Rear Rendering

Heres a new rendering of the rear with the smaller mid living room / dining room porch and stairs down. It also has a gable over the side porch vs the other style, whatever style that was.



I prefer the look of the gable over the other style roof. It's keeping more with the rest of the exterior. The spiral staircase was an effort to minimize the stairs from blocking light and views from the basement, but it appears that a regular set of stairs wouldn't block anything anyway. I still think I might like to continue that thin catwalk from the mid porch to the corner and then west towards the other porch. Just a little skinny thing though.

Driveway work and Prairie Musings

Work on the driveway has begun. It didn't take too long for problems to arise. It turned out that we were making huge cuts over the top of the hill. I think we would have had a small river valley rather than a road. After some frantic calls to the engineer, excavator, and architect, everything was resolved and now have a very nice, albeit huge looking, driveway. One of the excavators that quoted the project warned me that it was going to look like a super highway until the gravel was down and the area around it was seeded. He was right, take a look at these pictures. Keep in mind this is for a 12' wide driveway.









My mother-in-law was spreading some prairie seeds along the Ice Age Trail this past weekend and with all the work going on with the driveway I got excited about trying to seed the hill with prairie grasses. I ran out and collected 5 gallons of prairie seed from one of Tasha's colleagues and we're going out tomorrow to collect more. Some cooler heads warned me to slow down with the seeding until we had a nice seed mix selected. Well, it seems nice seed mixes run about $1500 per acre so I'm going ahead with this haphazard seeding plan. We should have enough for the area bounded by the driveway, our property line and the trees on the western edge of the property.

More plans and renderings

In no particular order I present to you more plans and renderings!

We're going to try a smaller porch off the back. Mirroring what's off of the master bedroom. Something needs to be done to the sleeping porch. To me it doesn't look like it belongs. A friend commented that the full width porch looked like a nun's habit, now that's all can see when I look at it.