Construction begins..... Excavation, footing and foundation

The end result is the walls of our house...


Finally we got some reprieve and got out foundation walls in.



This rock is an important piece of our past and our future... It comes from the church of the Holy Sceptre, Jerusalem. This is one of the holiest sites for our Ethiopian Orthodox Church and it symbolizes for us that our home is founded on the rock of our church



The excavation went quickly.... As soon as we started footing, it got miserable...




We broke ground in November, not the best time but....


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Mike Rust's Design............from start to now...

Our house is the collaboration of my wife's specific desire for specific items, my want to create a home in the FLW style but also meeting our needs and Mike's experience...

We started with these sketches about a week after Mike's site visit....


The Upper Floor



















The Lower Floor






















And after many many chats and changes....












We have made some more changes on site, changing the balconies to more open railings to be able to handle the snow. We are also changing the front entrance to incorporate a design element we picked up from Japanese landscaping...

Our design is an inverted floor plan, with the family living and bedroom spaces in the basement, and the main areas in the first floor.

The search for an inspiration....

Long long ago, I had seen a picture of Falling Water and been interested in design of FLW. Now being brand new owners of a lot I convinced myself and my wife was as close to a praire as we were ever we would get to, we started reading and talking to people about it...

One of the best sites for inspiration was Peter's Road Trips . He led me on a pictorial journey from a lay persons point of view.

We started our search for a local and not so local architect who understood and practiced residential architecture with a strong sense of FLW design. The first and probably most useful website was this web list of architects.

We spoke to several on the list. Additionally I also met with Charles Stinson as well as corresponded to SALA Architects . Both are renowened architects with expertise we recognized. But in the case of Charles, our budget was not even close, and SALA I was afraid that their practice was big and we would be lost a bit not being local.

We also corresponded with Mike Rust What really made Mike stand out was that his practice not only had the experience and expertise, but he was a small enough practice that we would be the main focus.

We spoke via email and on the phone many times asking lots of questions and pushing and proding... and finally we got Mike to come out and visit the site....

I knew we had made the right decision when he started talking about how to site the house with our love for light in the spaces... Next chapter for our design,,,

First attempt,,,,, Deck House.

The folks at www.deckhouse.com were fantastic. We met with our local sales rep, Hans Othner. They took our old house design, and modernized it, added special touches and gave us this

The First Floor















The Second Floor















The Front Elevation















The Back Elevation

















After working through lots of issues and getting many many hours of drafting from them, a friend in California created a 3D model of our plans. Right away, I knew it was not going to work. Basically we had asked and recieved a house we did not like.

The problem was two fold, one that the house was designed very much like a series of peaks, and our land was mostly flat, so it would have not looked right. We also dont have tall trees in the front which made it look out of place, and then it was oriented to take as much advantage of the sun exposure, but had no design to take advantage of that.

The second problem was that it was much bigger with lots of rooms we never used, like formal living and dining, 7 bathrooms etc....

So we launched into the search for help.... and we also put up our house for sale so we can move on both fronts...

Then the search for a house design....

We used to love in a lovely traditional house we had built in the Annaplois area. The house was great and was located in a lovely community.















With a great back yard, and even a nice fish pond and waterfall


















It even had a wonderful 60 pier. We never got a chance to use it as much as we wanted to and it was about an hour away from our friends and family.
















But we really liked a lot of the features of the house so we started with that....

In The Beginning... There was land

First for the post on our home building blog, we will start with what started it all... a piece of land we were very lucky to buy, close to DC and friends and family...














And we looked at all the angles of the sun, including the sun rise in the East...


















Here is the lot from above.... all 10.75 acres of it... The fence is maintained by the HOA which is a blessing since it is a wooden fence. But I am sure some day we will change it to plastic which we hope to complement on the other sides of the lot.