Flowers are blooming much slower this year and with a snow storm in mid April that covered the ground with 15 inches we still hadn't found our bulbs popping up. In fact we went to the house the last weekend of April expecting to see some greenery in the bulb bed and saw nothing. Of course I have no patience for that, so we dug and recovered about two dozen bulbs, some even still had ice around them, that were transplanted to a window box and are doing beautifully with full southern exposure at the townhouse.
We also have started meeting with the designer and visualizing our floor plan and talking about our use of space. Oddly enough the most difficult room to lay out so far was the mud room. That's probably because we want a mudroom on steroids. Having such a large garage it makes more sense to put the mudroom door more centrally located than on the far side, like we had before. Also the bathroom access will be from the mudroom and the laundry area will be partitioned off, but in that area. This all is because when you have folks that work in the garage, like Tom does, you don't want them traipsing around the house to get to things or drag their dirty clothes up to hampers in the bedroom. On the inside between the mudroom and kitchen we will have a lovely pocket door.
Placement of the laundry room is a heated discussion among many people, it appears. What I have learned is that most want it closest to run easily and manage the collection and distribution of the laundry. So that makes having it near your bedrooms, right? The consequences is that you hear the machines run while in your bedroom and perpetually have laundry on your bed. We decided to keep the machines far from the bedrooms and closest to where the dirtiest laundry is produced: the garage and kitchen.
Then we tackled basic design, not down in the weeds details, but very basic design of the kitchen. This is where things get interesting. Kitchens are primarily designed to store stuff and prepare meals with the stored stuff. So... if you lost all your stuff in a fire then you don't have it to put in cabinets and therefore you can save a ton of money by not wallpapering your kitchen with cabinets. This is where most people I talk to ask about resell. What an interesting way of deciding how you want to live in your house. Design it so you can sell it rather than how you want to live in it. We've learned that the expensive cabinets are the ones hanging on the wall. We won't have many. I'm sure I'll have lots to share about this when we get in the weeds of kitchen design.
Our old house had a tiny master bathroom. The new house will have a lovely bathroom suite with a tub, new to us!, a doorless shower (no glass cleaning) and a toilet in a closet, so to speak. That way the bathroom can be used while the toilet is being used by someone else. In addition to making the bathroom worthy of being part of a master bedroom we are pushing the bedroom over the garage making it larger too.
Roof lines. When you hire a designer you get some interesting proposals and roof lines is our first introduction to that. We are staying more traditional but need to decide between gable and hip and using standing seam accents. Yep, a whole new vocabulary is becoming part of our lives. I won't go into details but will share that we are not brave enough to just have a very modern flat roof, even though it will cost less.
One more item having to do with looking back. I will preface that our insurance company and experience has been fantastic about everything except the loss of our '71 VW squareback. That darn thing has been a thorn. First of all an adjuster insisted on coming out to look at it and the VIN to verify its demise. We explained that the VIN plate was destroyed and it's a heap of scorched metal, which didn't matter. Now we are having to coordinate the insurance's hauler with the house demo company to retrieve the carcass of the car so it can go to a scrap yard. My only thought is that there was someone sometime that took their car carcass and made it a new car after collecting insurance money. What a pain.
Speaking of demo. It's being scheduled! I'm sure our neighborhood is so excited. Yes, the party is actually getting started. We meet with an entourage of people, which includes our builder, his project manager and the demo company rep on Wednesday to make a plan. We've been told that now that road restrictions have been lifted by MNDot, Dakota County and the city of Farmington that dumpsters can be staged and will be deliverd on Monday, May 14, maybe Tuesday... it seems like this operating on estimated dates all the time is common place. I feel like I'm in perpetual "manana", like you hear about when you are on vacation south of the border.
We also meet with the designer again this Thursday and get to discuss other room designs. I look forward to his concepts and reception of our tweaks. It was a very positive experience last time. He got super excited when we talked about a "coffee station". We also have to sit down with the builder and hash out cost and prioritize how we want to spend our money. We aren't bringing more to the table than the insurance, so we have a tight budget.
Hopefully as things start getting going I will have more to say about the process and share some fun new vocabulary and insights. Just a reminder: check your homeowner policies for Loss of Use so you too can be sitting on a patio drinking coffee while waiting for your house to be built if this crazy path should ever unfortunately come your way.
