Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics General Stuff The journey of the cabin to a real house

"Top Floor" (master bedroom, master bath, walk-in closet)

Larry and I struggled with the stairs. He didn't want them to be U-shaped. He wanted them L-shaped. If we did L-shape we couldn't make it work on the main floor and have a decent sized bedroom there. At one point, Larry put the stairs inside the main floor bedroom. I told him that won't work - for privacy reason.

Then he made the U-shaped stairs start the incline up away from the back wall. I told him we couldn't do that, the incline needed to start against the back wall because as you turn on the landing to go up the second set of the U-stair, the nose of the car needed to fit under that part of the stair and that part of the stair had to be cantilevered in order to do that.

The project looks massive, but the reality is, I'm only adding two boxes off of the main house. The garage box is only 17.5' x 32'. My car is 16' that only leaves 16' for U-shape stairs (7' wide) and then the laundry room 5' at one point 7' at another point, with 2' before the garage door.




(Larry initially designed the stairs so the the ascent was away from the wall, I had him flip the ascent so that in the garage the front of the car could fit under the second part of the ascent.)

Some cool features of the house:

• You'll be able to stand at the front door, and without moving, see right through the transition hallway into the backyard. (Bringing the outside, in.)
• In the laundry room, there will a restaurant-style floor mop sink. It will be a dog wash for Rocksus
• In the kitchen, the south-east corner wall will be entirely floor-to-ceiling glass. Essentially two panes of glass, each 2' wide, joined together to form a corner, floor-to-ceiling, for the view of the water, because that part of the house is on a 45-degree angle from the beach.
• There will be a 3-story laundry chute with access on each floor to drop laundry down to the laundry room.
• The kitchen cabinets will be floor-to-ceiling. (another inspiration I took from that MIami condo).

Very nice. Now the only problem is finding the money to build it, and then to not have to sell it immediately.

I've been thinking about all of that. It is not my intention to build then resale.

The Kansas guy in the vanpool is encouraging me to start a company ASAP to be able to write-off the rental unit portion of the construction. I want to get the rental unit done first to start generating income to help repay the contraction loan.

I need to find someone who is experienced in this stuff to advise me.

Larry said engineering came back today. The front windows over the garage need to shrink. I requested a phone meet-up with him. Waiting to hear back.

I actually have three residential rentals. Each is treated as a business for income tax purposes. You report the business income and expenses on Schedule E, and you get to take depreciation for anything that is not your personal residence. The IRS is fine with you just declaring it a business of which your are the sole proprietor. I think doing this as an LLC would have exactly the same tax benefits. The main difference would be that the tenant would have to sue the LLC instead of you, if there was some liability issue. I think the LLC's only asset would be the apartment, so that's all they could get, I suppose the courts have figured out how to do that when a tenant wins. Maybe base the LLC's assets on the depreciated value at the time of the lawsuit? It might be easier to just buy an umbrella policy to buy you some protection beyond your homeowner's policy. We do that.

Is the window problem for structural or efficiency reasons? If efficiency, you night be able to keep them the same size with better glazing. If structural, with a steel header beam instead of wood.

My guess is there’s not enough shear strength in the problem wall, maybe compounded by the typical lack of shear reinforcement in the garage door wall below it. Shear strength is the resistance to “racking” - think of all the corners of the openings as hinges in a strong side wind or an earthquake. There has to be adequate lateral bracing of some kind, like a sheet of plywood or diagonal bracing between the top and bottom plates.

Larry and are talking this morning...sometime.

I'm surprised that the front windows is where engineering flagged. I thought at least it would be the corner in the kitchen, with the floor-to-ceiling corner window panes or I thought a critical area would be the tower's entry way.

I hope a beam header or two will fix the issue. I like the size and width of the windows as they are now.

Turns out that Loggy got it right. The walls have to be more rigid for twisting and turning in an earthquake.

Currently all three windows are 48" wide. Engineering says there needs to be 4' of wall before the first window. So the left and right windows are going from 48" to 30" and the middle window will stay the same.