Here are larger versions of the draft floor plan - the first floor particularly is a VERY LARGE file!

Some of the special things that will be built into our house

We've got some special items we've collected over the years that we want to build into the new house. The most problematic will be the sand blasted glass piece made by Robert Bischoff:


We've got to figure out how to mount this as a fixed window - with glass on the front and back to protect it - AND edge light it for the best effect. Front lighting as seen here is just not very effective.













These are book cases made from a set that came out of the Governor's office when the Old Florida Capitol Building was restored to the 1905 version. We want to use them to make a faux fireplace wall with a stained glass "fireplace" that was made by Bischoff Studios, possibly by George Greene.





These are some doors from the Old Capitol - the little narrow door is only 18" wide - I think it would be great as a door for a tiny coat closet in the living room. The double doors were the entrance doors to the House of Representative Chambers. Of course, they need to be completely refinished, since the guys demolishing the Capitol were not very careful, plus they've been in storage for over 25 years.



















We also have some other doors that we may take apart for the mahoganey paneling and molding - they were "hidden" doors and have paneling to match the rooms they were in. And we have eight exterior lamps from the Old Capitol - those we'll have rewired and cleaned to use around the outside of the house.

First draft of floorplans and simple 3-D view

MH (the contractor and designer for our ICF house) has sent me the first draft of our plans. This is the low-res version, so the measurements are not readable.
















The side with the wide porch is the north end of the house and the formal entrance. Our entrance will be under the carport/porte cochere.

Panorama shots of the house site

Here are a couple of huge pictures that are panoramas of the house site. The first is taken from about where the north end of the house will be. The second is taken from about where the south end of the house will be. In both, the gate at both ends of the panorama is roughly due north.

Our barn teardown and salvage project

In 1979-1980, we built our first horse barn out of freshly cut cypress lumber. Unfortunately, we let a know-it-all convince us that cypress logs would last as the posts for our two story barn. They didn't. So the old barn was becoming unstable and dangerous and we knew we had to tear down at least part of it.

Here is what the barn looked like before we started:



You can see how the upstairs front "porch" is sagging. What you cannot see is how rotten some of the posts are!

















Here are the sides of the barn showing the beautifully weathered cypress siding. We salvaged almost all the cypress and will sell it for the first reasonable offer.










































Here are the guys tearing down the upstairs.

















We tore down the entire loft and eight of the fourteen stalls, leaving me a six
stall barn - plenty for our remaining four hourses!














We still have some cleanup left to do, but the smaller barn should be easier to maintain. And if I need more space there is always the newer twenty stall barn down the hill.

Here is an older aerial view of the upper 30 acres of the farm. The curving line on the left side is the county road along our frontage. The two large buildings at the top are our barns. The planned house site is about a third of the way from the bottom straight south of the larger barn.







Here is a large view of the house site with a "cut out" of the current plan placed on it. I've angled the house slightly off straight north south the take better advantage of the views and the slope of the site. The red lines are the topo lines - heavy are every twn feet, light ones visible if you zoom in are every two feet.

The drive to the house site will come through a gap in the trees just north of the porte chochere. We'll have a turn around on that side of the house which will provide guest parking. Although the front porch is on the north, the approach will be from the west side.

Here is the current version of my house plan. We've cut off the two downstairs extra bedrooms, flipped the house (to the left is north) for better views and reduced the size of the formal living-dining room. This layout lets us put the formal entrance and front porch on the narrow end of the house and well away from our mud entrance and our parking area - and I can have the porte cochere I always wanted!

I've got a similar layout with the half bath moved to the library so the library could be used as a guest room, but this one seems more efficient since it clusters all the plumbing together. I'm just not sure which would be better for getting plumbing upstairs for the bath and bedrooms upstairs.