Bye bye big city!

86LK said:

mud room with laundry equipment with door to outside? seating bench by a door so you can sit and swap from shoes to Crocs inside the house without tracking dirt all over (also has coat hooks and storage bins for gloves/hats/raincoats) ?stained concrete slab instead of carpet/flooring?

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Sorry, I overlooked responding to this post. Thanks for the suggestions. There is a powder room, or half bath off of the patio. It will serve as the place to go change when getting out of the pool. Beyond it is a small mud room opposite of the laundry room. It does have a small bench and there will be hooks to hang stuff up. Mud rooms like what are common up north are not really a thing here in Houston. Most of the house will be tile that looks like wood. Most of the bedrooms will have carpet. Mine won't.

86LK said:

I see you have outside gang outlets at the shop. Are they going to be 120 or 220? if not 220 you may want to consider that

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The three outlets we put outside the shop are 120V duplex. I have a 240V outlet just inside the big door, in case we want/need to weld outside.

Supercharged111 said:

Yep, that's way nicer than what we'll be building. What's with the plywood/OSB combo on the bottom of the exterior shop walls? The OSB seems like a lame way to cheap out considering the rest of the build. Or maybe they ran out of plywood that day?

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Lame way to cheap out? Thanks. It's just how our builder does the houses he builds. It's not cost effective to sheath an entire house in ground contact treated plywood. He installs that for the bottom two feet and then does the rest in OSB. He just did the same on the shop. Admittedly, we could have done all plywood for something like $500, which at this point, doesn't really move the needle. Still, it's overkill, and we already have plenty enough of that to go around. Like I said before, in the building process, you have to make a lot of decisions. It's impossible to get all of them right. We're trying to get as many right as we can and keep the cost under control. We're losing the battle on the latter. In hindsight, I'd prefer to have the bottom 4' to be all plywood but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. The plywood/OSB is just there for the brick ties to fasten to and to serve as a backer for the spray foam on the inside. If there's a moisture problem, it will be at the bottom where we have the ground contact rated treated plywood. I don't have doubt for a second that barring a disaster, the building will outlive me.