Unfortunately, the plans had changed between 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM, as I was told there would be no Dump today. Evidently there is some sort of minimum amount of garbage that makes the trip worth it, and we were under by an undetermined amount. If I had known this, I would have gone out late Friday night and taken garbage from the neighbors. Kind of the opposite from what we did in Skillman, NJ where we would go out at night and put our excess garbage in the neighbors trash cans as we only contracted for one small pick-up a week.
As a side, I'll be posting pictures of the Westport and Kent Dumps as we progress as I know this sidebar may be more interesting to some than the house.
The rest of the trip went like our version of 'clock-work'; kind of slow and sometimes not in the right time zone. We managed to get out the door within a half hour of the new start time (as we didn't need to allow Dump time) and made it to Kelley's with a ten minute window to drop off the dogs and the rugs. We seemed to be on the same page as Kim volunteered that she knew we needed to leave Kelly's at 11:30, no problem. I think I'm still learning to decipher some of this communication stuff, as we finally exited Kelley's at 11:50 and that was only after two false starts where I was already in the car as she was 'right behind' me and had to go back into the house to extract her.
We eventually made it to Kent only a few minutes late, but that was really due to some strange detour we were forced to take off of Route 7. I can now see why Kim does not take the schedule and driving estimates I come up with seriously, as even with all these delays, we were only a few minutes late. If this keeps going I'll probably be sitting in the car the night before, waiting for Kim to wake up so we can leave in the morning for the hour and a half drive.
Once we sat down with Wes, we agreed that he should show us his latest drawings and after that, we could go over all the pictures we had found during the previous week. I'm pretty sure he was hoping we would forget about our side of the 'show-and-tell', but he has not learned yet how relentless we are at pulling any conversation completely off track. He was in luck last week as I was a little off, and Kim had to bear the full responsibility for derailing the conversation. But on Saturday, he got the full team effect of our finally tuned chaotic speech and thought patterns.
(Note: you can click on the pictures to get to to be big enough to see)
We started with a drawing that Wes has made, giving us a front view of the house. We love the balance, the different gables, and windows and can now envision how the left side of the house will look as a walk out some ten feet below the rest of the house. Even though we were at first against it, we also really like the door on the right side being in the front of the house, instead of the side.
Next we went over a revised sketch of the main floor. Lots of progress on this and all our ideas from last week were incorporated. There are a couple of neat features, like a double fireplace in the Den and Great Room that shares the same stonework, the stairs as a focal point in the Great Room, a large Mud Room and the idea of a separate stairway that leads up to an unfinished room over the kitchen. This can be used for expansion later and is shown in the next picture. Wes also put in some nice flow through areas in the front and back of the Kitchen wing that make it easier to cruise around the house and added a Screened in Porch to the back right of the house.
This last picture shows the top floor, where you can see the extra room for expansion. We now have two bedrooms and a bath upstairs, and a pretty big extra closet plus a nice sized loft area. Kim decided after this meeting that she could use the loft as her work area, which will help reduce some space downstairs. I really like this last idea as since I plan on making the walk out basement my office area, having Kim on the very top floor working will really make communication easy, especially with our rapidly deteriorating hearing. I guess we'll be relying on cell phones and Skype to arrange cocktails and dinner.
Yup, we have this under control now, this house building stuff is really easy .... so, since we weren't completely overwhelmed on our ride home this time, I decided to have an anxiety attack on the potential cost for building exactly what we want, just to make the drive more interesting of course. By the time we got to Kelley's, I was OK, but Kim needed several minutes of 'quiet time' in the car as my tirade totally stressed her out. Fortunately, our next stop was drinks and dinner at Joanne and Ricks restored Colonial Home in Weston. We got a lot of great ideas from them and ended the evening feeling things were in control once again.
No comments:
Post a Comment