Jill, the Craigslist Madam, found (among other things) a very large (9′ long, to be exact) three bay stainless steel sink for sale for $125.

It required us to borrow a truck from my brother in law and drive to Grandview, but all in all as Borat would say ‘Great Success.’

It is pretty dirty and looks like it was most recently used as an ashtray but I’m confident with some Barkeeper’s Friend and Playtex Easy Living Gloves I’ll have it looking shiny and new in no time.  We are going to put it on a side wall in the garage (assuming it holds water after initial testing) and use it for a utility (read: brewing) sink.

Other items that have been procured, are in process, or at least considered from that mecca of unwanted stuff:

• An attic fan for $30
• Bathroom exhaust fans (these slipped away from us)
• A whirlpool tub (negotiations pending as of press time)
• A wood burning stove (also pending)
• A windmill (?!?)
• Neverland Ranch (didn’t pass inspection)

The guy at Home Depot used this line yesterday, I’m sure he gets a lot of mileage out of it.

Weekend before last we started our foray into the world of windows with a million questions.  We spent about 45 minutes at Lowes watching a bespectacled old man click through screen after screen of options (grille or no grille?  prairie or colonial? aluminum or vinyl? low e? tempered?) which then spat out a giant number and a lot of unintelligible model numbers and specifications.  A few days later we went through the same drill at Home Depot only this time for Andersen windows.

Somehow I hoped that a purchase roughly equivalent to my first year’s starting salary would be a little bit more informed.

So we haven’t made any final decisions yet but after considering all the details, options, and prices we are leaning toward Integrity windows given the fact that they *seem* to be of comparable quality and slightly lower cost, and they have come reasonably well recommended from those that we have talked to.

I’ve been having panic attacks the past few days when every Google search I do on the major manufacturers has 3 of the top 10 posts dealing with CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS.

More details on decision criteria, features, etc. to come.  My suggestion is to read a lot, panic a little, then repeat.

Another action-city day on Woody road. We just got an update from Doug regarding some more earth moving activity at the site today.

The well driller came and made it down 200′ without hitting any major obstructions that would add to the time and cost. Weather permitting he will be back out tomorrow to finish the job.

Additionally, Backhoe Joe returned and he and Doug filled in the electric service trench. We’ve not heard about the temporary electric service but I can’t imagine it is too far off from completion if we can avoid too much rain.

A few pictures, one of the well truck and the other of the electric trench being filled in:

After spending the last few weeks preparing, the project got started in a big way on Friday. Heavy equipment descended on our land and we had the basement excavated, 700 feet of driveway cleared and covered with gravel, and a 6′ deep trench dug for the utilities.  Some pics:

The next steps will be to have the well drilled on Monday, and getting the electric hooked up by Webster Electric.

The roof of the structure is something we gave a great deal of thought to.  As we looked at more and more houses it seemed that the single most distinguishing feature of the house is the roof, and specifically the pitch of the roof.   In the central US, the vast majority of the roofs are utilitarian and don’t add much in the way of eye candy.  When we paged through our notebook of design ideas we noticed quickly that nearly all of the profiles included had relatively low sloped rooflines, or as I have been calling them ‘California’ roofs.

It turns out that the common conception is that anything less than 6 / 12 pitch (6 feet of rise over 12 feet of run) is a no-no due to ice damming, at least according to our draftsman Jim.  We struggled a lot with this, especially after we saw the preliminary drawings that came complete with a ’standard’ roof line.

My brother in law Matt is a structural engineer, and after all the thinking I had done about the fact that the exterior walls would be made entirely of concrete, I asked the next obvious question of ‘why not the roof?’  This would seem to accomplish two goals of having a (relatively) flat roof, in addition to eliminating what I perceived to be the weak link in the construction envelope.

Matt and Doug talked me out of this soon enough, for the primary reason that the structural support required to have a concrete attic floor would be tremendously expensive, and that the fireproofing / insulation benefits of concrete could be achieved fairly easily with some fire code drywall and a nice helping of cellulose insulation.

So we circled back to our plans and determined that we would have a more traditional roof profile, but would use a standing seam metal roof in combination with a somewhat lower pitch (4/12 or 5/12) to keep it a little bit unique and fit in with our low maintenance goal.

We are still working on the exact details and hope to have that ironed out in the next few weeks.

Shortly after we finished remodeling our current house, we started the design process for the new house. I think it all started one day when we were in the car, and I drew a ‘U’ shaped outline. We envisioned one of the arms of the U as a guest wing that we could close off when not in use so that we wouldn’t have to heat / cool / clean it. The main part of the house was to contain the kitchen and living area, and the other arm was the master suite and an office.

We kicked around the idea of having a garage either underneath in the basement or detached from the house and connected via a small walkway or breezeway.

That same basic outline lasted for quite some time, and got more and more detailed through the use of some ‘design for dummies’ software. We grew pretty emotionally attached to the layout, and spent a lot of time cutting out pages from magazines as inspiration for design elements in the different areas of the house.

At the end of the DIY design process, we had a notebook full of sketches and photographs, and some printouts from our software with as much detail depicted as we could show.

We realized at that point that before we went much further we would need to enlist some expert help. My friend Warren is a builder and suggested that we call B & G Drafting to get some help, and said that they had worked with him on some prior designs. Enter Jim and his ruthless red pen and cold efficiency. Within 15 minutes the design we were so attached to had undergone a pretty serious transformation. He shrank and grew walls, melded the garage into the structure, and moved things around quite a bit.

For the most part this was exactly what we were paying him for, and he likely saved us untold thousands of dollars and a great deal of frustration down the road. Knowing this, it was still difficult to get reacquainted with the new layout when we were so intimately familiar with the old one.

After one more session with him to review some preliminary drawings we ended up with a set of blueprints that were very close to what we had in mind. After reviewing them with our builder Doug, we determined that we could finally consider the design milestone more or less complete.

We got the construction ball rolling a few months ago when we took our plans (created with Punch and untold hours) into a drafting company (B&G Drafting in Springfield, MO) to watch them magically change before our eyes. It turns out there are a lot of things you can do wrong without the benefit of any formal engineering or design training.

Our ‘Low Maintenance’ mantra has led us toward the use of ICF for the structure, a standing seam metal roof, and polished concrete floors throughout the house.

To this point we have selected the land and started lining up the financing. Additionally, we have started working with a builder, Doug, who is something of a Renaissance Man and will guide us through the process and perhaps pummel some subcontractors along the way.