To Begin - The Lot and The Plan

So here's the scene...

The Lot:
A non-symmetrical corner, pie-shaped lot that is flat and will have a beautiful sunset view with the way it's shaped now.  It's just shy of 2 acres.

The House: 
We figured we would just tweak an online house plan to our specifications to save costs like all of our friends did.  Wrong...  we could have, but a typical boxy house shape gave us a "short" backyard view which didn't make sense.  I want to look out my main living space windows and see the expanse of yard, not have it be off to the side, invisible.  Granted, it's more economical to build up in a stacking manner, but it didn't make sense in our case, unfortunately for us.


The Architect:
I was fortunate to count several architects as friends, so once we agreed that working together would not ruin our friendship (kidding, sorta), I worked closely with our architect for literally about 6 months.  (The delay mainly being different square footage preferences between my husband and I - I've been continually trying to downsize but with a lot of resistance!  So we reached the best happy medium we could.) Our architect drew up a few sketches and eventually we decided on a boomerang-shaped house that is specifically built for our lot views in mind.  It's unusual, but perfect for the land.  There were compromises that come with this - mainly that the garage isn't as close to the kitchen as I'd like - but a mudroom entrance helps and the views/backyard was more important to us in the long run.  More on this in the next post http://acustomhouse.blogspot.com/2013/01/to-begin-part-2-determining-house-plan.htmlHere are our plans: 

The Builder:
We have a builder, a GC who also built three of my friends' homes in the past 2 years.  I'm lucky to have that perspective on him.   I have the utmost confidence in him, even though he's never done an ICF build.  We are subcontracting the ICF piece to a local company.   Our builder knows I'm going out on a limb giving him the job, but I trust him.  Time will tell...

Resources:
I would be remiss without mentioning some amazing resources that were priceless for the planning process.  You can find these under the label "Invaluable Resources" and will see them mentioned throughout the blog.