The incredible (let's hope) shrinking house

I guess we just got carried away. And we had a lot of fun doing it. We loved the floor plans and we loved the elevations (eventually) and so I suppose we loved the whole house. We were so happy we were about to submit the plans to the city and the Coastal Commission and get moving on the approval process.

But something niggled. When I described the house to friends, it sounded a little excessive. As in, after I described the living space and the bedrooms I had to say 'wait, there's more'. There was an additional story with a couple of rooms that seemed a little superfluous. More of a want than a need. Then again, as we soothed ourselves, 'we're only going to do this once in our lives, we should make sure we do get everything we can'.

Then there was a offhand comment the architect made about the build costs having crept up - to 25% over our original budget. We did some calculations and thought weeeeellll maybe we could make that work. But, as I pointed out (with great originality) just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Anyway then there was the number. The actual factual real square footage.

4973.

That’s right, almost 5000 square foot of living space. At this point, if you’re from a fly-over state you’re thinking that’s fairly modest. But we think it’s big. It’s big for Brit. And it’s big for Hermosa. Our old house was 2400 and that felt spacious enough.

We talked about it and decided we could do it and just own our choice and refuse to be embarrassed by it. We’d use every room and it wouldn’t be wasteful as a result. 

Then we looked into the costs a little more closely. It turns out this enormous house would cost 70% more than we'd budgeted. That's no small overrun. After a couple of weeks of prevarication, this information made it a very easy decision. And one I'm glad we made this side of the planning process - rather than getting plans approved for an oversized house we couldn't afford to build (at least, not very nicely). 

I called the architect and said ‘make it smaller!’. We suggested we just take the top floor off.Thats where the luxury items are: the extra lounge/ man cave, and the studio space. But we’re open to other suggestions. If there's another way to shrink this house we'd love to see it. I suspect there isn't and at some point next week we'll see exactly the same floor plans, just missing a sheet.