Let me just point out one thing you may want to consider before designing your own home. Don't. Hire an architect, explain what you want, have them design it. It is a lot of fun to sit down and sketch out what you want and how you want to live, but not understanding the structural implications is grossly misunderstood.

So we thought it would be really cool to have a sunken living room and a curved front wall and an open living space and a bedroom that floated over nothing. Which is not a problem if you don't care how much its going to cost. Then by all means design away. There is more steel in this 1700sf house than there needs to be. Most houses- which we've kindly been referring to as 'boxes'- don't even require any steel. We racked up an 8k bill for the steel alone, not to mention the overage on the lumber. And we haven't even built those "really cool" stairs we want.

Over the course of the last week, B&D Foundations came in, set up forms, poured concrete, and Basement Formspeeled the forms away. We have one deep basement- all in all it is almost 13' deep. Why so deep? You ask. Well, we can only go so high with the height of the house, as not to encroach on the bulk plane (the imaginary lines that the city requires us to stay within). We also want 9' ceilings on all of our floors. Well, what we discovered was, in order to stay under the bulk plane, the first floor had to be on grade (100'0"). That meant the floor joists were going to have to be below grade. They would have to be set into the basement walls. And if we wanted to have at least 8' ceilings in the basement, we were going to have to dig to the proverbial 'China'.

I have tried to draw this out as well as possible. This is not what you would call and 'architectural detail'. But you may get the gist.

I walked over to the lot at 7am. They were already there, ready to unload the excavator. Trucks and dump trucks were lined down the street. I thought to myself "This is a great way to make friends with your neighbors." Hillen Corporation was doing the work that day. Class A outfit. They were on time, very professional, and they even cleaned up after themselves. 

They rolled on the lot by 7:15 and by 8:00 already had the main structure down. It wasn't so much a KABOOM as it was a tickclackspfooshhhshsh. The main structure sat on the property line, so I was very nervous that there would be a pile of debris in the neighbors back yard. But the way they handled that rig was as gentle as holding a baby.

We could have moved to the suburbs. We could have found a nice large plot of land in Englewood for cheaper. We could have bought a large track house in Broomfield for pennies on the dollar. But Nooooooo, we had to stay in the urban edge, more specifically Sunnyside.

Sunnyside is what I like to refer to as “the poor Highlands”.

I heart this hood.