Late summer of 2016, I came across an image of an outdoor fireplace and like I do with so many idea images, I shared it with Mike. I’m not sure if it was my insistence on how cool it would be to have an outdoor fireplace or Mike’s love for a challenge, but for some reason he took on the project with the lofty goal of finishing it for that fall. Perhaps as a sweet birthday present to me.

Once Mike began building the structure and we finalized idea, the project had substantially grown beyond the initial intent. So, here we are over a year later…

This is the largest W house project we’ve undertaken (yet)! We started this project like most other house projects… with an innocent suggestion. It went something like: ‘wouldn’t this space be awesome if we had an extra three feet of headroom and we could move the stair?’ Somehow, the expected reaction from two people with experience in design and construction was not what you’d expect– we didn’t think anything of it. Maybe because we I didn’t actually think we would do it. Then we repeated the idea enough times until it became part of ‘the plan.’

Then, one day this past spring (2017), Mike had a ‘schedule’ in mind for the project and we began to seriously discuss it. After several minutes of talking about how cool the room would be and what we would do with all this new extra usable space, we began to map out the expected design and construction challenges. At that point, we realized we needed to draw the house. THE. WHOLE. HOUSE.