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We met with Joe this week, focusing on what we were going to do with the "hardscape" around the home. The hardscape can be defined as the decks, sidewalks, stairs, patio area around that home. We spent most of the time talking about how to orient the deck and stairs off the back of the house. The most difficult prospect was figuring where we were going to put the dog run. Jen and I have been messing around with this idea for weeks now, and we still didn't have a great place to put it on Thursday when Joe got there. The problems we kept running into: we really didn't want to look down from the back of the house or the deck into the dog run if we could avoid it, and we didn't know if we wanted to eliminate the potential for a sidewalk down the east side of the house by putting it there. In the end we made a decision through a process of elimination - we are going to put the dog run on the east side of the house between the house and the property line. Furthermore, we had to figure out how to run the stairs off the back/west side of the house. The credit here goes to Joe, he came up with several different ideas during the course of working it through that got us to the end result. We decided that it made sense to have the stairs start down towards the west near the house, go to a landing, and then split north and south to meet the ground. This will make much more sense when seen on the drawings, but this will allow us to create a nice patio and close the dogs off from the back "yard" and the side yard which will have a sidewalk and landscaping all the way down the west side. Its going to be very useful when its finished.

Some of the others things we talked about were related to the materials we are going to use inside the home. We are working on how to use different types of flooring to define space. Its becoming more clear every day how much work we have ahead of us to create a simple, cohesive design for the actual materials on the interior of the home. Very interesting.

Progress-wise, we are moving right along, and on pace to be done with the plans in full by early September allowing us to get the plans to the bank for appraisal, and a potential ground breaking October 1.

We are going to make a few other aesthetic changes related to moving a few doors and walls that will show up on the next iteration of drawings that I hope to post early next week.

Stay tuned....more visuals of plans coming next week.