For anyone that is looking to purchase a vacation home, why not a castle?

But seriously… I want a castle for my birthday! (please) 🙂

//www.wists.com/chateaux.html

I picked up the plans from plan check today (this is from 2nd submittal), and there were 8 changes needed. This is tiny compared to the 1st submittal.

At least the 3rd (and hopefully final) submittal can be done “over the counter” right there since there are so few changes.

So today I had to pay all the “fees” required to build a house. This included the following:

Traffic Impact Fee: $8,299.00
Park Fee: $1,000.00
Fire District Fee: $4,132.36
Building Permit Fee: $2,176.00
PAD: $4,000.00 (I don’t even know what in the hell this stands for)
Fire District Plan Check Fee: $350 $450
Water District meter installation fee: $33,226.00
Sewer Fee: $600
School District Fee: $40,958.98 $30,387.31

Are you serious? $94,742.34 $84,270.67 in “fees” just so you can get permission from the city and various agencies to build a house? This is on top of the $5,545.78 plan check fees already paid, which puts the total at $100,288.12 $89,816.45 and we aren’t even building yet. I wonder if SDG&E is going to charge to install the transformer for electricity (probably). Ouch.

Oh, there is also a “Drainage Fee” that will be due and I have no clue what that amount is going to be yet.

If you were building a house for resale, how does anyone make any money??

Apparently bribing the city really does help get your plans through the city MUCH faster. Plans came back for the revisions (which are all minor), so it’s all good. 🙂

The city of San Diego assigned an address to the vacant lot where I’m going to be building my house. Cool.

I found out today that you can push your plans through the city’s review process faster by paying them to “work overtime”. So that’s what I’m doing. It should be 2-3 weeks now instead of 6-8 weeks.

I forgot to mention that the city now has my plans for my house, so breaking ground on it is now in their hands as far as when they issue building permits.

I haven’t seen the “official” review response, but I think it went well today. Pretty much the HOA just wants a fence moved (maybe some other minor things), but all the “big” stuff I was worried about seemed to be fine.

So for the most part that means the house is pretty much good to go as far as the home owners association goes (this was the last of 3 necessary design reviews).

I always had plans to do a home theatre in my house, but it was going to be a bedroom that was turned into a home theatre. Well, I was finally talked into reversing that stance. It’s now going to be a home theatre that could be turned into a bedroom (if really needed).

So this…

I just found out today that the house I’m building is going to have fiber to the door from the phone company (SBC/AT&T), so there will be no old school twisted pair copper wires coming into my home. 🙂

The downside to this is the temporary construction trailer is going to need special equipment to get a temporary phone line from the fiber. Oh well. 🙂

39Mbit “DSL”, here I come!

The 2nd (of 3) design reviews by the design board (for the HOA) where my house is going to be built is done. It was approved on the first try submittal (yay!).

I think the final submittal is basically just the working drawings (same thing you submit to the county to get permits). If all goes well, that could be in 5-6 weeks.

I have a color rendering of the front elevation of my house now (it’s required for the second phase of the design review by the HOA).

It was too big to fit in my scanner, so I pieced it together from two different scans. If you don’t like the line where the images were joined, too bad! 🙂

Notice the moat on the front (with a bridge to the front door).

After I made this post about maybe having three pools (technically), I took my building/site plans to the San Diego Department of Planning and Land Use this afternoon to just ask them what they thought.

It turns out I’m exempt from the normal pool fence guidelines because my parcel is more than 3 acres. Not only that I found out that the lagoon and moat wouldn’t count as a pool because a pool is specifically defined as “a structure intended for swimming or recreational bathing”. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me, because you could make a 20′ deep “lagoon”, which a 1 year old child could still drown in… but you wouldn’t have to fence it, because it’s not DESIGNED for swimming.

Oh well… at least I don’t have to have dreams about this problem anymore.

The pool fence for my house has been the only part about it I don’t like. It’s stressing me out so much that I’ve been dreaming about it. I don’t like it because it ends up cutting my backyard in half and dividing it (there’s also some other weirdness that I won’t bother getting into).

So anyway… I’ve been trying to figure out a good excuse to wrap the fence completely around the property just so I don’t have to see it in my backyard, and today I just realized something that complicates it even more. Technically I have three pools. The actual pool, the lagoon in the middle of the golf course and the moat in the front of the house are going to be considered pools as far as the county is concerned (so they are going to have to be fenced in so the neighbor’s kids don’t wander over and drown themselves). So now I may not have any choice but to fence the whole property…

At least I won’t have a fence splitting my backyard.

The fire department doesn’t like the fact that I want to put a pool house against the edge of the slope off the pad (even if it’s 100% non-combustable materials). Now we are going to see if maybe they will be happy if we extend the pad in that area 15′ out using a stepped retaining wall.

The fire department is the man, and they are out to get me! (hehe just kidding)

I had a 9:30 am meeting today with the homeowners association where I’m building my house for the first stage of a three stage process of getting your house approved to be built.

Of course, I’ve never been to something like that before, so I’m thinking it’s going to be 3 or 4 hours or something. Nope… I was there a total of 5 minutes (I guess thats a good thing). 🙂

The good news is the first step (Concept Design Submittal) was approved, so now we can move on to the next phase of the review process (Design Development Submittal). I think that’s things like landscape plans, artist renderings of the home, samples of the materials you are going to use, etc.

I’m starting to think I may have actually lost touch with reality here…

For my pool, I want a big (large enough to actually swim in) zero-edge pool with a swim-up bar. Then I started thinking it would be pretty cool to be in the pool and go under a waterfall into a grotto where the hot tub is. Well… what if you want to be in a hot tub and actually be in your backyard (vs. inside a cave)?

Is it too excessive to have two hot tubs in the backyard (one in a grotto, and one in the open)?

German companies seem to always make some pretty cool stuff. Check out these faucets for example. The first model (the squarish one) even has LEDs that light up the water depending on the temperature (the colder the water, the bluer it is, the hotter, the redder it be becomes). All their faucets are pretty cool looking though.

Funny I think that because it hasn’t even started yet. 🙂

But I met up with my architect and saw a new property that I liked better (and put an offer on it) on Tuesday, met with a landscape architect on Wednesday, going to Irvine to meet with the company for the home automation/smart home stuff this afternoon, starting the escrow on the new property tomorrow, etc.

Oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to go to the bank before I drive to Irvine to cash out a CD (I need to wire 5% of the purchase price tomorrow when the escrow starts).

Hopefully it will be less work later, but I have a feeling that’s not going to be the case.

Well, they rejected my offer I put in yesterday, but came back with an offer that was still pretty good, so I’m going to go into a 15 (quick huh?) escrow on the new lot tomorrow.

Anyone want to buy my old lot? 🙂

Funny how things work out… I was meeting with my architect this morning, and he showed me a lot for sale right down the street from my existing one. To make a long story short, I put an offer on the new property today, so hopefully I’ll get that and sell my old lot.

The old lot is really nice, but the new one is 10x better…

• No other lots on either side (I wouldn’t have to look at the side of people’s houses)
• The property itself is 3x larger
• The useable pad is 2x larger (the old one is still one of the biggest around)
• There is an area below the slope on the property that I could put a full-on orchard without needing to use the normal lot pad
• The views are amazing (ocean, lake, golf course, city skyline, etc.)
• Private driveway off the main road, so you don’t even see the road from where the house would be.

So basically I could put a big house, a 30 car garage, have a huge backyard and still maybe have room for a football field. 🙂

Weird how things happen…

Now that I’m moving forward with having my house designed and built, I just wanted to say how nice it is to have an architect that actually does everything when he says he is going to. No nagging necessary… which is a welcome change from every other architect (individual and firms) I’ve dealt with in the past.

It’s really early at this point, but it’s SO nice to not have to follow up with them on things they said they are going to do. If Dan says he will call me in 2 weeks with something (for example preliminary design ideas), I’ve found you can bet money he will call you in two weeks. Other architects I’ve worked with went something more along the lines of… “Gee, I haven’t heard from them, and it’s been 4 weeks now.” So then you call them up and they tell you they haven’t started anything because of whatever (insert random reason here). Hmmm… were you ever going to call me? 🙂

Anyway, just figured I should mention that since the little things like that often go unnoticed, and you usually only read about the bad things when researching a company.

Until a few days ago, I had no idea what was the difference between different style homes. For example, I couldn’t tell you what’s different between a Tuscan or Italian style.

But dammit, now I know! And I also know that I like French Chateau style (which is what I’m going to have my house designed as). French style has steep roofs with slate roofing materials. It also uses a good amount of stone, but not so much it’s overwhelming. I like it. 🙂

This is a French Chateau (as an example), although this one is a little much for my tastes…