How about a 96 square foot house?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/27/carollloyd.DTL

Went over all the doors, door finishes and door hardware for the house today… I never knew there were so many options for door. Glad that’s over.

Well, I decided a long time ago that it would be neat to put a big solar voltaic system at my new place and try to generate 100% of the electricity needed for the house (and servers and everything else I use since I work from home).
So I ended up going with a system that […]

The foundation/slab was (finally) poured for the house today, so I figure I’ll post another time lapse video (it ends this afternoon).
Sorry the quality is lame and it’s little, YouTube downsamples the video, not me… To give you an idea of how the “real” video looks, this is the last frame of the video:

It’s hard to see, since this is just one area, and it’s all buried anyway, but there is lots and lots of conduit under the house (the grey pipes). That way you can run wires or whatever else to different locations in the house as needed in the future (for example maybe you need […]

I picked appliances for the house a few weeks ago, and I ended up with a pretty cool stove (I ended up with the 6 burner, 22″ griddle configuration).
The best part about it is this:
Certified by Star-K to meet religious regulations
Huh? Must be a Jewish/kosher thing I’m thinking… {shrug}
http://subzero.com/wolf/description.asp?category=dual%20fuel%20ranges&id=30
This will be great because I […]

There appears to be an alien in the camera dome at the construction site. Great… now I need to go there, climb up there, clean it out and hopefully not get some alien egg implanted in my chest.

This is a live webcam shot (well live as of this posting) of my basement. The only reason I think it’s cool is because the three important sides are backfilled now, so we can finally start digging the footings for the main house (the front side isn’t backfilled yet because the dirt from the […]

I met with my interior designer today and I actually got *all* the plumbing fixtures picked out for the house. Faucets, shower stuff, toilets, sinks, bathtubs, etc.
There’s a lot of sinks… so it’s not as easy as it sounds. Just glad that’s over.

I threw together a time lapse of the basement being built. The end of it is today, when they took all the forms off the basement walls and we actually have freestanding concrete walls. Now for the waterproofing of the walls…
The movie runs through 4 hours per second. The resolution […]

There ended up being about 750 tons of concrete poured/sprayed today at the construction site for the basement walls and pool.
That’s a lot of concrete… So much that you could give yourself a hernia trying to lift the pool or basement…

Today we are getting concrete poured in the basement walls as well as concrete sprayed into the pool. I’m guessing it’s pretty much just going to be a zillion concrete trucks coming and going all day (it looks like they do 4 trucks at a time… 2 for basement and 2 for pool).
Shot from […]

More than anything, this is just a bookmark for myself. That way when/if I need it at a later date, I remember what it was!
These units are Single Band which means there are 3 separate units to serve the different carriers. Each WorkBase can fill up to 40,000 square feet […]

I didn’t realize how tall 12 foot ceilings are until I walked around the guest house today (since it now has trusses it’s easy to gauge). They are pretty high up there.
The nice thing about it is we can setup some interesting stuff indoors… like a climbing wall, base jumping, hang gliding indoors, etc.

It doesn’t work so well inside a dome at night with the infrared illuminator on.

If 2Wire’s crappy router would let me remotely configure it, maybe I could open up the ports on the firewall so I could get into the camera configuration…. but no, I have to drive there. So dumb.

The webcam at the job site is now live… After spending about 2 hours wrestling with 2Wire’s lameness (I need to screw around with it more to see if I can get it configured better).

It’s mounted on a pole, it’s had Internet connectivity to the site since Thursday, it’s been plugged in since Friday and I was planning on hooking up the Ethernet cable and configuring it on Friday, but I was too tore up to leave my home.
Figuring I would do it today, I went to the site […]

I was talking to the SBC/AT&T guys that installed the Internet connectivity at the job site today and having fiber to the door is going to have some really cool advantages early next year (right now they just run phone and 6Mbps Internet across it). At that point the “standard” Internet connectivity on it […]

My new place has fiber to the door, so there’s some bad news, and some great news to go along with that. The bad news is that I can’t get DSL. The great news is I can get something way better and cheaper (6Mbit connectivity over fiber for $27/month).
If all goes well, we […]

Went up to the site today to see what’s been going on in the last 2 weeks (since I’ve been gone), and it looks like lots of stuff has been happening…

Guest house/garage has it’s concrete slab poured
Basement looks like it’s just about ready to have it’s slab poured
Framing of the guest house has started (2 […]

Anne’s aunt is a real estate agent and lives in Playa Hermosa, so we went to check out a house she was selling. A pretty nice place with a decent (hah) view… I think it was around 4,500 square feet and rents as a vacation rental for $5,000/week. It’s currently on the market […]

Got word from Mike today that we officially have power at the site now. Someone must have read my plea.

Check this bed out… it’s pretty pimp.
A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million).

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2006-08/08/content_659747.htm

So I was checking out some of the stuff that should be installed soon at the construction site (most notably electricity). I guess SDG&E is going to be putting in a digital electric meter vs. the “old school” mechanical type.
I Googled around a bit to find out what’s up with them… I guess they […]

So it looks like the basement is more or less dug out now… ended up being about 1000 cubic yards of dirt. They should start hauling the dirt away later this week.
To get a general scale, Stephanie is standing over there, and she’s not a little kid like the picture makes her look. […]

Went up to the site yesterday, and there’s lots of digging going on now. 3 tractors up there (a normal backhoe, a little one for doing foundation footings and then a bit excavator one for digging the basement). It’s hard to tell how much dirt was pulled out, but check out the picture […]

I’m not sure what this trench is for (I guess one end of the pool maybe?), but there is now a pretty deep trench (like 12 or 13 feet deep) where the edge of the pool is going to be…

I bought an exterior dome for the camera I got (to be installed at the construction site), and the damn thing was missing the two electrical transformers it was supposed to come with. No biggie though, Videolarm shipping them out today, so should have them soon.
I guess it’s not terribly important right now since […]

So had the “pre-construction” meeting today with the HOA. Everything looks a-okay, and we are cleared (finally) for full blown construction.
I meandered up to the site after the meeting, and the half ditch is now a full ditch, with conduit pipes and gas lines in it even. The more interesting part is the […]

Shawn, myself and Allison went to take a peek at my property today and there’s half a ditch now (about 150′, with another 150′ to go). It’s so SDG&E can install a transformer. I guess that means construction started… sorta.

Guess what? We have building permits as of today… Which means we can actually break ground on the house. (it’s about time!)
There is a pre-construction meeting with the home owners association next Thursday.

The only thing that could should have held us up today as far as being issued building permits was the Waste Discharge Identification Number (see this post). But the county of San Diego agreed that we weren’t disturbing more than 1 acre, because landscaping isn’t a land disturbance (only the foundation, pool and driveway […]

Guess what? The fire department gave their stamp of approval without any changes needed. So now we go back to the city on Monday and get the last 8 things checked off (over the counter). One of the eight items has not been completed yet (we need a Waste Discharge Identification Number […]

For anyone that is looking to purchase a vacation home, why not a castle?
But seriously… I want a castle for my birthday! (please)

http://www.wists.com/chateaux.html

I picked up the plans from plan check today (this is from 2nd submittal), and there were 8 changes needed. This is tiny compared to the 1st submittal.
At least the 3rd (and hopefully final) submittal can be done “over the counter” right there since there are so few changes.
UpdatePlans are at the fire department […]

So today I had to pay all the “fees” required to build a house. This included the following:
Traffic Impact Fee: $8,299.00
Park Fee: $1,000.00
Fire District Fee: $4,132.36
Building Permit Fee: $2,176.00
PAD: $4,000.00 (I don’t even know what in the hell this stands for)
Fire District Plan Check Fee: $350 $450
Water District […]

Apparently bribing the city really does help get your plans through the city MUCH faster. Plans came back for the revisions (which are all minor), so it’s all good.

The city of San Diego assigned an address to the vacant lot where I’m going to be building my house. Cool.

I found out today that you can push your plans through the city’s review process faster by paying them to “work overtime”. So that’s what I’m doing. It should be 2-3 weeks now instead of 6-8 weeks.

I forgot to mention that the city now has my plans for my house, so breaking ground on it is now in their hands as far as when they issue building permits.

I haven’t seen the “official” review response, but I think it went well today. Pretty much the HOA just wants a fence moved (maybe some other minor things), but all the “big” stuff I was worried about seemed to be fine.
So for the most part that means the house is pretty much good to […]

I need to get a good pan/tilt/zoom camera for the site of the house construction (to automatically make a time lapse of the house being built and also just to see what’s going on at any given time).
I’ve done a little research on it, and so far the Canon is the best one (for the […]

I always had plans to do a home theatre in my house, but it was going to be a bedroom that was turned into a home theatre. Well, I was finally talked into reversing that stance. It’s now going to be a home theatre that could be turned into a bedroom (if really […]

I just found out today that the house I’m building is going to have fiber to the door from the phone company (SBC/AT&T), so there will be no old school twisted pair copper wires coming into my home.
The downside to this is the temporary construction trailer is going to need special equipment […]

The 2nd (of 3) design reviews by the design board (for the HOA) where my house is going to be built is done. It was approved on the first try submittal (yay!).
I think the final submittal is basically just the working drawings (same thing you submit to the county to get permits). If […]

Okay, I finally sat down tonight and figured out what I *think* I need (at least it’s a start so the experts have something to start with) to do centrally distributed audio/video for the house.
Audio
So I’m thinking every room (minus bathrooms, except for master) should be an audio “zone” as well as the pool house […]

I have a color rendering of the front elevation of my house now (it’s required for the second phase of the design review by the HOA).
It was too big to fit in my scanner, so I pieced it together from two different scans. If you don’t like the line where the images were joined, […]

After I made this post about maybe having three pools (technically), I took my building/site plans to the San Diego Department of Planning and Land Use this afternoon to just ask them what they thought.
It turns out I’m exempt from the normal pool fence guidelines because my parcel is more than 3 acres. Not […]

The pool fence for my house has been the only part about it I don’t like. It’s stressing me out so much that I’ve been dreaming about it. I don’t like it because it ends up cutting my backyard in half and dividing it (there’s also some other weirdness that I won’t bother […]

Okay, I need to start making a list of things I want to be able to control from the home automation system for my house… So I’m just going to use this blog entry for that. If anyone can think of anything I’ve forgotten, please leave it as a comment and I’ll update this […]

I also saw the first rough sketches of a 5 hole golf course for my house. It looks pretty damn cool if I do say so myself. It even has a pond in the middle (although I didn’t see a golf cart path).
The front of the house is going to […]

The fire department doesn’t like the fact that I want to put a pool house against the edge of the slope off the pad (even if it’s 100% non-combustable materials). Now we are going to see if maybe they will be happy if we extend the pad in that area 15′ out using a […]

I had a 9:30 am meeting today with the homeowners association where I’m building my house for the first stage of a three stage process of getting your house approved to be built.
Of course, I’ve never been to something like that before, so I’m thinking it’s going to be 3 or 4 hours or something. […]

So I’m thinking about getting a system for my new house where you can get an implant and doors will unlock for you automatically. But I also thought it would be cool if you could use those to track where someone (or a pet) was in the house in real time. Well I […]

I’m starting to think I may have actually lost touch with reality here…
For my pool, I want a big (large enough to actually swim in) zero-edge pool with a swim-up bar. Then I started thinking it would be pretty cool to be in the pool and go under a waterfall into a grotto where […]

So after my last post, I was poking around the Internet regarding RFID access control systems for buildings (for a house in my case), and I found a company called VeriChip. They offer systems that are wearable (what I originally was looking for), but also implantable inside your body, which seems pretty cool to […]

German companies seem to always make some pretty cool stuff. Check out these faucets for example. The first model (the squarish one) even has LEDs that light up the water depending on the temperature (the colder the water, the bluer it is, the hotter, the redder it be becomes). All their faucets […]

Google Earth lets you generate .kmz files by right-clicking a marker and saving it. Pretty handy, but I wanted to be able to adjust the tilt and direction the default view comes up as, so I poked a little bit (well not that much… heh). The .kmz files are simply zipped .kml files […]

Funny I think that because it hasn’t even started yet.
But I met up with my architect and saw a new property that I liked better (and put an offer on it) on Tuesday, met with a landscape architect on Wednesday, going to Irvine to meet with the company for the home automation/smart […]

Well, they rejected my offer I put in yesterday, but came back with an offer that was still pretty good, so I’m going to go into a 15 (quick huh?) escrow on the new lot tomorrow.
Anyone want to buy my old lot?

Funny how things work out… I was meeting with my architect this morning, and he showed me a lot for sale right down the street from my existing one. To make a long story short, I put an offer on the new property today, so hopefully I’ll get that and sell my old lot.
The […]

Now that I’m moving forward with having my house designed and built, I just wanted to say how nice it is to have an architect that actually does everything when he says he is going to. No nagging necessary… which is a welcome change from every other architect (individual and firms) I’ve dealt with […]

Until a few days ago, I had no idea what was the difference between different style homes. For example, I couldn’t tell you what’s different between a Tuscan or Italian style.
But dammit, now I know! And I also know that I like French Chateau style (which is what I’m going to have my […]