We met with David Howard today, architect and founder of FirstDay Cottages. He has a great office in downtown Walpole, NH where we met and worked on meshing our plan with some of his ideas for our new house. It is 3 bedrooms, 1 3/4 baths, 1,228 square feet on two stories and a full walk-out basement. David drafts each house plan by hand, so we should have our floor plans and elevations soon. Once we have those in hand, Josh and I can get down to business with subcontractors and ironing out our budget.
On a related note, David was impressed with my drafting abilities (thank you two years of high school drafting class) and grasp on the FirstDay Cottage concept. He offered me some work drafting plans for his other clients and I'm excited to figure out the details with him. Drafting has always been a fun hobby and I'm looking forward to doing it quasi professionally. Plus this house project is going to require every penny we can scrounge up!!
The drawings that I sent to our architect are slowly trickling back to me in the FirstDay Cottage format. He still has some work to do in order to get them to match my plans, but I'm taking this as an excercise in the patience that I'll need to make this house a reality. Essentially this is it though! A couple windows need to be shifted or resized, we're leaning toward a six over six grill pattern for the windows to give it that "cottage feel", and the doors will be full glass rather than half. We also hope to have a shed roof off of the walkout basement to store firewood.
