Preparing Our Lot & Firming Up the Design

This was the condition of our lot before construction began...

After some final mods and further clarifications to the chosen design we entered into a contract to have our house built. So now we had a suitable design to fit on our lot we decided to move forward with building a house in Bacoor. The first thing that needed to happen was to clear the lot. Our lot had become the local dump site so we had plenty of work ahead of us in getting all the garbage removed along with a few small banana trees. We hired a few locals and got to work. Once the lot was cleared we canvassed the locals about flooding and the highest levels they had experienced, all this was in an effort to establish the ground floor elevation. With that information in hand we determined to set the ground floor height 28 – 30 inches above grade, this was to help prevent taking water into the ground floor during the worst flooding. We would have gone even higher were it not going to become increasingly challenging to manage the extra height on such a small lot. The grade up from the street would be quite steep if we were to go any higher. Next our contractor began laying out the house and establishing the main foundation location and digging began for the footers per our approved blueprints. With the footer dug and rebar inserted we began mixing and pouring the concrete that would form our footers. These were constructed to hold a three story structure even though our design was only a two story house. You see we were still not settled on the type of roof we would employ and were strongly considering a flat concrete roof. With a flat roof we all figured there would be a logical progression to add onto it and someday complete a third floor, and with this in mind we built our footers for this contingency. I have included some of the conceptual renderings of our house design, there would be one major change that would ultimately cause us plenty of heartache but more on that in a later post. Conceptual design renderings

Two of many concept drawings provided during the proposal