Hi, guys

R.E. your last e-mail - how's this?


There are other options; this was just to demonstrate how much room there is in your suite (a bit more than the quick calculation in my e-mail this morning).

The bathroom & office can be swapped around, and that 12' wall between them can be moved at will.

Oops, I forgot to put a door in that wall.... silly. Imagine having to go through the bedroom every time? I don't think so.

Speaking of oops - remember that there may be an extra 9" along the office/stairwell/landing wall (an extra 9 sq feet for the office).


Francois

Hi, guys - you mean like this?

Floorplan:


From outside, pool deck view...

Before:


After:




problem in the details: the second floor of the wings is 9" wider than the ground floor, like this:



Which, when you move the wall forward, leads to weird cutouts :



Which I kinda fixed, but not really:


Another way would be to double-up the wall below it, build the ground floor 9" wider... but then the sliding doors on the ground floor would be off-center:


As a side-issue, I finally understand why why my vestibule/landing measurements kept giving me grief. And I'll need to revise the floorplan I posted earlier. I'm not sure which storey is off by 9", but one of them is. Either your room is 13 1/2 square feet bigger, or the diningroom/kitchen is 31 square feet smaller, than my drawings.


Back on-topic:

- I assume this ties in with no stairs up to the roof, since it eliminates the little stairs... I still think we should keep 'em, the new stairs would/will be easy to cordon off (and where would we go to watch the sunset in spring & fall?)

- I think bringing those walls forward would make the central courtyard area claustrophobic, right now the 2nd floor set-back opens it up.

- It'd make the front even more of a winter wind catcher than it already is. Issues for the big livingroom, but also for your room. This is the most wind-beaten wall of the house, you can see it in the size of the drifts and depth of the cuts it makes in the snow...





... and I won't put a window on that wall: not in the diningroom, not upstairs. If I did, you'd have me closing it up with solid wall within a year. It'd be worse than the livingroom wall-o-glass.

- If this about where to put the stairs, there are other ways... one would be to add a bit along the back (I was playing with this, for the stairs, last week):







From the garden, it dissapears - like that bit of the livingroom I worried about before, when we were talking about symmetry from the garden side.

It does only gets you 45 sq ft, as opposed to the 88 sq ft your suggestion adds. But with almost 600 square feet already...

For perspective, your current room is about 450, and wastes a lot of that on bad layout. I haven't drawn out the back jacuzzi/steamroom area, but I think your proposed master suite (not counting its decks) is roughly the same size as the current master suite, deck (but not steam room) included.


Final note: Off-topic again, kind of - In the last picture, you can see how off-center the front door is (the two windows), and I need to revise that, as well. Rows 1 and 3 are moveable! We don't need to center on the current hallway, we can make everything perfectly centered: door, windows, the posts... all of it. I'll post updated sketches as soon as I work out the details (and figure out which storey is off so I can fix that, too).

Hi Jon, Tim...

Here ya go - this is the basic shell-of-a-floorplan for your new master suite.

Click to enlarge...



Light grey is the ground floor's outline, dark grey is the 2nd floor.

Once again, we'll need posts or walls where the current exterior wall is, and (I'm 95% certain) where the bedroom's back wall is right now.

As we re-think stairwell locations, we might want to get rid of the little doors off the current landings? Pretty useless, now, and it'd give us more room for redesigning the little outdoor side-deck-to-roof-deck stairs.

Okay, hope this is enough to get ya started...

Later,

Francois

This post is for Jon and Tim

Hi Guys -

I think this may be the easiest way to get drawings to you, at least for now... no attachments to deal with, and I can insert comments more easily

Reminder: click on the picture to enlarge.


This is the basic shell for the new diningrooom/kitchen section:

(livingroom side)

(garden side)

The dotted lines represent the approximate position of axes that need supporting. It could be evenly spaced posts, as shown here, but it could also be walls or sections of walls, or posts disguised by fireplace as in Ariadne's... whatever. Just so long as there's no gap, along one of those lines, that's longer then 8 feet or so.

The first line from the left could move a bit - it hasn't been built yet - I just placed the same distit where it is for symmetrical to the oppositely from the door, for symmetry.

The 2nd line from the left absolutely has to be where it is (it's the exterior wall right now).

The third-from-the-left doesn't really need to be there at all, but it balances the 2nd line, so things don't look totally lopsided when you walk in the door.

The right-most line is where the bedrooms' back walls are right now, and I'm 98% sure it's load-bearing.


We need to decide where to put the stairs, and how big we want them, etc. Figure about 8' x 8' for stairs that come to a landing & switch back, or 12 x 3' for stairs that just go straight up.

Ideally, I think these stairs should be enclosed, to better control sound travellin upstairs, and to prevent warm/cold air drafts. If we put them in the top-right corner somewhere, then the stairwell can continue down to the lower bedroom (current laundry-room area).

Bear in mind that it's easy to wind up outdoors at the top of the stairs, something we want to avoid... The measurements for that are as follows (Sorry for the clutter, I just pasted the existing floorplan of Rob's room onto the drawing).

(livingroom)

(garden)

Now the fun part:

For the sake of comparisions, the existing diningroom is about 20' 6" by 11' 1"; the existing kitchen is 10' 4" by 11' 1"; and the laundry room is 6'8" x 10'1". Total area: about 409 square feet.

The new location is 41'7" by 22'11" ...total area 952 square feet.

Or, to put it more graphically (oh, bad pun):


It's a fair bit bigger than I'd realised, even with 40 to 80 square feet set aside for a staircase... I think we can fit a billiard table.



Slightly off-topic: the last few days, I've been thinking that this wing wants a fireplace as well. Or maybe, with the open-floor design, a freestanding woodstove? There's some pretty slick ones out there...

from wittus design (http://www.wittus.com/) :



The above also comes in a slightly different version - wider platform, looks almost like a coffe-table - I can't download the picture, it's in this PDF: http://www.wittus.com/Specs/shaker%20spec.pdf



... And then therte's these, from Morsoe (http://www.morsoe.com/us/stoves.htm):




And finally, there's SCAN stoves (http://kiconf.krog-iversen.dk/us/), which website I can't download pictures from (flash animation).


Okay, that's it for now. Talk to you later,

Francois

Testing, testing...

If this goes more easily than last year, I may update & start using it again...

(Got a new computer this spring)


testing...


I want to see how easy or hard these are to post... bear with me, I want to see what happens with a lot of pictures...





I also want to see how easy it is to move them around, and insert comments... This is one of the wings, with the planned added spave on the back.









This is the foundation, which will be getting rebuilt, and extended a bit.













See the cut-in corners at the top of the drawing? Picture them full - the back of the house just one continuous wall for the whole 92'.

this is (part of) what I've been up to lately.

I want to test this because it may be an easy way to get drawings and specs to people. We won't be keeping the house open this winter, so I'll be in Brooklyn for three months. If this blog saves me trips to the mailbox, trips to Long Island, and saves me a ton of money on printer ink cartridges, great.

Okay, let's see how this goes. testing, testing...