Well, we always tell people that we only build houses in the City of Charlottesville.  But, I guess there is always an exception to the rule.

We are under roof on our latest and beginning to work our way around installing the rigid insulation to the exterior, windows, doors and hardie panel siding.   I guess we justify venturing past city limits by the fact that that we are under five miles from downtown and Tom is already biking to work.

But, the real reason has to be hitting it off with our clients from the get go. They have a son about the same age as Eleanor and we’ve spent the last year leading up to the build having various budgeting and design meetings while having our kids run all over the place.

One thing our clients did from the get go is bring the energy consulting firm Think Little into the process.  Working with Think Little, we ran all sorts of energy models based on different types of windows, wall sections, and insulation such that our clients could make an informed decision on payback when having to select these various components as well as the size of their overall mortgage.  We also had them independently design our hvac system, which I hope to get to more in a later post.

This should keep us rolling through the summer before breaking ground on our next spec house this fall.