crestview Doors) is that it's crazy cheap - a couple of hundred dollars even with a double glazed glass area (which raises another beef - "double glazed" ...when I think of "glazing" I think cake glazing...I don't think of "number of panes of glass". Why don't they call it "double paned"??). I'm guessing it's crap, but heck, it looks nice! The other one above is from Masonite and is a fiberglass door - and looks like quality (great R-value, looks good, well built). Might very well be the one we go with in the end.

3) Awesome website for US-Canada cross border shopping. As I get further into this, I'm increasingly realizing that there are so many deals to be had in the US. Not sure what they do down there, but they just seem to make things cheaper! This site is SUPER useful for all sorts of info on calculating duty, figuring out exemptions, etc. Check it out.

Ok. That's probably enough for now. Make these things too long and nobody read's 'em. Night all!