A House By The Park

Every so often, a design element just doesn’t end up looking good. Such is the case for the galvanized steel awning that went up above the front door. There are a few things wrong with it, in my opinion, but of course, this is all subjective:

• The galvanized steel just doesn’t go with the rest of the house and is too industrial looking.
• The scale does not look right. It’s neither as thick as the elements around it, nor as thin as some of the aluminum details near it. It also seems like it should span all the way across the box.
• It doesn’t provide a mechanism to cleanly conceal lighting which should inconspicuously light the front door area.

Sometimes when less-than-ideal elements go up, you can make a few tweaks here and there to salvage the situation, but I think this was just a clear (and rare) case of a design miss. Build is working on some ways to keep the steel structure up to provide stiffness and wrap it with a different material, like aluminum or fir, whilst providing a means to conceal puck lighting inside.

My lesson from this is to stand strong against materials you don’t particularly care for. I’ve never liked galvanized steel and underestimated the effect it would have on the front entryway. I’m sure things will work out fine but this is a misstep I would have rather avoided.

According to the schedule, we’re only about three weeks away from occupancy now. From looking at the house, it feels more like six weeks, but I’m told things come together extremely rapidly at the end. So many of the surfaces are still covered in protection and there’s so much dust and debris around that it just looks a lot less finished than it actually is. On the bright side, coming to the house every day now is a complete joy as a new element is finished and uncovered almost every day.

If we really end up being done in three weeks, the project will have come in only about five or six weeks late and only about $8000 over budget. I’ll explain this in a later post, but both the time and the budget are a bit misleading though because we added approximately 1300 square feet in the form of a fully finished basement and some other things to the project and still came in close to the original monetary and time budgets.

Things are definitely getting a little hectic as Build and the many different subcontractors involved at this point scramble to put all of the remaining pieces in place. There are a ton of things to coordinate and if I was acting as my own G.C., this is where things would really start to fall apart, if they hadn’t already.

I have a bunch of miscellaneous costs to recognize in this post that have occurred over the last couple of months, so if you have costs turned on, you should see them below.