A year ago we were just about to start our big kitchen remodel/addition and we rented a giant container and parked it in our front yard, and we were all ready to start moving everything out of our kitchen, when our builder called and said that the city had reviewed the plans, and would not approve them. There are power lines that run right next to our house and the city requires that new structures stay at least 15 feet away from them. The addition as it was drawn up in our blueprints was impossible.
So it was back to the drawing board. Literally. No. Not literally. Back to the blueprint software on my computer, and back to the graph paper, and back to the spiral bound notebooks, as we started over, trying to find a way to fit what we wanted into the space we had to work with. It took a while. My husband and I are not the fastest agree-ers. We almost gave up. We spent a while looking at land, and I spent a lot of time on home-buying web sites looking for something that seemed like it might be home. We had Realtors come and look at our house to see if we could get any money out of it. But in the end we decided to stay. We came up with a new plan. A plan that uses space so much more efficiently, and is more asthetically pleasing and has a better flow and feng shue and all the rest. It is better. And I'm not glad for the stress and the hassle and the extra time, and I'm not glad we've had a shipping container in our front yard for over a year, but I'm glad we had to change our plans.
So we hired a NEW architect; my friend Raquel (I found out she was an architect right after the first architect finished the first set of plans) who was awesome. She drew up the plans just how we asked her to which seems like it shouldn't be hard, but it sure was the first time. And she was fast. 10 times faster than the first guy who charged us twice as much.
So the plans got drewed up, and then they got engineered. We got the construction loan all squared away and then the city approved our permit!
So here we are. (And I guess I'm a person who thinks the best way to start a paragraph is with the word "So".) It has begun. We are doing the demolition ourselves to save money. We have 3 weeks. On Your Mark! Get Set! Go!
