Sandy meet Layne. Layne meet Sandy.

At the very beginning of this we met with Sandra Hatch (the architect Doug Rosenbaum had recommended), and we met with Layne Kimball of First Western Construction (who had dug out every basement of anyone I had met that had dug out a basement).  But I'm having troubles remembering who we met with first.

But I do remember I checked out a couple different architects before we chose Sandra.  

My friend Cori had recommended I speak with Annie at Renovation Design Group.  I liked her immediately.  Annie and I spoke the same language.  She seemed to know intrinsically what I wanted.  I was confident she could make the whole renovation happen.  But their bid price reflected that they had an attractive office and a large staff that they were paying for.  And although her plans seemed as though they would include every last detail necessary to leave you with a beautifully finished home, I got the idea that they wanted you to choose from their limited finishes at the end, otherwise you'd be paying an arm and a leg for any creativity in the details I personally took so much pleasure in affecting.  I needed to have a little more control.  And extra costs you weren't budgeting for right at the end of the project, was the last thing I wanted to be dealing with.

  I also met with architect Bill Arthur.  I am trying to remember who recommended him to me.  Maybe Doug did as well.  He is also on the board of my friend Stephen Brown's dance company.  In any case, very nice guy, I have seen a couple of his finished projects in the Avenues and they look like tasteful smart additions to our typically tiny Avenues homes.  

But Sandra Hatch seemed she would best be able to give us a plan that would remain respectful to the period of the house & the spirit of the home.  And she works alone, so she was more cost-effective for us than R.D.G.

We started out with a lot of talking.  I didn't seem able to express myself as well to her as I did to Annie.  But she listened, and then she'd bring back these beautiful hand drawn plans, that whether they were what I wanted or not really won me over.  Her drawings are beautiful.

It took a lot more drafts to get to a plan that we felt comfortable with than I expected it would.  When she came over with the first draft, I was so ridiculously excited.  I honestly nearly cried because I had thought I had communicated our needs so clearly and she had tried to solve our space issues by bringing us a plan that seemed to match a house she had done previously with Doug, that (as happens in the Avenues) had the exact layout as our home.     

I was disappointed.  But she didn't seem worried.  She said it was only a first draft and that we would have many more.  She had also really avoided the idea of a basement initially because she had never done a dug-out basement under a house that did not have one.  It seemed expensive and risky.  She was right.  She warned us that the cost of the excavation and the finishing would add up to exceed the cost of new construction on the top or back of the house.

Early on we scheduled a meeting between her and Layne.  She needed to meet the man that had been digging out basements under existing structures for over 40 years.  She needed to hear his methods and feel they were sound.  

They met, and the meeting went really well.   If Layne is anything, he is careful.  She would not have to worry about a cave-in, and his methods made sense to her.  We also met with (pretty much) Layne's only competitor in the Salt Lake Valley, Ivo Archuleta.  She listened to his methods as well (relatively similar).  The two meetings seemed to convince Sandy that if a basement was what we really wanted she felt confident that we could make it happen.  But she admittedly preferred First Western Construction.  They later, separately both voiced respect for the way the other worked/communicated.  

Once we had pinned down the fact we were going down, and then eventually going up as well, STAIRS became our main issue.   We had a set of existing stairs in each direction, but they were steep and old and in order to make them meet current code requirements we would have to re-do them both.  And renovated, they would not fit in the same footprint.  I think the stairs gave us the most trouble.  I was very specific about not wanting to change anything in the layout of the front half of the house.  That really limited us.  For a while it seemed I was trying out different placement ideas on tracing paper, graph paper, scratch paper... every spare moment I had (which pre-Wyatt, seemed to be a lot more spare moments).  

After Sandy embraced the basement she brought us some plans with a bedroom, a wash/storage room and a large family room downstairs.  But we were adamant about 'living space' (cooking, wash and kids studying/playing) on the main floor and sleeping quarters all below.  We wanted three bedrooms, a full bath and an office all downstairs.  It was a tall order, especially with the huge foundation of the fireplace under the living room and the need for a mechanical room that could accommodate  furnace, water heater and sewer ejector pump.  Because we didn't have a basement, our ancient sewer line was above the potential basement's ground level so we would have to get permission for an electric sewage ejector pump.  BUMMER!  And YUCKY!  I remember being warned 'You just have to remember that if the electricity goes out, no one should use the basement bathroom.  Or you may flood...'

We didn't have the final basement drawings in place.  But we gave First Western Construction the job.   Layne had told us that it would be anywhere between $40-75 a square foot to excavate and leave us with an unfinished basement.  Of course, when the bid came around, due to the age of our home, the old sandstone foundation with weak mortar, three windows on the West side of the house, of course we were on the expensive end of that spectrum.  I was seriously hopeful that we'd get it dug out for between $45-50,000, and this unfinished basement was going to cost us just under 70 grand!

I prayed the quality of the future space would not feel like a dark and gloomy basement.  I would just cry if I sunk that amount of Walter's hard earned money into a creating a dark and gloomy hole for my little family to sleep in.

do we need an architect?

In May of 2006 we adopted a dog.  She was a beauty, sweet with the baby and a real desire to please.  She was training well, v. obedient.  Walter and I agreed our family was growing.  Between the dog and our baby quickly becoming a toddler, our enclosed back yard was more important to us than ever.  

We had felt a little crowded in our home since we moved in 6 month earlier.   By summer we were in full discussion mode about what to do to about this.  

This in itself was a funny process.  Because Walter owned and had lived in (on & off) the house for the last 17 years, and I had been here 6 months.  He called it 'our home.'  But regardless of how much I believed him, I still really felt like it was his and that I should be as respectful as I could be about any drastic changes.  So I was really wanting his opinions, his dreams, his desires of change or transformation for his home.  This of course was in contrast to my already hugely developed ideas of where we might go with this house.  

Walter had already considered some improvements over the years.  

He has always been 'the cook'.  Whether it be necessity or because he really enjoys it, the kitchen is his domain.  The cook, and as unfair as it is, he is also the cleaning crew.  He cooks a lovely meal, then is also the one that cannot tolerate leaving the kitchen messy for the next morning, meal or moment.  And so when we entertained, after dinner I was in the dining room with our guests, while Walter was back in our tiny counter-shy kitchen cleaning up. 

It really bugged me.  I wanted him out there with the rest of us.  But he couldn't leave it alone, and there was no room for us to join him.  

It really was too small to leave messy.  If you left a stack of dirty dishes or pots or pans anywhere you used every bit of prep space we had.  No room for dessert preparations, certainly no room for a cereal bowl the following morning.  We even dried our clean dishes in a drying rack that sat down inside one of the two sinks.  It was high priority to create a kitchen that had storage, counter space, and space for kids and/or guests to join the Cook in the kitchen.  Not leave him back there to himself. 

He had considered opening up the kitchen into the adjacent bedroom long before all this.  It was an odd place for a bedroom, right off the kitchen.  But then you would lose a bedroom.  They always had used the back add-on room (which I call the 'family room') as a master bedroom.  It was a nice sized space, but a midnight trek to the bathroom meant you  either went through the smaller bedroom or around and through the kitchen, the dining room and the guest bedroom.  

So he also had hopes to reconnect the upstairs apartment to the house.  Move the sleeping space upstairs.  But it seemed almost too luxurious.  That apartment's rent was such a nice consistent contributer to the mortgage.  Ahhh, dilemnas!

I am a "in the closet" designer/decorater/architect.  I have no formal education unless you count the year of textile design classes I took at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in NYC just before our daughter was born.  I also worked 6 years for the Pottery Barn first in SLC, then in San Francisco and finally at the SoHo store in Manhattan.  My childhood was full of drawings, fashion and floor plans.  But my scholarship money came from the University of Utah ballet department, so that is what my BFA is in... ballet.  I follow HGTV, all the DIY magazines, the home decor retailers with a quiet desire to be a part of the club.  To create my own fabrics, furniture, decorative accessories, stationary and cards would be a dream.  But that is probably another blog.

So let's just say I was full of ideas. 

We refinanced the house in July for a sum of money we thought we cover the renovation.  At least the first major portion of it.  Future garage with loft space above can wait.  Even the master bedroom suite upstairs could wait.  Our goal was to make our house function for our immediate family and our current needs.

I began having discussions with my Block's 'Contractor Extraordinaire' Doug Rosenbaum.  He specializes in gorgeous historically respectful renovation with beautiful attention to detail, here in the Avenues.  He did the house to our right and he did the house to our left.  And my mother-in-law used him for handyman jobs on our home while Walter lived in California and New York.  

I trust Doug.  He loves to talk.  But he also listens and he is really great for advice.  We considered him to general our future projects.  The first major advice he gave us was, "Get an Architect!"

I thought we didn't need one.  I thought with all my ideas and attention to detail we'd be fine without drawings.  (Little did I know.  I was so naive and over confident.)  

"How hard can it be?   I've been drawing floor plans my whole life."  But I was nervous about the structural stuff, the stuff requiring math.  

Not really interested in blowing something like that.

So we contacted architect Sandra Hatch at Doug's recommendation.