The Design

I’m going to tell you about how the design came about.

It seems like so long ago now, but it was a beautiful afternoon, and we had a small leak in the roof. So Dwayne of course, went up to fix it. It was about 6.30pm, and it was so lovely and warm and sunny up there that it started ticking over in his mind, that why couldn't we utilise this? We lose the sun in the yard about 5pm in summer, maybe a little later, but not much. So for him to feel the heat and sunshine covering the roof area, while he looked down at the yard in shadow, he was frustrated and wanted to change things. When Dwayne came down off that roof, he was so full of ideas. Wild and wonderful ideas.

What if we could do this magical thing where we live up there....? We could capture all that sunshine. We would still be at work, where we needed to be, but imagine what kind of house we could put up there?

As is pretty standard round these parts, at first I thought he was losing his ever loving mind. Not gonna lie, I might still think he’s completely loopy, but as is also pretty standard round here, Mr Imagination kept at me. Coming up with one crazy scheme after another and in more and more detail until I started to actually believe that maybe it was possible after all.

I was definitely still on the fence, but to humour him I sent him over to measure the building. While I started researching online CAD programmes because this here is WAY above my paygrade but I’m a Gemini, a perfectionist, and a very intelligent overachiever. Never let a lack of knowledge stop you when you can totally learn this in a day.

Ahem.

And I did.

So by the time he had numbers, I had a basic plan. a few tweaks to the measurements and we had a box!

I know, so exciting right?

So once we started digging into putting together a house plan, we put in hours and hours of research.

We spent weeks working on different layouts. Him searching house plans on Google and looking at how others had designed things while giving me directions and tweaking parts before chucking the lot out and starting from scratch.

We scoured the internet for ideas in all forms. Both of us looking at different things at different times, making notes, figuring out what we each wanted.

Then once we had some things in mind, we put both of our heads together and started the arduous task of turning brain ideas into solid ‘on-paper’ ideas.

Which as you can imagine was no easy feat! I swear there were so many iterations of the design I actually lost count.

We went back and forth, with mostly him tossing out ideas like cookies and me racking my brain as to how to make those align with the space we had and the size we had - as we knew those dimensions were fixed. So. Many. Restarts.

We argued, we agreed, we negotiated and we laughed. There were also tears and many long conversations about feasibility.

in fact the closer we got to feeling like the plan was solid, the more nervous I got.

This thing was spiralling into a mammoth space and it was like a monster that had taken on its own life and all I was doing was running after it trying to grab its lead!

We had a huge number of things we were totally agreed on, so it was a good starting point.

Single level living, with space for visitors, kids play, entertaining. We wanted light and easy care. With a few of the luxuries we hadn’t afforded ourselves before. We wanted work space and home space to be separated. And a safe place for the kids to finish growing up.

After six months, we had nailed it!

We finally had a model of our home.

It was hard to look at to begin with because I didn’t want to get too attached to the idea. And yes I completely admit that I loved it, but I didn’t want to love it too much as we had no idea if this was affordable, buildable, or whether we could get consents and stuff.

Now, we are no architects but we thought our ‘final’ design was pretty decent.

It ticked all our boxes and we thought it looked awesome.

So once we got to here, we decided it was time to talk to BECA more and we organised a meeting with them where we showed them our plan, we talked through what we hoped and what we thought we would like to aim for.

So just so you can see, here is 'our' plan, that we handed over to BECA and the architects;