I’m very happy to be writing this post, I cannot tell a lie. 🙂 The last update I shared was in June — I shared that we were going to wait out the crazy building market before we picked up our house again. We made that decision back in March, actually (just took me forever to write about it!), so it’s now been six months of hanging out and watching this market do its thing, and welp, construction prices aren’t looking like they are going to lower for a long time (if ever?), so we’re just going to buckle up and ride this ride. Woo! Who knows, maybe we’ll choose to excuse ourselves again depending on how wild things get, but for now, we’re approaching this big decision with an “open door, close door” attitude: we’ll keep pursuing till doors start closing. So far, the doors keep opening. Yay.
Before we decided to move forward again, we did one crazy thing: we scrapped our entire house plan and re-drew everything. And I mean e v e r y t h i n g ! We handed over an entirely different house to our architect last week, inside and out. I’m shaking my head, honestly, as I admit that, considering how long we spent drawing those first house plans, and that we ended up with something so close to perfect by the time we were done. Which is part of why we re-drew the plans, ha! The final exterior elevations on the house always bugged both Ryan and me. They were just a little off. We were working so hard to make our interior floor plan needs fit a particular exterior style, and honestly? In the end it just didn’t work. Turns out you can’t have your cake and it, too. 😉
We realized that to both make our vision for the home come to life, we needed to shrink the house. We really want our home to have a classic look and feel, like something you’d see on the old East Coast and on the beach in old Del Mar, CA, (yes, ode to our former homes and lives! I’m working hard to tell our family’s story in building this home). IE, to get a classic house, you need to apply classic design principles, like symmetry. Cue the need to re-draw the plans. We also thought of certain rooms to either scrap or consolidate in the house, so again, cue the need to re-draw the plans.
While the sunk costs of the first house plans feels painful, that’s just how life goes sometimes. Sometimes bummer things happen and you’re like, wait what?? Why didn’t I get a heads up about this, if this is how things were going to go?! I don’t know why our life experiences often pan out like that, but when they do, I guess the best thing to do is to embrace what you learned and move on. Like in this scenario, we designed Home #1 and now Home #2, which gave us the chance to learn a lot and is actually a good thing. Supposedly building a custom home takes three times to get right — three times before you really know what you both actually need and actually want. Looking at it through that lens of learning, we’re just grateful that our first house was a done deal on paper ($) and not IRL ($$$).
Ironically, the second house we’ve drawn mirrors the very first home I was inspired by when we realized we were going to build last year. Its design is so classic – it’s a shingle-style stunner (I’ve always wanted a shingle-style home!) – and I fell for it the second I saw it. Fear just got the best of me when we started sketching our plans because the style doesn’t really exist here. Could we honestly pull that off in STG, UT?? Last time my heart said “yes” but my head said “no.” This time my head says “I don’t even care, just build this dang thing before the world explodes” and my heart says “YES!” I’m expecting a good chunk of people to not love what we’re creating but we will. What matters more than that?
Crossing our fingers that the architect we’re going with this time can turn the plans around pretty quickly, and that we can keep this ride going! I’ll see you posted. 🙂
PS, that pic up there? Those are shingle options we’re looking at, with a teeny peek of our rough sketch of the new plans on the side. Hoping so much that I can share more soon!!
