karinoyo

I thought clarify some of the influences on the designs (that is, the regional tex-mex influences, architecturally). Plus, don’t forget that pesky floodplain. A few of the things that hem me in when it comes to options:

1. I can’t increase the house’s footprint in any way. This includes impervious surfaces adjacent except where I can replace the existing square footage with a lower-rated material. (That is, a square foot of concrete counts as 1 square foot of impervious surface; the same square footage in wood counts 50% of that; the same in slate on rock base counts as 75%, something like that.)
2. We can’t spend more than 50% of the house’s current appraised value (house, not house+land, mind you). That puts a cap on how much I can do outside, given how much I’ve already done inside. There’s still no clear explanation of whether, say, $25K is equal to “what you would’ve paid if you’d had someone else do it” versus what you actually paid if you did it yourself — obviously, my money goes a lot farther when I do this myself.The final result, though, may be that the house’s value still increases and if it jumps past that magic point, FEMA will force me to bring my house up to floodplain-code… and that would mean raising my house (literally) up about four feet. In case you’re wondering? I definitely want to avoid that! …which means I’m trying to be very careful about coming up with concepts I can either do myself, or can hire someone to do for minimal money.

   It also means limiting architect use. If something we’re doing requires an architect’s work, that means a permit, and that means the city will then come poking around afterwards as part of the post-permit process, and along with that is a reassessment of the house’s appraised value. Which, truthfully, I don’t mind, but only if the resulting property-tax increase will be a burden on some buyer and not on me! Architect = inspection = potential eyebrows raised about value of work, and/or tax increase, so… let’s keep any formal architecture intervention out of this, okay?

3. The sole reason for bothering with the house’s exterior is that right now, I would not recoup much of anything of what I’ve done inside, regardless of whether or not the kitchen were complete, the bathroom nicely re-countertopped, the carpets replaced, the panelling in the living room covered with drywall & painted, the baseboards done… doesn’t matter. From the outside, the house looks kinda… well, it looks like your average working-class, badly-dated, dumpy little ranch suburban-rural home. It certainly doesn’t announce that it’s worth the money I’d ask, per the interior.I don’t know for certain if we will be in this house come two years, maybe three. If I knew for certain that we would be here another five years, I wouldn’t bother outside cleaning the brick, doing something about the water damage per mold/mildew from splashback, pointing up the brick here and there… and maybe having it sealed with some buttery-yellow-tint limewash. Oh, and replacing the garage doors. Otherwise? Naw, let the rest ride for now. However, the return on investment for landscaping is phenomenal but — and this is a big stop, here — only if the landscaping doesn’t look like it was just planted last month.

   Landscaping does need at least a year to ‘age’ — and, too, I don’t want to spend, nor have to spend, the money I’d need to install plants anywhere near maturity. That means for at least a year, I’m going to have a yard that’s got a lot of mulched spaces and plants that haven’t quite grown into their spots… and things are going to look a bit more imbalanced (green-wise) for at least a few seasons. Okay, that, and the fact that I can’t conceivably do all of it myself at top speed, so either I do it myself (what I can, that is) slow, or I do it slow anyway because it’ll take me time to get the money to pay someone else.

   On the other hand, if I spend $5K on the house’s exterior, it’s reasonable to expect I’ll get back at least treble that when it comes time to sell — and moreso if the yard/scaping is well-established by that point. (In other words, even slightly intimidated gardeners would say, “oh, it’s all native, and you never water?” … well, no, I won’t, not once the first year is past. Until then, the plants will require extra water as part of establishment. Yada yada yada etc.)

4. The city’s code does have an exemption (that is, no permit/inspection required) for attachments to a house’s eaves or walls of awnings, screens, shutters, or any other shade-increasing device so long as the shade doesn’t protrude more than 58″ from the house’s existing exterior wall. The cost (and again, risk of city curiosity, FEMA belligerence, or tax hikes) of adding onto the roof are too much, in my opinion. Extending the roofline means a number of architectural and engineering and construction steps…And that’s without considering the fact that with the roof’s current slope, to extend the rafters out five feet (the distance of the current arched wall), the head-room would clock in at 76″ inches — for comparison, a standard doorway height is 81″. To extend the roofline forward would mean flattening the angle (an additional engineering issue of its own, but not insurmountable): the resulting rise/run would be 1:12.

   A ‘flat’ roof (technically, a ‘low rise’ roof) has a rise:run of 2:12… and that would mean an additional whack-job amount of CRAP attached to extending the roofline. We just couldn’t “lengthen” the eaves, to say the least. We’d need to backtrack up the roof, to a higher point, and build up so the roof would be at least a 3:12 slope… and if CP has at times gotten cranky about living with an incomplete kitchen, I don’t even want to consider what he’d be feeling if we had to have a great swath of the roof ripped off and redone. It’s just not worth it.

5. I am SICK and TIRED of getting a TOTAL DRENCHING every time I come home while it’s raining. Absolutely SICK and TIRED of it, I tell you! Lattice work that stretches from the brick to the existing eaves is all good and well, but it just means the current shower-line would be all over the place, instead of at least in an avoidable single line…I should probably mention that I live in a region where rain ain’t like normal coastal rain. Around here, we have about half as many days of rain as Seattle… and yet we get almost as much rain as Seattle does! When it does rain, it really does POUR. None of this drizzle for a day or so, not here. No, we get DELUGED — and that means splashback is ferocious. It’s a lot of water, and it’s almost always all at one time, and then nothing for two or more weeks and then kaBAM we get six inches in two hours or some ridiculous amount like that.

   (Which, I think, is part of the reason a lot of the houses don’t have gutters, around here. Of the houses that do, when it’s raining and I’m driving through the neighborhood, I can see their gutters streaming nearly as much water as their gutterless neighbors. You’d really have to have HUGE gutters — moreso than normal — to handle the run-off, and the rest of the time you’ve had these huge honking pipes on your roofline. I can see why, now, that most contractors just don’t bother to install them, and why most people don’t bother retroactively installing them, either.)

I feel kinda like a bad client. Hi, please build me X, but here’s reasons Y, Z, and oh, A through T of all the things you can’t do. Have at it!

(Which is why most people go out of their way to avoid floodplain-based homes, or any type of construction or property… and that’s yet another reason to do something about it. When we bought the house, we were rated in a lesser-floodplain. Now we’re in a worse one, and since that’s going to create its own set of hassles when it comes to selling — ignoring the hassle of actual, y’know, FLOODING — I might as well do stuff for this house with an eye towards making the house look like less of a victim waiting to be hit.)

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Alright, now for what I’ve been reviewing as part of my brainstorming. First up, several houses from Mexico… I’ve seen houses like this around here, but it’s hard to find decent pictures. (Most of the decent pictures from real estate agents are all of the Really Massive Monster Mansions over on the west side of the city, and those architectural treatments would just overwhelm this poor house.)

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Not entirely the elephantine columns that CP dislikes, but these do retain a certain solidity that you really need when the roofline is so low. It’s what helps bring the house down to a human scale, but that’s explaining it badly. Anyway. Next one is semi-local; I think it’s a big house just south of here about an hour, but at least it shows the broader arches while keeping the squarish-impact of the original Mexican/Spanish design:

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Here’s one from a Mexican resort, with a rather (to my eyes) peculiar mix of what looks like an Asian-influenced roofline. The columns and arches aren’t organic to each other — that is, the arches are more like upside-down flying buttresses. But, hey, I include it anyway, in case the visual helps someone come up with an idea.

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This one’s a classic design, and the house itself is a historic home not far from the city. Okay, actually, you probably can’t get much more classic than this, when it comes to local regional style:

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Spanish-revival style, which incidentally does tend to have thicker exterior beams, even if what we’ve currently got looks rather odd to me. (On the otherhand, this isn’t an architecture I grew up with, but I did see my share of late-victorian-tudor-influenced oddities on the East Coast, growing up, so when I see large beams, that’s my first impression. No idea whether someone rasied in, say, Arizona, would react the same.)

Much more squarish here, but still with an incredible solidity to the uprights. These are not your parents’ suburban four-by-four for porch supports. I’d guess more at 16″ square, minimum. (Not the least of which is because a tile roof is heavy, and that design element therefore drives any related elements.)

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Modern house in Arizona, New Mexico (something like that), but it’s one of my favorite examples of how Asian details can mix very nicely with the Spanish-influenced adobe/pueblo style. In this instance, I mean specifically the under-beams along the roofline: instead of arches, it’s a secondary horizontal beam.

It does also make a difference to be able to see joinery of some kind. It makes up for, in some way, the fact that the columns aren’t these hulking monsters — it’s a different way of reminding you of the thing’s structural integrity/strength, but by virtue of its connections and not its own inherent mass.

Gee, I hope that made sense to someone other than me.

Another classic Mexican style for upright beams:

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And the brick version. (I think this picture is actually from Italy, but then, the entire notion of portales or a veranda come to us from the Romans by way of the Spainish.) In this instance, the arch begins just above the shadow-line created by the cap. Plus, the columns are square — not wider than deep — so the sense isn’t that they’ll topple easily (which is the sense I get everytime I walk past our own arches) and, also, that the arches “grow out of” that capstone edging, rather than “lean over from” the vertical part.

Now, for better detailing on some of the issues I’m looking to deal with (and trying to deal with before I do a lot of hardscaping, let alone planting, that would get wrecked by doing in the wrong order)… First, this is a stretch of brick right by the front door. Behold, it is NOT green!

It took me two power-washings, and three-quarters of a bottle of BLEACH to get it this clean. We can’t actually power-wash-power-wash (the type of brick would just erode under the force), nor can we use the stronger cleaners… we’re stuck with simple bleach and scrubbing and these forty years past, the bricks have effectively lost whatever glaze they may’ve had. They really need to be cleaned and sealed. (That’s where the limewash possibility comes in.)

Another shot of the existing “faux” beams… and with this you can see why I’m not going to just leave it as is and train a vine. Any vine worth its salt (especially the woody kinds like we get around here) would be pulling these things down in a heartbeat. CRASH! What was that? Hey, something came crashing down and for once it wasn’t the cat’s fault, imagine that!

Actually, that might be a better shot for seeing why I always feel like I half-expect the brick wall to sway in the wind. It just looks insubstantial as you walk past, no matter how broad it may be from the front. (And that’s also why I doubt there’s any internal support other than brick and mortar: there’s just not enough depth to indicate there’s a supporting four-by-four or anything.)

Tagged: architecture, landscaping