sleepy wrote:
.... the extension of the house ties it all together.
Sleepy
I agree, and I have "The Boss" to thank for that. My initial plan was to just have the upper bay where the cars park a single-story, with a peaked roof butting into the wall that overlooked the flat garage roof and extending over both the upper and lower garage bays. She convinced me I didn't want that, and in retrospect it probably would have looked strange. I don't think I would have wanted to build an attached RV garage if the roofline over the RV bay had ended up higher than the rest of the house. That's one (and maybe the only) advantage of a hillside lot, I suppose.
I still don't know what we'll actually DO with that space above the garage, though.
As my projects tend to do, certain details of the plans are changing as we go, usually to accommodate "issues" that crop up. For example, I was initially going keep and re-pupose the RV cover on one of two level pads I was having constructed behind the house. The slope and ground sponginess of the hillside turned out to be a bigger problem for the dump trucks than anticipated, though. The entire budget and then some for the two pads was blown on the first pad, so we called it quits. The RV cover has been taken down and will be sold, and the one pad will be where the red barn is moved after the garage is built. I built the red barn planning to eventually move it, so it's mostly screwed together and can be taken apart into panels for reassembly.
One other change has to do with the exterior walls of the new room above the garage. The drawings show a "wall of windows" above the garage doors, with the opposite wall on the backside looking the same. That is a HUGE room though (30x30), bigger than anything else in our house. The boss came up with the idea of moving those exterior walls in about five feet, creating a recessed balcony on each side. The "wall of windows" on each side would then have a french door set in the middle to access the balcony. The interior room would still be pretty big, and the balconies would be nice to sit on. Making the balcony floors weather and water proof is a concern of mine, and we're still working on that with the builder. My thought right now is to have the balcony floors be a 3-4" slab of concrete, but what's done under it to prevent leaks is going to be important. We've talked about having a sheet metal pan made, using shower-pan membrane, etc. If any of you pro's out there have some ideas about this, could you PM me?
:):)
