READY, SET....GO!

So now with closing tentatively set for the end of March, just over a month away, our immediate task at hand was to not only design our new house, but then to also smash together a set of drawings to get into the village so they can sit around and wait for an undetermined amount of time before someone in the elusive land of Oak Park’s building department decides to sit down and review them and then most likely return them to us smeared with comments and revisions we’d need to make. This needed to happen quickly as our goal at the time was to try and get the drawings back in a timely manner so that we could start construction as close to closing as possible to minimize the amount of months we had to pay both mortgage and rent simultaneously. (Did I mention folks were currently using the rear enclosed porch of the house for drinking parties?)

Yeah. Awesome.

No.

So, the task at hand – redesign the existing 2-flat brick box into a nice “normal” single family home.

And by "normal", I mean something more attractive to potential buyers than ourselves as this is really an investment property that we’d also like to enjoy living in for the few years (cross our fingers) that we have left in Illinois.  Designing to "normal" within our own standards if we were to stay there forever would most likely involve things like concrete flooring, zinc paneling, plywood walls, moss balconies and nothing would be straight - there may not even be any walls.  Not exactly your "appeal to the masses" type look.

Me and J hemmed and hawed over the design for quite a few evenings after T went to bed, on the train to and from work, and in our heads while we hummed in the shower.

And for some reason (mostly due to our brain damage I’m guessing), neither one of us can seem to remember to bring home or purchase any trace paper, and we end up sketching space plan upon space plan right on top of each other on a single sheet of plain white paper. About 7 sketches in, we’d both be hunched over the drawing trying to remember if the red line or that black line, or maybe the slightly faded blackish line was the current running model. It is as if we were literally trying to look for ways to make the process even more difficult than it already was.

For the sake of pete, whoever that guy is, I can’t begin to understand why we do things like this.

A few days later, the basic design was complete enough to start drawing, and we attacked with a vengeance. Now mind you, I don’t think me and J have ever said the phrase “just get something on paper, we’ll worry about the actual design later” as much as we heard ourselves saying that week. MmHm. We'll see how that pans out in the end.

Fast forward another week and we were close to being done with drawings.

Fast forward another week and there is gnashing of teeth over having to now wait on others for MEP (mechanical/electrical/plumbing) and structural drawings/calcs that we found out we needed.  Additionally, due to our venting out the side of the house for range hood exhaust, we had to hire a surveyor to do a plat of survey for the village to prove we were within the required distance away from the neighbors house to do this. 

We did also end up hiring an architect to size a few beams for us as the 1st floor plan went from many rooms to one room which meant large open spans that hadn’t previously existed.

(Note easier method having been to keep walls around rooms in the design like most people have in their homes)

(Oh yeah, also note irony in having to hire an architect when both of us work in an architecture firm - commence groan)

Anywho…

Many late late nights later (round of applause to J who shouldered much of the drawing work towards the end due to the technical nature of the MEP/S drawings), we felt we had scabbed together a set of drawings sufficient enough to have a fighting chance at the village. I plopped them on the building department’s desk on March 12 and walked away fully expecting to hear back from them in a few weeks (because, duh, they must know our closing is supposed to be soon and we can’t be delayed any further!  AND because T did a LOT of flirting with the woman at the front desk.)

I'm shaking my head in disbelief that I could ever dream anything so stupid now having the permit in hand and realizing how long the entire process actually took.  More on that later.

So drawings in to the village for review.

Check.

 So here is the existing floorplan.  All the dashed lines are walls or things that are being demo'd.  What exactly are you leaving you ask?  Well, the floor joists.  We thought we'd leave the floor joists.  

And here is the new plan.  Kind of hard to read, but you can get an idea of the basic layout.  In addition to the interior renovation, which involves an open living area encompassing kitchen/living/dining area, mud room, study, powder room, 4 bedrooms, and two full baths - we are also tearing off the haneous back porch enclosure currently eating up half the back yard as well as the white siding infill enclosed front porch.

And so here is the front of the house as it exists today.

 And here is our very rudimentary, half designed rendition of what it will look like eventually.  As you can see, all that white siding will be gone and the existing brick piers will be sliced to half their height - back to the original design of the house which you can see a little bit in the house just to the left of it.  The top of the new porch becomes the balcony off the master bedroom.  It actually reduces the square footage of the house, but we think it will be worth it.


Now if we can just get the property closed, we’ll be sitting pretty.
Right?