Still designing

The design process has been incredibly enlightening. And time consuming. I plan to write about it extensively, but needless to say, I've been humbled by the amount of aspects of a well built home that I didn't understand.

Meanwhile, I am taking an intensive 96 hour class called the Sustainable Homes Professional course, which has added an entire new perspective to my process.

At this stage, the architect and I have had at least 10 hours of meetings and phone conversations, 15 schematic drawings, 200-300 email exchanges, and countless hours of playing around with the floor plans and models on our time.

I'm super psyched about what we've come up with for the floor plan. The plans are currently being worked on by the structural engineer.

In five days, I'll meet with the architect, and the builder that I've selected, and we will pass the design build torch.

Next week, I'll be submitting the drawings for a permit through the City of Portland.

Design #12

The design process is taking much longer than I had anticipated. I thought that with my SketchUp model complete, it would just be a matter of translating that model's dimensions into CAD.

It's a good thing that I have a good architect. It's been frustrating for me, but he has altered and refined the floor plan again and again. We're now on the twelfth iteration of the floor plan, and he considered this to be the preliminary set of designs.

Shortly, he'll put these into SketchUp, where I'll give him more feedback, and then we'll hand over the plans to an engineer, who will do the post and beam gravity sizing. Then, once the engineer has signed off, my architect will create drawings for the city that we can get stamped and approved.

Hopefully.