About A House - Timeline Story 1

It's been a few weeks since my last update. We were getting a little discouraged by the delay in getting our permits from the city. The approval finally came Dec 20, 2011!

Here's a timeline of the project up to this momentous milestone...

May 2010 - Purchased property
Dec 2010 - Preliminary discussion on house design
Feb 2011 - Begin design in ernest as we sold our house
Mar 2011 - Draft interior floor plan drawings
Apr 2011 - Potential of peat on the site investigation begin
May 2011 - Draft exterior design drawings
July 2011 - Completion of geology report which closes the peat and water table risks
Aug 2011 - Discussion with city to start permit application. 64% SFR* qualification ran into a snag
Sept 2011 - Detailed drawings and various engineering firms seal of approval starts
Nov 2011 - Submitted all documents, final approval wait begin
Dec 2011 - Ceraclad use for exterior cladding rejected by city. Drawings revised to not use Ceraclad!
Dec 20, 2011 - Finally!

Total time of 9 months for design & permit application. It is within the range of the 6 to 9 months average expected. I think ours required 9 months since it's a custom home and the extra geotechnical engineering report for foundation on peat.

Saving Grace, you ask? The builder has been working on scheduling demolition activities to start right after permit approval... progress as of:

Jan 4, 2012 - house demo, old tree taken down, site cleared

Jan 6, 2012 - house positioned, foundation surveyed and backfilled

Most importantly, all sides of the neighbours' house are still standing!

Cost of site assessment, design and permits up to approval: $44,000

About A House... Designs That Inspire

In designing this house, other than our general requirement of having a suite on the ground floor for elderly parents; many other considerations were incorporated:

• overall house style bounded by the zoning
• maximize natural light and orientation of the lot
• low maintenance and eco material
• simplicity and openness
• maximize square footage usage
• economize construction cost
• accommodate existing furniture and decorative pieces lovingly collected over the years
• minimalistic but warm sense of style
• modern material that works for a traditional house style

Double Garage

The Internet really changed the way we researched for ideas compared to when we did our renovation back in 1999! There is so much resources available for ideas and application examples of potential building materials. 

Here'a short list of resources that inspired us to research our design elements down to the most minute detail.  They open our eyes to all the possibilities and our house wouldn't be anywhere nearly as nice without their contribution. These sites inspire us to start our own blog so that some day... maybe, just maybe ours would be nice enough to inspire someone else.  To these sites, we thank you! 

Superkul Architect

An amazing Victorian house in SFO

Design Shuffle Blog

Houses magazine issue 76

urbaynehomes

Denver Modern

Ecomajority

Clair Rockel Realtor (she sells cool houses and posts awesome pictures of her listings)

Google Image (incredible amount of photos of design ideas googled)

Special mention to A House By The Park, if you have a good look at its content, you will know why!

About A House... Design Almost Done!

Lots of friends have mentioned that we should document the process of our house building in a blog. Now is probably the best time to get started as we're very close to the end of the design stage and about 2 weeks from getting our permit!

Here's a picture of the 100+ year old house that's on the property. Try as we may to want to reno it... not possible!

We're working with Wilma Leung, named one of the top influencer in residential construction by BC Homes Magazine to design it. The concept is to build a modern Vancouver Special with:

• no basement
• separate senior friendly suite on the main floor 
• a bigger suite on the upper floor plus the attic for us
• eco design and energy efficiency in mind
• low long term maintenance

Overall square ft of the new house will be around 2400 sq ft with 800 for the secondary suite and about 1600 Sq Ft for us. The overall design is extremely compact and maximizes usage of the slanted space under the roof.

The design is a mix of modern and traditional; modern in the building materials but the overall shape of the house is typical old timer Vancouver house.

Our builder is Arthur Lo of Insightful Healthy Home. He is part of the team that built the CMHC sponsored Equilibrium Project Harmony House.

More about the green aspects of the design another time...