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First Contact - The beginning of it all...

Right now we are playing the waiting game. Its fall in New England and in a very short time everything will be buried under snow. Not exactly the best time to be building a house but it is a great time to get our plans all set to start in the spring.

I just sent over all our brain storming documents to Monolitic so they can begin the "feasibility study" part of the planning process.

Read here about what that is - http://www.monolithic.org/feasibility-residential

I sent them several documents that will help them guide us through this process.

1. Word Picture - This is just a text only file that describes every aspect of the house. Everything from the overall lifestyle to how many toilets we need. Being a visual person I found this the most difficult part but they made it easier by providing an outline of questions to follow.

The result is a super detailed boring document that will inevitably change as we go along. The birth of this document has already been a source of conflict between my husband (from now on referred to as Mr. Dometastic) and I. This conflict stems from a fundamental difference in WHY we are building this weird house.
I want to build it because it has a very organic feel to the space. Mr. Dometastic wants to build it because it is as close to disaster proof as you can get without digging a hole to live in. And yes... he did actually try to convince me to live underground! And NO I will not live underground like a mole!! I want light and airy curves. He wants "a defensible home". Including but not limited to metal security shutters you can drop over all the openings with the touch of a button. There was also some talk of embedded chips in our hands that would open the doors. And no I am not kidding.... the list goes on. Anyway... back to the documents.

2. Image Reference - Coming from a designer approach I added this to help convey what we want. In my work as a designer we always use image references as part of the beginning design process. An image is worth more than a 1000 words!

3. Floor Plan - One of the great things about building a dome is none of the interior walls are load bearing. This gives us total freedom to design the interior spaces any way that we like. I am sure the plan we have in place will change once the architect gets involved but we wanted to show as close to scale as we could our vision of the floor plan.

So what are we doing while we wait? Yard work! Well more like land work. We are fortunate to have great friends with very large machines to make our yard work possible! How do you mow your lawn?


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