Almost-er
Almost a year ago now, over the course of a weekend, Mark and I (who am I kidding: just Mark) designed our hypothetical house. The design was to be appraised as one of the conditions on our construction mortgage. This is a ridiculous time frame to design a home. However, it only needed to be rough as we would be able to revise once we were approved for financing. The initial design appraisal came in where we needed it to be, and so to keep the project moving along (with the hopes of breaking ground in fall 2014) we revised.
Mark developed the design into something we were both fairly excited about (see previous post Almost). He prepared working drawings, submitted them to the city for permit and to various general contractors for tender. With the thermometer dropping, we were starting to feel pressure to make decisions before the ground started to freeze. We didn’t like it. This would potentially be our forever home. We had to get it right.
That’s when we decided to take a step back. Why were we so driven to break ground in the fall? What were the implications of waiting? Waiting meant we would be living in-between for a while longer and have to pay more interest on our land. In the grand scheme of things, however, those repercussions were fairly minor.
With a little more breathing room, and an intervention staged by Mark’s partners at plotnonplot, we realized that our initial design was not going to cut it for us. Because of the rushed timeline, we never truly followed a proper creative process. And it showed. We designed a lovely home. But it wasn’t our home. And so we tore up the old design and began round 2 – the redesign – which led us to our current much-improved (x infinity) design. I am beyond thrilled with it. Working more as a team this time around, they nailed it.