A Change of Pace

For once, even while the ever-exciting transfer season of English football is going on, I'm actually NOT going to write about it (even after we signed a very quality and promising Argentinian player this week.) Nor am I going to write about food, which has quickly become the topic that most readers of this blog look forward to (and by "most," I mean two out of three), even though Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood and I made up two new recipes this week.
This blog needs a touch of class, a touch of personality to it. So I'm going to once again write a bit about architecture, and a very personal project for the missus and myself.

But first, I'm going to give you a link which you may or may not care to visit. Blog Tokyo, Expat Tokyo is an incredible resource of many great blogs by English speakers living in Japan, some American, most foreigners to Japan, all speaking and typing in English. There's some fascinating stuff going on in these blogs. As anybody who knows me knows, after my first trip to Japan, I was hooked, and I immediately fell in love with the country, its people and customs, and I love the fact that I get to go there every year. But even in those moments that I haven't been there in a while, I sometimes really long for it, and many times I wish I could live there, for countless reasons - most of them being cultural/quality of life related, but more and more increasingly, it has to do with a certain disdain for my own country - almost always being politically related. Anyway - these blogs simultaneously fill a void in me, and also make the void even more expansive, and that's something you gotta love.

Okay back to the architecture. Here's the scoop. Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood and I are (not surprisingly) architects. We eat, sleep, and breathe it (well - that and Newcastle United!!)(And actual food, of course. We enjoy eating real people food. Hence, the reviews on this blog.) so when we recently bought a new home in the River North area of Chicago, while we absolutely LOVE the place and are so happy we get to spend time in a place as cool as this, we immediately wanted to screw with it a bit. A house is like a laboratory for us - it's a great scale for us to look at, think about, and change. And we're pushing full steam ahead into our first real project within our house. Now, let me assure you - we've got big, big plans for pretty much every square inch of this house - but with a fairly limited budget you really can't take care of all of it at once, so we're spreading it out a bit. So the first area we've decided to take on is the master bathroom/walk in closet. This project, if we actually go through with it, will probably take quite a few months from here on out to finish. So I just wanted to introduce everybody to it, and let you know that you'll be hearing more from me about it in the future.

Basically, what we've got now is a bedroom, and off of the bedroom, there's a little 3' wide short hallway. To the left of the hallway you've got a walk in closet, about 5' x 7', and at the end of the hallway, you've basically got your typical master bath, double bowl vanity, toilet, and combo bath/shower at the end of the space. We've been beating ourselves over the head to figure out how we can use the space better, and hopefully get a more "Japanese" bath configuration in there, which is a separate shower and bath, all in one, big wet zone. We want our bath to be very, very simple and clean, like everything else we design, but give an extreme sense of calm and weight. As most of you know, we constantly want to be surrounded by clean white - so the majority of the project will be stark white, with very nice dark grey stone throughout the tub area.

This project, as I said, has come through countless maserations and editions, ranging from the near brilliant with one or two insurmountable hang-ups, to the obsurd with hardly any redeemable qualities. Unfortunately for my ego, I must say that the majority of my ideas fell into the latter column - per typical. HA! So here we are today - we think we've slowly solved each problem and have come to a wonderful and doable solution. Right now we're at the stage where the easy, fun design-y part is over and we've begun really looking at tiny, tiny details about wet/dry zones, materials, lights, where corners meet each other, etc etc. The way architecture works is like everything else in that the more detail you get into the more problems arise and just as soon as you think you're out of the woods, something new and horrible pops up. We've come into this already about 300 times, and it's only a matter of time before it happens again. The question is, will it be something big enough to deflate the whole project or can we somehow navigate through it. This is something we'll have to figure out.

So I look forward to taking you through this journey of ours.

Oh, also - great news tonight in that the house we designed for Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood's cousin is, indeed, going through and after securing a general contractor in Japan, we found out today that they've been slowly and steadily going through the "value engineering" phase of the project where they try to get the budget down enough by taking out size or individual pieces of the project little by little. They've done a great job, and apparently they're on schedule to start construction in the fall sometime. We'll be heading out to Japan this fall, so hopefully it'll be begun by then. We'll keep you informed on this too! Don't forget to keep checking plexdesign.net for updates! (it's been funky on Internet Explorer lately - but should work fine on Firefox for some reason)

Comments welcome.