Planning
Planning
Aug 25, 08:45 AM
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I’m an electrical engineer by day, and pretty skilled at AutoCAD. But certainly not skilled in construction, and I’ve never done anything remotely like this before… I bought a copy of IRC 2003 (International Residential Code- the code book in use here) and read it cover-to-cover. I did a detailed sketch of our existing house and input it into CAD, and we started playing with all sorts of ideas on how to get our garage, storage and kitchen. I decided the only way we were going to be able to do this was to stick it on the gable end of the house- this would minimize impact on the existing house, give us room to build the addition and let us basically just turn the kitchen sink and stove around into the new kitchen, eliminating nearly all the plumbing work and making our life much easier. We could also extend our heating duct into the new kitchen. I found a loophole in the code that let us infringe further into the front setback than we thought, which let us make a decent kitchen. So, I took all this into account and drafted up some floorplans in CAD. My wife was having a hard time picturing it, so I used my m4d photoshop skillz to whip up some half-assed artists renditions of the planned addition. We decided what we’d like was a 2-car garage with a kitchen in the back, and a large finished attic above for storage, with short knee-walls. The peak of the center would be about 8’, and the walls would be short. This was a compromise because my wife did NOT want a 2-story house because she thought it would look terrible, but I really wanted usable 2nd story space…
