the design stage

So this is the fun part.  You can “build” anything you want when you are drawing it out on paper.  Sketches don’t care about sheer walls, or daylight planes.  Sketches don’t care how much it costs to move sewer lines or replace tile floors. Sketches also don’t care where the city draws your property line or special set-back.

Our goals were:

• add a master bedroom and bathroom upstairs
• enclose a weird ground floor patio area of the back of the house
• clean up the basement (currently only had 4 foot walls open to the crawlspace and partially drywalled–we used it for storage/utilities but it was dank and creepy down there)

We spent nearly a year finalizing our plan.  Our process went like this:

1) look up our parcel report here:  http://xmap.cityofpaloalto.org/parcelreports/  The report lists some basic limits of your lot (like max floor area, easements, and set-backs etc)

2) have a meeting with architect to sketch out all the possible ideas we can think of that fall within the limits of our parcel report 

3) stop by the building department to clarify questions that come up with our funky old home

4) meet back with the architect because we have more limits than we thought

5) repeat steps 3 & 4…for nearly two years.

If you want to nitty gritty–specifics that that limited us on our design plan:

• We have a relatively small lot (5600 sq ft).  
• Our lot is on a busy road (special set-backs in the front of the house).
• We share a private alley/driveway in the rear of the house with 4 other neighbors, but the driveway sits largely within our property lines (this creates gray area on rear set backs…does it start at the property line or the alley…does this set-back affect our maximum floor area or just our building area…the city didn’t even have the alley on our parcel report…)
• Our existing house sits within the side yard set-backs in some areas (grand-fathered in)
• Our neighbor has some large heritage oaks (the trees are just over the property line, but their roots and canopy are on our partially on our property so we have to accommodate them). 

Our main discussion was regarding the maximum square footage we could build because of the alley situation.  Our existing house comes in at 2100 sq ft (including the garage which is how the city calculates it).

First they said we were limited to 2,250 sf total building area (including garage).  A kind planner, perhaps feeling bad about bursting my remodel bubble, shared a flyer summarizing the new 2017 ADU incentives –if you convert an existing bedroom to a Junior ADU (i.e. add a mini kitchen sink and counter-top area) the city will allow you to add up to 50 additional sq ft over your maximum floor area to accommodate the JADU.  We could just barely create our new upstairs bedroom/bath and downstairs mudroom with this amount so we created a full set of plans, with engineering to cover 2300 sf total building area (new addition of about 200 sq ft). 

Then as we got through the first round of planning reviews, we learned that: maybe the driveway doesn’t limit us after all, maybe we are eligible for the full 2438 sq ft. floor area listed on our parcel report, and if we stick with the JADU idea (that was growing on us at this point for a few reasons), we can get up to nearly 2490 sf (i.e. over 350 sf addition = much bigger bedroom and bathroom upstairs).  We revised the plans, redid (re-paid!) the structural engineering plans and after what felt like FOREVER, resubmitted our plans for a planning review.  

In the end we were limited by daylight planes and the stairwell location for our upstairs addition so didn’t end up maxing out all available buildable sq footage afterall.

….and that is how we took nearly two years to prepare a design plan for a *simple* 350 sq ft addition.