Entries from January 2008 ↓

I just got back from Interface’s office where I saw a cool new diagram of the 100K House posted on their wall. Here it is for your viewing pleasure. Click on the link to see the full image via Flickr. The astute eye will notice a bit more detail and a few modifications from the […]

As you know we are focusing our budget on the major guts of the home that are not easy to upgrade in the future. Probably the biggest organ of all in the home is the insulation or quality of the shell. I can’t believe all of the home improvement shows I have seen lately that […]

Hurray! I just received the commitment letter from our lender - The Bancorp Bank. The Vice President of Commercial Lending, Edward Dixon, got all of the necessary signatures to approve us for the loan and move us to the next level. Our closing on the land is scheduled for February 22nd and we simply need […]

Last night I met with the zoning committee from the East Kensington Neighbors Association which is the local neighborhood group for the area our project is in. In Philly, each neighborhood is represented by an association of neighbors that appoints a zoning committee from its members to assist developers and homeowners who require zoning variances […]

Just a quick financing update before I head to Philly’s annual Home Show to visit some “green” product vendors and see if anything else tickles my fancy. We received an update from our loan officer that he has all but one of the signatures he needs and should be getting the last SVP to sign […]

Well we’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the new facade debuted last week. I have also been running it by anyone who will listen to me and provide input as well in my offline life. I also have a meeting with the local neighborhood committee - The East Kensington Neighbors Association - to solicit feedback on the design prior to knocking on doors of the neighbors to introduce the project and seek further feedback before the design is finalized.

As stated before the new facade is the combination of a few factors that all happened within a 24 hour period and the team has not officially discussed the outcome yet.

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You may recall our Preliminary SIP Mfg Evaluation in early December. After speaking with the various manufacturers about their basic process, product and market differentiators I owed them more detailed plans to give us a quote for the two homes. I just finished contacting the manufacturers and delivering the plans to each of them for […]

If you’ve glanced at our plans today you’ve noticed we are spec’ing out a lot of plywood for flooring, storage, doors and even wall coverings to cut costs. I am always searching for innovative uses of plywood in modern architecture and design for this reason and stumbled upon PLY Architecture today via Materialicious today. Stop by the PLY site and peruse some of their projects. It’s worth a visit if you love good design with inexpensive materials.

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As promised here are our updated plans from ISA for both houses that we have just released to Level 5 to give us an estimate on construction costs. ISA named the corner house next to the 100K House the “120K House” and I like it. Once they come back with budget and comments we will […]

Yesterday we made the decision to go forward with seeking LEED for Homes Silver rating on both homes in the 100k house project. If you remember in this previous post we were still grappling with this decision due to its uncertain impact on our tight $100K construction budget.
What solidified this decision was an informal meeting […]