Lots of model talk these last few posts, but I wanted to share a 3D render that Stillwater had done for my home. This was started before our current value engineering exercise to bring down the construction costs, but it’s still awesome to see the house come to life in the render and truly appreciate the complexity of the stairs and retaining required. But changes are coming…
During the past month, I’ve had a few calls with Stillwater to run through the plan edits being made. Nothing to show yet, but the big changes involve bringing the house further down the hill (about 4 feet), as well as moving it forward a bit over the depth of the garage. This eliminates some of the complexity in the stairs. The biggest change is using the back wall of the top level as a retaining wall of the hillside – so the house will be more embedded into the slope. This helps eliminate the two crawl space areas at the back of the lower level as well as the excavation and multiple retaining walls needed to have a short backyard seen in the earlier plans.
The only downsides to all that is that all back wall windows will be eliminated from the living level (that’s fine), I won’t have the extra crawl space storage (didn’t need it, I’m pretty minimal in my possessions), and I don’t get a backyard (it would just more to maintain, and with all the decks and terraces up front, I don’t know why I’d ever go back there).
As soon as I have more finalized plans, I’ll post side by side comparisons to show how things have changed. But the overall simplification and elimination of things that were less important to me, should go a long way in bringing down the construction costs for the site.