It’s hard to see unless if you really read the details, but there’s been quite a bit of changes in the house.  We enlarged the pass through in between the kitchen and the great room to 5’ wide.  We love it now!  It still leaves us plenty of cabinetry in kitchen but really opens up the space.  The vaulted ceiling was also added to the great room – but because of the roof on the back of the house, the sloped ceilings in the great room don’t exactly line up with the walls of the room.  That’s a bit weird, and we’re definitely going to see what other options we have for that.  The office has also changed shapes…we’re really pretty flexible with the office.  We know we want to have it on the main level at the front of the house, but the shape can be pretty much anything.  As long as it can fit two desks, we’d be fine with it.  The exterior of the house is most critical at this point, so the office can morph to fit whatever we need the exterior to be.  Other details that were added to the house was transom windows above the doorways and windows of the main floor.  We both love the look of transom windows and are excited that we can incorporate them into our house design.

Preliminary Design V8 – Main Floor

In the basement we decided to recess cabinetry under the stairs to really increase the amount of counter space and storage that the bar has.  We also tweaked the shape of some of the unheated storage spaces.  In the unheated storage room 3 we added a possible space for a tech closet.  We’ll need to discuss the exact space for that with an audio/video expert.  For now, at least it reminds us that we’ll need to put it somewhere in the house.

Preliminary Design V8 – Lower Level

The exterior is really where we saw some significant changes happening in Version 8. The roofline was really heightened to create one large gable and one smaller gable.  I actually really love the way that this exterior is looking.  It’s a shingle style with a lot of coastal details and really adds a lot of height to the front of the house.  But now is it too tall?  I feel like goldilocks…the first is too small, this might be too high, we need one that’s just right!

Preliminary Design V8 – Elevation

Preliminary Design V8 – Exterior Perspectives

So that we could really understand the roofing, Mike provided us with a roof plan.  And I’m glad that he did!  It gave us a good grasp on how the roof lines all fit together.  This was especially important for us on the back of the house where the two gables are so closely spaced.  We definitely think that rearranging that a bit may give us a better interior ceiling line.

Preliminary Design V8 – Roof Plan

At this point we really feel good about how the house floor plan is shaping up and really it’s just details that we’re working on now.  After seeing the kitchen layout in Arizona, we decided that adding a pass through in the kitchen would be good…to really open up the space.  Mike added that into this version of the design.  I’m thinking that it’s a little small, and that we’ll likely want to increase it even more to open up the space though.  At the top of the stairs, we increased the depth of the “picture wall” in Version 6 to be a bookcase in Version 7.  That’ll give us more flexibility for a built-in or shelves (or both).  We also added in the coffered ceiling in the dining room – love that!  There’s really not much else that changed on the first floor, except for the swing of the laundry back door.

Preliminary Design – Version 7 – Main Floor

The downstairs space is really turning out great now.  We’re loving the layout that Mike came up with and really there’s only minor tweaks on this floor too.  We decided to switch Bedroom 2’s closet location with the shower/toilet room.  This will give more privacy to the bathroom and depending on how the site is graded, we may be able to add a window in there as well.  We actually debated a lot about the shower vs. tub in the boy’s bath and ultimately landed on a walk-in shower.  Really the boys only take showers as it is now and every blue moon take a bath in our soaker tub.  So we figured that they can use our tub in the new house too.  So we removed their bathtub and gave them a shower.  All of the bathrooms in the house have showers without doors.  We’re thinking that’ll be pretty nice not to have to clean any shower glass.  In the guest bath downstairs, we took half of the closet from the hallway and flipped it to be in the bathroom.  That creates a decent sized linen closet in there for guests and toiletries.

Preliminary Design – Version 7 – Lower Floor

The outside of the house is where we’re now focusing our attention.  To us, it’s been difficult to really figure out what we want this house to look like.  In the northwest, the majority of homes are two stories from the front of the house…so having a one story is different than I ever envisioned my dream home.  Mike gave us a couple of different options in Version 6 to look at and now with Version 7 gave us yet another one.  I do like how some of the gables in the front of the house overlap, however it feels off-balance to me.

Preliminary Design – Version 7 – Exterior