Major Milestone -- House plans are signed off

For more than a year now, I've been imagining all the possibilities for our new house. I've tried to think of all the little details that will make life easier, all the things I miss from Canadian houses (closets! Mudroom!)  all the things I love about italian houses (cellar, thick cement everything), and gone through about a million different designs, refining and getting better each time around, and finally we have our final drafts.

I gave my original designs to the architect a few months ago, and he made his suggestions and adjustments, put in the necessary things in order to get the permissions through -- and this is not an easy thing because we are building what is considered highly sensitive parkland, so we are very very very restricted in what would be acceptable to build; in fact, we are only allowed to build at all because the area needs non-intensive farmers that will tend the land properly, and there aren't enough of those around these days, so we have special government dispensation to come in and take care.

And so now, finally, about 5kg of paper all organised into the appropriate folders for the appropriate bureaucrats have gone off the appropriate offices, and within 45-60 days we should have all our permissions set and be ready to build...of course, in 60 days it will be winter, and we can't do anything until spring anyway, but still....

So here are the floor plans -- a few essential things I really really wanted include the mudroom --  a place to sit on a bench and put on boots and hats and coats, with its own entrance and outside the mudroom door will be a bench, bootjack, and fountain for cleaning up before coming inside.  Also the easy access from the kitchen to the cellar.  In the original plans, I had a spiral staircase in the kitchen itself, and then i realised that was dumb...I just had to put the kitchen right by the backdoor staircase.  Imagining trying to navigate a spiral staircase with a crate of 30 jars of jam set me straight pretty quick on that.  Gab was smart enough to realise we would need ramp access to the cellar as well because even a regular staircase will be a pain to access with a 70kg wheelbarrow load of potatoes!

I also insisted on a huge dining space, within the kitchen.  Dining room separate from kitchen dining has just always been wasted space for us, but I need dining space big enough for entertaining, and we can have some biiiiiig parties, so the 10 seater table in the kitchen will have another 12 seater attachment that we will put in a "T" across the top when we have parties.  The sitting area in front of a big open kitchen fireplace was also an essential.  Of course, big kitchen space with sit in island, with all the cooking we'll be doing, that's essential.  Windows in the kitchen, lots and lots.  That's something very uncommon here, and in fact I had to fight for it...Gab and the architect will both see the benefit when its finally built!

A bonus that i love but had not even dared to put in the original design is the loft studio space above the dining area.  Because of the strict building restrictions, we can only have a ground floor, can't over 4m height as an average across the whole...however, there is a high ceiling space right across where its widest, and just enough for a loft comes out right in that space.  The loft will look down on the kitchen and the sitting area, and will have a lovely wooden bridge which will cross the entrance hallway, so you will see that when you look up from both the front and back doors.

5 big bedrooms, so everyone has their private space, and there is a very big linen/general walkin closet by the bathroom.  We only have one "main" bathroom because we're a "pee with the door open" kind of family, and always end up using the same bathroom anyway, so all our bestest bathroom resources will go into one single gigantic super wonderful bathroom, and the other two bathrooms will be just small useful things.  Oh, there's a fourth bathroom in the basement, but I don't think we'll be using that much -- its a just in caser...The laundry room, off the small guest bathroom, has a door directly onto the portico, so laundry will go straight from the washer outside onto the line without any carrying anywhere.  

And here are the computer renderings of the house placed into an actual photograph of the land where it will be built.  The hills in the background are on the other side of the river, the house backs onto a steep cliff down to the river, where will put a nice gazebo as a walking / lookout point.

First, below pictures of the front of the house.  Not shown, the barn would be just to your right as you look at the house in this direction. The house will built with antiseismic armoured cement -- the wooden panneling is just an aesthetic finish that the bureaucrat responsible for passing the externals is particularly partial too -- she has already pre-approved our first drafts, so we know she likes this finish. Also, the scan came out a bit too yellow, the colour of the stucco parts is more biscuit than lemon...

And here is a rendering of the house from the side. This is my favourite perspective, and its what we'll see as we come in from the garden and poultry areas.  The top pic you can see the back of the house and the portico, and the bottom pic is full-on side view, and you can see the barn in the background behind the house.

And here is the rendering of the barn -- the top pic is what you see from the house, and the bottom pic is what you see from the road, and the side the animals access from.  The top doors are hay storage and the bottom is the circuit for the goats -- they go in the small door on the right one at a time to be hooked up to the milking machine in the milking room, then exit the milking room in to the main barn area from inside, then exit the barn from the main double doors in the middle.  Not shown, just around the corner where the wooden panneling is, is the big garage and storage area, and on the "short" side of the barn (so the window on the right side of the top picture) will be my mosaic studio and materials storage area.

Now we just have to wait for all the permissions to come back, and we are set to go!  But first there's a baby that needs to be born (first things first, right! Priorities priorities!)...only a few more weeks now before Ernesto Elia joins us, and I am quite ready...he's getting awfully heavy!!