So I met with the architect to start working on the working docs. This is where the electrical, lighting, structural, and plumbing engineering work gets done. At the end of this phase, we will have a full set of engineered plans that a builder or contractor can bid work and build the house from.
Lighting & Electrical
The first session walking through the electrical and lighting was more or less what I expected. The architect went room by room adding somewhat standard lighting asking what I wanted and what lights would be connected to what switches. Apparently i'm a minimalist compared to most because he commented several times that usually everyone wants switches everywhere with complex switch schemes. I wanted to minimize the number of switches to only whats needed.
These days, there is apparently an emphasis on energy efficiency thus most of my lighting will have to be fluorescent or LED. I did some basic research and at this time think LED isn't worth the increased cost for it's marginally better energy usage. Fluorescent - it seems - lasts 10 years give or take while LED can last 25-30. However, LED is significantly more expensive, isn't as big a drop in wattage usage as i'd thought over FL, and ultimately i'm leaning towards using LED either nowhere or only on lights that will be on a lot (exterior?). Frankly, i'm concerned that they'll even make the bulbs for either 10-30 years from now and can see myself being forced to change the fixtures because the bulbs or fixtures no longer exist. Or more likely, that trends change every 5-10 years so you'll be changing them due more to style then energy usage or bulbs.
The other interesting item i've learned is around what lighting is optimal for a room. Houzz has some excellent articles on lighting that i saved and thought about..
5 questions to ask for the best overall lighting
Universal bath design: Light your bathroom for all ages and abilities
10 ways to get your lighting right
I tried to take some thoughts from each of these articles and ultimately, to try to use a combination of lighting for each room (table/floor lamps, recessed, pendents, accent and wall lights).
Ultimately I walked away with a set of plans with both lighting and electrical to consider. I'll return soon to make some tweaks after i've had a chance to dwell on it for a bit.
Structural Engineering
Here the architect sent the plans off for bids from 3 different structural engineers. I can't say that I was terribly surprised when the bids came back all over the place for essentially the same work. The amounts ended up being $6300, $4300, and $2800. I was originally told to expect around $4000-5000. So after some due diligence on checking each of their backgrounds and being told all three were competent by the architect, I went with the cheapest. $2800 it is! It feels good to save money where you can ;-)..
So I signed the letter and sent off the retainer to get that started. It's estimated at 2 weeks but supposedly this guy is a bit slower then average so we'll see how long it takes.
Ray Tracing
I learned that Chief Architect supports ray traced images so I went ahead and started creating some which is pretty neat. It takes many hours to make just one image if you do many passes for a higher quality image, but the results are a lot more realistic then the default screen grabs and it does a good job with lighting. Since I had some preliminary lighting in the plans it was a good time to play with it. Here are some shots..
I'm eager for the next phase which for me will be more nerve wracking and thats to get bids for doing the work from 3 different general contractors. This will ultimately determine whether or not i have a project that i can move forward with (i.e. afford) or just a set of pretty plans that i can stare at.
