We sent you the link to our new house blog months ago with promises of regular posts and then...nothing. It has been a busy several months getting settled in our rental in North Asheville and with holidays every way you turn, progress has slowed down a bit.
The planning process and getting estimates from subs had all been going along relatively smoothly. We are all ready with the building permit and the loan application (need the final set of plans before we can submit). Then we got back the quote from our foundation contractor. You can see from the elevations posted that we have a big, big foundation wall. We are going to get some more pics up to give you a better sense of the topography on the site, but there are basically two problems we are dealing with: 1) super steepness; 2) colluvial soil found in some spots on the site. We learned about the questionable soil after consulting with a geotechnical engineer and in consultaion with him and the structural engineer already working on the project, our architect came up with a foundation the likes of which no foundation contractor has ever seen before (it involves about 21' of exposed foundation wall for the guest wing--lots and lots of concrete and rebar and many hours of work). So until this point we were hopeful that we would be breaking ground at the beginning of 2009 and this news put up a huge roadblock. Back to the drawing board we went and in not too long, a solution emerged. We basically moved the house up the mountain about 30', avoiding the colluvial soil (we had to get more test pits dug by the geo tech engineer) and reducing the size of our foundation wall dramatically.
This is what the original site plan looked like:
Here is what we have now:
The driveway is smaller--stops before the house. The house makes more use of the relatively flat land where the original driveway was. It also creates a garden in front of the house with a nice walkway running through it.
So it stinks that we spent more time and money coming up with this second plan, but in the end, we will save money on our foundation and will have what we think is a pretty nice site for the house.
