Now that we knew where we wanted to build, the next step was to come up with a design. We wanted 2 bedrooms, 2 baths and everything on one floor.

Having lived the last ten years in homes with multiple floors we came to the conclusion that we ended up spending 90% + of our waking hours on one floor of the house so it just seemed to make sense to try and build a one story this time around.

Besides, we had plenty of room on our four lots to make it work. After several weeks of playing around with some design ideas, we came up with a plan that would become our new home. We figured that we could build the main house in two stages with the second bedroom / bath and laundry in phase two.

The plan was that we would move in after phase 1 was done and continue working on phase 2. (that didn’t happen as planned)

Originally I had penciled in a workshop corner in the laundry area to accommodate our solar control system and batteries as well as leave me a workshop area that i could use until our garage and my workshop could be completed in phase 3.

(I would later modify the phase 2 plan to remove my temporary workshop, leaving only the solar system and batteries. Cristina wanted a larger laundry area and in hindsight, it was the right move)