Staked!

I came home the other day to see that the surveyors had been by the house. We had an intial survey before we moved in, but we wanted to get the stakes in the ground because we weren't exactly sure where the property lines were.



Turns out that the side lines were about where we thought they were, but the fence on the back of the property is about a foot into our yard. So that will be nice to "reclaim". Our neighbor's fence is even farther forward - to the point where his neighbors fence is in his yard. He's not sure how to broach the subject of moving the fence back with the neighbors... =/

Stalled Again

I think Matt has "fired" our architect. He wasn't really happy with the guy's lack of attention to the roof-line and details about spacing and such. So we're stalled out again...
But Matt has taken it upon himself to draw a new floor plan and it's looking pretty solid. Not sure what the next step will be - find a new architect? At least we're saving up more money while we wait! =]

It Won't Stop Raining...

Enough of the rain already! I enjoy having a dry backyard.

Decision of the day to think about - how do we deal with the water ponding in the backyard?



The four fingers Matt is holding up refers to how many inches of water are in this particular spot. I think that is the most that was in any one spot of the yard, but it had definitely been higher than that.

Under the house was a similar story. I think it is a few inches of water there, but you can easily see that the water was much higher at some point in the day. Matt said this was still lower than the water from Ike and that event was still below the frame of the house.


So the big decision is whether or not we should raise the house. Either way we will probably need to re-level the yard and possibly install drains. Oh the joys of living in Houston...

The Chimney Issue

The architect came back today with the next set of plans. I'll scan those in and post them, but one of the issues that came up again was the chimney. When we first moved in I noticed a 2'x2' section of the kitchen that was walled off. It didn't take long to figure out that there was a chimney behind that sheetrock. You can see the base of it under the house and then it comes up through the attic to the roof.



I was in the "Keep the Chimney" camp, while Matt was not so sure. I rooted for it at every possible moment. We had mentioned the possibility to the architect that we would keep it, but weren't sure. We tried to look at it once before, but when we cut the sheetrock away, the chimney was still covered in shiplap, so we taped the piece of sheetrock back up...



Now we are discussing the possibility of having side pieces in between the living room and dining room to match the chimney. So we decided we had to look at the chimney to see the potential of keeping it. I gave Matt the go ahead to cut up the wall in the kitchen, after getting his promise to cover it up after destroying it.



Now we both really want to keep it. It doesn't stick out as far from the center wall as the standard 2' counter tops, so now we have to decide if we want to shorten the countertop or if the countertop sticking out will look ok. We'll probably run that one by the guy who has more design experience than we do... =]

One a related note, I am excited about the possibility of finding any cool tidbits about the history of the house. We haven't discovered much so far, but anything is cool to me. So it was pretty excited when we saw the wallpaper that was hiding behind the sheetrock. It's such a funky color!



Oh and just to make us more nervous, the shiplap in front of the chimney had lots of termite damage... Just like every other piece of wood we have uncovered in this house. *sigh*

First Plans

The architect came by again today and had sketched out 3 different plans, each one being grander than the one before. While I did like aspects of all of them, the middle of the grandness seems to be the one we both liked. We gave some feedback on aspects of it, and we will meet again next week to look at plans again.

I know it wasn't the finished product, but just seeing plans on paper made me really excited! We copied the image, though it has doodles and tidbits of what we liked on it - so it's not the cleanest document. But if you are curious (my dad wanted to see the progression), then feel free to take a closer look.

If you want to see the house drawn up as it currently is built, click here.