Design
Our original idea was to have a country house with a wrap-around porch. Unfortunately, these just don't go that well in the Phoenix area. Most houses around here are more southwest in flavor and we've seen what houses look like that stick out. Not for us, thank you
So we decided on a Santa Barbara style house. It would have a very large kitchen and pantry (we both like to cook) and have a home office, a living and dining room, a craft room, and library. Added to that would be an entertainment area, two spare bedrooms (besides the master suite), and a storage area.
As well, either attached to the house or as a stand-alone building, I wanted a woodworking shop. I've enjoyed building things since high school and have always worked in tight space conditions. This time (hopefully) I could have the space I always wanted.
Shirley's son is an architectural designer. He designs homes in the $1-25 million range. Fabulous homes. Starter mansions (and not so starter). So he agreed to design us a home on a smaller scale and if it was too much, we could always cut it down.
After some long discussions as to what we wanted, he drew up a concept drawing that was incredible. We made very few modifications to it and this was transformed into the drawings in the next section. The only significant change was the roof design. While quite striking, his original roof design would have cost 3 times as much as the existing one to build. And that's expensive eyecandy.
The only changes from the original plans were converting an elevator into a wine room and expanding of the original 3 car garage into a 4 /1/2 car garage with the left 2 1/2 stalls becoming my workshop, rather than a stand-alone workshop. The latter didn't look as appropriate on the smaller lot.