Build - Day 50 - September 2, 2011

Yesterday we had a great turn-out for our Dusty Shoe Open House. Between 5:45pm and 8pm we had a steady stream of guests. We handed out little cards with our builders info as well as the URL to this building blog so anyone who wants to can continue following the progress and read-up on our decision-making processes. Thanks to those who took the time to visit our dream house!

Today they are pouring the concrete floors. We have a number of them: the front porch, back porch, garage and basement floor. Keeping with our Universal Design principles, the front porch will be made accessible for a wheelchair. Our original idea was to use the back porch into the inlaw suite as an accessible entry, but then we thought of our lovely North-East Ohio winters...

The covered front porch is much easier to clear than a whole exposed walk-way to the back. Don't really want to tell our wheelchair guests to sit out in the car for 15-20 minutes while we shovel/plow that entire walk-way. Also, if something happens to one of us--especially if Jen hits her head again and has mobility issues--redoing the walk is one less thing we have to think of during that stressful time. Some people might think it looks a bit odd, but anyone having difficulty with steps (e.g. bad knees, arthritis, hip-issues and of couse, wheelchair-bound) will find this quite welcome and sometimes even required.

Today they just did the basement, front porch and the garage. The steps/ramp/driveway will come later in the build when no more heavy trucks need to pull up anymore... ;-) The back porch will be stamped concrete. Jen picked out the pattern and color yesterday. That will be done at a later date since we need to keep at least one entrance to the house available while the rest of the cement dries.

Big cement truck, we had 3 today.

The concrete starts to flow

Basement poured.

The fans help with the drying and moisture levels

On to the garage...

Smoothing out the garage floor

Garage floor finished

We had to wake him up on his 1st potty training day, but it was worth it. We've dedicated the house. Welcome to the 'Daniel'!

Blog updates

Made a couple of updates to the non-mobile version of the blog - besides the recent posts:

• Created a separate Photo sets page
• Added the final plans
• Updated the 'Selections' section on the right 
• Updated the 'Timeline' section on the right

Now that we own a big a hole in the ground, the updates will really start to get interesting!!

Home Designer (Chief Architect)

One key element in the process of designing a house is the ability to visualize the structure before it is built. For me, that isn't too big of an issue but for people who lack the ability to instantly 'convert' a flat, 2D floorplan into an active 3D walk-through--i.e., Jen--it becomes a lot more of a struggle. One option is to find an architect that does 3D modeling as part of the design but that isn't always available or it might be cost-prohibative.

Enter 3D tools like Chief Architect's Home Designer. It's the consumer version of their 'Premiere' line which is a tool aimed at the actual architects, but Home Designer has a lot of the features for 10% of the price. Plus, once you have the initial software, you can always upgrade until you have the features you want.

One of the cool things about Home Designer is the auto-generation of 3D motion based on your floor plan. It will take a couple of hours to (re-)create your plan(s) but once created, it looks very nice. Below is a little screenshot of the trial-version and 90 minutes of work based on our floorplan. I would have played with it longer but it's the wee hours of the morning and we have an 8:30 am showing tomorrow (fingers crossed and prayers said!).

Just 90 minutes of work yields some impressive results including a first crack at modeling the latest kitchen idea, but I haven't even played with styles or textures yet....

I think we'll be buying this little gem so I can show my wife whatthe latest changes will actually look like and what the impact will be on the rest of house. The before-mentioned ability to create a 3D walk-through will make that so much easier for Jen. With 1000s of library objects (furniture, windows, doors, etc.), ability to import pictures for texture and colors and a dazzling area of other designer options, I'm a fan and will gladly pay for this over a free tool like Google Sketch-up. Just take 15 mins and look at this video to see how intuitive and impressive this software is for home owners.

If you're paying multi-$100k for a house, this a must-buy and one of the best $200 spend in the overall budget.