Decisions, decisions, Part 2

Apologies for not posting part 2 sooner, but another contract came along (thankfully a nice short one this time!) When I'm chasing a deadline and spending long hours at the computer every day I try to avoid spending any of my spare time at the keyboard.

Anyway, trying my best to pick up where I left off last time...

After making the decision to get a house designed with an architect, one fell into our lap, figuratively speaking. Iain was talking about our plans with a work colleague and it turns out she knows an architectural designer who works in Palmerston North, the 'big smoke' about an hour's drive from Wanganui. She gave us his contact details and we looked up the website of the firm he works for. We felt a bit intimidated when we saw the buildings in their online portfolio, but we dropped him an email nonetheless, asking if he'd be interested in designing a 'hippy cabin'. Thankfully, he said it sounded like fun, and would we like to arrange a meeting to discuss our ideas?

So that we'd have something to discuss at our meeting, and to give the architect, (whose name is Phil, by the way), a better idea of the sort of thing we were after, we sifted through the hundreds of house-related images we've collected from the internet over the last year or so, ever since we decided to build a new home. Initially we narrowed it down to about a dozen that we both liked, but I thought we might actually muddy the issue if we gave Phil too many images. I thought a single, well-chosen image would communicate our vision much more effectively.

Here's the image we gave him:

An interior we both really like

There are so many things that appeal to us about this interior: the 'solid' feel (even though it looks as if it the walls might be straw bale), the rough plaster finish on the walls, the rough wood cladding, the wooden post and beams, the wooden doors and windows, (yes, we're suckers for wood!) and the way it manages to feel both light and airy and cosy at the same time. It's neither strikingly modern, nor overtly traditional, but a clever and unpretentious blend of the two.

Once our 'key image' was chosen we needed to communicate the nitty-gritty of what we want from the house, and we decided to draw a mind map for this. When we first started we thought the complementary areas of form and function would be pretty evenly balanced, but as the mind map evolved, we discovered that for us, the functional considerations far outweigh the aesthetic side of things. This came as a bit of a revelation, or at least it did for me. I've always been an out-and-out dreamer, and I never realised before how important practicalities are to me. Maybe it's a function of middle age? (All observations welcome.)

Click here to view our new home mindmap. (Be patient; it's a big file!)

We had our initial meeting with Phil last week, and explained our ideas. We also gave him some photos of the section, as well as a map the engineer drew when he did the geotech report. He said it was an ideal spot to build a house, which was gratifying, because it confirmed what we've thought all along - that we've got a real cracker of a site, which we should be able to make into something really special.

Phil's busy on a big project right now, but he should be free in about six weeks time, and then it should only take him a couple of weeks to draw up a concept plan. Fortunately Phil seemed to think it would be possible to build the sort of thing we're looking for within our budget, and he even talked about the possibility of building a mezzanine, which is something we'd always fancied, but always assumed would bump the price up too much.

On the land purchase front there's still no more news on when the subdivision is likely to go through; we won't be at all surprised if the first anniversary of signing the contract comes around and we still haven't got the land.

Anyway, it's getting late, so I'll sign off now and catch you again next week.

Helen