Monday, July 21, 2008

Where have we been?????????? Concept number what?

No, we haven't vanished off the planet earth. We just entered a blog funk along with our general depressed house funk.

On top of the bids being to expensive Joe went to the MREA fair (midwest renewable energy association fair) and came back with new ideas. The main one of these put us right back to where we had already been twice before. The summary of this is that our spread out "L" plan was not smart for our climate and goals of minimal footprint and energy use. In other words, we need it to be more compact. I will let him write more about all the other wonderful things he brought home. That was literal, and really no sarcasm.

Then, I ALMOST FORGOT- Joe told me he decided he didn't really the builder I thought we had agreed upon. I am not even going to go into this as it could lead to death by blogging.

So, what to do. We have been through this same crisis before... When this first happened I thought I honestly might just surrender to the building/design gods and and buy an existing house. This week we even half heartedly looked at houses on Lake Mendota but unfortunately (or probably fortunately) found out we could just barely afford a two bedroom. To this I said, "no thank you"- based on our current very small space experience.

So, we are sort of starting over. We already have a tentative new design concept that Joe will put up. It takes many of the old ideas but makes it more compact. We are also meeting with more builders to see if there is someone out there we both can "love." Ha Ha.

Honestly, I am burned out. We met with a builder today and I could barely talk again about what "green or efficient meant to us" and to go through all the material research we have done. I am little disappointed we are back to where we were months ago but I feel like completely starting from scratch with different designers would be a mistake as we actually do like our architects and we are also not without fault in this whole thing.

ANYWAY - on a positive note, check out design concept 5 (number 5 of the "new plans"). Full speed ahead again.

The new goal is driveway this fall and start building first thing in the spring.