Thursday, August 28, 2008

Driveway and feng shui..

Lots has happened. We met with our builder and took them to my mom's house and our property. It was helpful and we are going to see some homes far west of Madison to get some exterior ideas. We are going to arrange this after we work on our plans a bit more and try and pick our driveway/excavator company.

So driveways. Wow! Can I say that again, WOW! We decided we would coordinate this ourselves. We are still awaiting a bid but so far they are all over the place. They have thus far ranged from $20,000 to 40,000! Yikes. I normally don't like to put in the $$ but this was so crazy I just had to share. We are waiting for the last bid to come in and then pick someone to put it in this fall. Admittedly the driveway is long... 960 feet. However, it is really hard to get psyched up about paying so much for gravel. Of note, this does not include the fees for the engineering plans we had to have drawn up to get it approved by the town. Thankfully it was approved without any problems. Joe did go to our future town's meeting and met many of our future neighbors.

Finally we met with my family friend who is a feng shui expert and does home design (this was news to me!). Anyway, he had some good suggestions. He agreed we should flip flop the location of the dining room and living room, a south west corner wrap around porch is a good idea, the entrance needs to be its own defined space with presence and it should lead you into the common area and not equally into the bedroom/mudroom/office wing, he also thought there should be both an outdoor and indoor closet by the main entrance if possible, he agreed we should turn the garage north so you don't look at the doors when you drive in, he suggested having multiple outdoor living areas to suit the sun and weather, some sort of visual division of the kitchen from the living space, and several other things I cannot quite recall because I was chasing my naked children around my Mom's house at the same time. He did have some good exterior and interior finish ideas as well. Maybe Joe will return to the blog world and elaborate.

That is it. Hopefully we will have a driveway before the end of 9/08 and our friends and family can come drive up the gold plated path to our future home site.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow- that is an impressive driveway cost. I NEVER would have guessed it would be so much. I like the ideas that the Feng Guy offered. It is good to get additional input on an idea that has been turing in your and Joe's heads for so long. Brings a new perspective. Nice. Also, just wanted to make sure you got the info I forwarded from Nata. Let me know. Can't wait to see your continued progress.

August 30, 2008 at 12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow- that is an impressive driveway cost. I NEVER would have guessed it would be so much. I like the ideas that the Feng Guy offered. It is good to get additional input on an idea that has been turing in your and Joe's heads for so long. Brings a new perspective. Nice. Also, just wanted to make sure you got the info I forwarded from Nata. Let me know. Can't wait to see your continued progress. -- Myla

August 30, 2008 at 12:13 PM  
Blogger Bill and Tami said...

Check out this show-Beyond the Box on HGTV. I was blown away by some of their ideas on the second house. Could give you some great ideas.

http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/shows_hbbox/episode/0,3293,HGTV_32417_59063,00.html

September 9, 2008 at 4:33 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home