RaNdOm Creations
About my last blog regarding the two buildings joined together as one building, I have heard I was not being complete enough on explaining just how the “barn” and house would be connected yet visually separated. Let me breifly explain.
From the road, it appears as though these two buildings are about 30 feet apart but they are connected by a 30 foot long (by about 8 foot wide) breezeway/hallway. The hallway is hidden by tall shrubbery and landscaping. I know it may be hard to envision but only Part of the breezeway is left revealed and this part appears like a protrusion from the barn that has an entrance door on it. This door , which is on the front of the breezeway(adjacent to the barn) has another door on the immediate backside of the breezeway. This door arrangement allows folks to pass from the front “court yard” through by the garage/barn main overhead door area to the backyard of the home/barn area.
On this land, I mentioned that an old farm silo is present. This silo is viewed from the street to be adjacent to the rear of the barn. In fact, the silo is 20 to 40 feet behind the barn, and is in no way connected. From the street vantage point, observers could not tell exactly where the silo is located. It “looks” like it is attached to the barn. My kids want me to finish the silo to have it become a neat fort with spiral staircase going up to the top look-out tower. I said we could make it a “camp-out” bedroom get-away and fit the inside with a glass roof top and a big round mattress to lay on and look up toward the stars . I think the money end of this deal will dictate it be left for the future owners to do as they wish.
I was out in the field today driving around to see some of our homes under construction. The lake home we are building on Ocauchee now has the staircase to the walk-out basement finished. The basement has 12 foot high ceilings! We did this so the sloping lot would be used to it’s best advantage and cost the least to build. If we would have done a standard 8 foot high basement, we would have had to fill the site with about 4 feet of stone. This probably costs just a little more to build the walls 12 feet tall over the cost of filling the 4 feet of stone but consider the benefits two ways. You get a taller, more dramatic basement(get the basketball hoop!), and you get to walk out of the basement and not have to build so many stairs to get down to the lake level.
I thoroughly enjoy designing full custom homes for any project but this expensive lake lot left less in our client’s budget for building the home. I love a good challenge and a creative solution was in order. The first part of the solution was to take an existing plan ( our 4 bedroom Dream series T2000 and re-design it to work. I did not want it to simply look like a re-design, and when we are finished with it, it won’t. We started by making the side of the home, into the front of the home. This made the home a comfortable 30 feet in lake lot width. But the creativity was just begining!
Next: Lake house supreme on a less than supreme budget. The creative solution. I have some exciting weekend news coming, so …stay tuned!
Thanks for reading the blog. Comments are always welcome.
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
