...Which is why Plan C makes sense

I did the math on Plan B. The expanded house would be 5 bedrooms, 4.5 baths (no tub), with a 2-car attached garage and a wine cellar. It includes a 486 SF one-bedroom apartment with a separate entrance. 2,980 SF not including the garage. A brand-new house with those specs could sell in the mid-$700s in this neighborhood, maybe $800,000.

To get there, we propose adding 314 SF to the main floor and a 1,084 SF second floor. We need to add 184 SF to restore the garage, but that doesn't cost the same as living space. The plan includes a two-story volume for the Trees Room, and while that isn't free, it isn't the same as living space, either.

314 SF (main floor) @ $200/SF = $62,800
1084 SF (2nd floor) @ $200/SF = $216,800
184 SF (garage) @ $100/SF = $18,400
304 SF (Trees room ext. height) @ $50/SF = $15,200

RENOVATION COST = $313,200

Basis = $467,000
Remodel = $313,200
Cost = $780,200

Sale Price = $800,000
Excise Tax (1.78%) = $14,240
Profit = $5,560

Plan A

Plan A would be 3 bedrooms, 3 baths (no tub), with a 2-car attached garage. It includes a 263 SF studio apartment with a separate entrance. 1,630 SF not including the garage. A "studs-out remodel" with those specs should sell in the mid $500s in this neighborhood--it's just much smaller than its competition.

We would leave the footprint mostly alone, other than enclosing the porch. 

48 SF (porch) @ $200/SF = $9,600

184 SF (garage) @ $100/SF = $18,400

New kitchen, 3 new baths, reconfigure roof = $20,000

RENOVATION COST = $48,000

So, our cost is $515,000 (I think the conversion to gas, repiping, rewiring, and all new finishes might bump the cost another $20,000, but it's a swag.)

Sale Price = $565,000
Excise Tax = $10,057
Profit = $39,943 (or $19,943 if I'm right about the extras)

Put in $68, get back $20 profit--there aren't many investments that yield 29%. On the other hand, $20k is too small. I'd like to scale the whole thing up--put in $314k, get back $91k. Hey...$314k sounds like Plan B.

Let's work Plan B the other way:

Basis = $467,000
Remodel = $313,200
Desired Profit = $91,000
Cost + Profitt = $871,200
Excise Tax = $15,000 (about)

So, we sell for $886,200 and it's all good.

Comparables

12721 Evanston Ave N (Bitter Lake) - Asking $769,000 4BR/2.5BA, 2392 SF ($321)
1255 NW Blakely Ct - Asking $800,000 4BR/4.25BA, 4040 SF. Built 1969, lot is 12,600 SF.($198)
606 N 138th St (Bitter Lake) - Asking $689,000 4BR/2.75 BA, 2640 SF. New, modern ($261)

At $886,200, we would be at $298/SF.

Plan B

I'm designing three approaches at once: Plan A, the minimum footprint change; Plan B, a full build-out; and Plan C, a hybrid. Here's Plan B, with some details to work out.

Known problems:

• The kitchen has no refrigerator
• The living room is a Tetris shape with no definition and no particular place for a dining table. A eating counter in this situation seems stupid.
• What does one do in a Trees Room?
• There is no laundry
• Should the Guest Apt have a roof deck over the garage extension?
• The Trees Room is long and narrow--that was not the original idea.

Security camera

A few weeks of playing with the Samsung SmartCam in the kitchen have persuaded me that what is needed is an outdoor camera, showing the car, the garage doors, the front door and the side yard to the back. The indoor camera in the kitchen was not very helpful.

Good news--Samsung makes an outdoor model with a nice wide angle lens that meets this need perfectly.

I can connect the camera's base unit to power in the cabinet over the microwave and run the video line straight through the wall. (Right now, I have the video line going out the kitchen's north window.) Turns out the drill bits didn't make the truck north.

I returned one indoor camera, and kept the second one to monitor Bedroom 3, since it has an outside door. These cameras work with the wi-fi network, and the Bedroom 3 camera couldn't connect reliably to the router when it was 65' away in Bedroom 1. So, I moved the router to Bedroom 2, more in the middle of the house, and everything seems copacetic.

First draft of Plan A

Here's a first pass at what Plan A might entail. We need to resolve the kitchen and bathroom layouts, end the confusion about which front door to use, and restore the garage. The idea with Plan A is to make minimal changes to accomplish those goals (Plans B and C also add square footage in the form of bedrooms and baths).

I already see things I want to change

I held the new garage back 4" from the main house to be cute with the Seattle garage frontage rules, but that's stupid--the rule says "no closer to the street," so it can be even with the house.

I looked, but couldn't find anything that says that the man door on the south wall of the garage has to open in the direction of egress. That wouldn't be the end of the world, but it's better as shown, imo.

My apathy for the front yard shows...I didn't leave a door. I'm not happy with the kitchen layout, so presumably a garden door can be added (perhaps where shown) in a revised layout. The idea, by the way, was to let a super-wide refrigerator intrude into the public space so the chef isn't bothered by people getting drinks. I'm also assuming there is such a thing as a corner pantry unit.

The dashed rectangle in the garage, btw, represents the precise dimensions of a 2005 Toyota Prius.

I'm thinking that we leave the living room north elevation completely as is--hence, no garden door there--but re-face the kitchen on the north and west sides to match the garage extension, presumably something geometric like cement board, rather than vertical or horizontal siding. We might be able to save the hardwood in the living room, but not the old dining room, and it's fine in the two bedrooms.

Not sure how to treat the garage extension. Maybe a gable that ties back to the hip. But one possibility is to keep it flat and run stairs up the west side (hidden by the workshop extension), so there's an accessible roof deck. Sigh--a solution in search of a problem.

Zoning envelope

Trees House is zoned SF9600 (single-family homes only, minimum lot size 9,600 SF). The following information is based on Seattle Development and Planning Department (DPD) Tip #220. The lot size is important, because lot coverage is a consideration. Unlike most parcels, we won't know the precise boundary dimensions until the survey is prepared--it's just not clear from the available public records.

Setbacks

Standard setbacks apply: 20' front, 25' rear (see below), 5' on sides, and the existing house has a margin all around--we can extend the house in any direction.

I can't remember a project where the existing house didn't touch at least one setback.

Front: The living room can be at least 9' closer to the street. The garage can be 17' 6" closer to the street. (Pending confirmation by the survey)

Sides: The NW and NE corners are apparently not 90 degrees. The north boundary bears at N 88-27-02 W, and the west boundary at N 0-55-11 W, so the NW corner is 87.5309 degrees.

Rear: The garage can extend at least 20' to the south. The main house can move at least 28' south. The normal 25' setback is already reduced to 24' (20% of average lot depth), but an odd rule about not counting portions of parcels less than 10' wide might apply to the SE corner where the parcel makes an acute angle.

Keith Cross, the soils engineer, warned against proposing construction in the rear, for fear of Carkeek entanglements, so it is ironic that being in an Environmentally Critical Area (ECA) could reduce the setback requirement by 5'. That would effectively allow us to build right to the top of slope (pending confirmation by the surveyor). For the ECA reduction, see Seattle 23.44.014D15.

Height Limit

The height is limited to 30' about average grade, with several possible exceptions.

The average grade can be calculated by one of several methods (see Seattle Director's Rule 9-2011), but it will likely work out to about 3' below the main floor level (the grade is about 6' below at the SW corner of BR3).

Exceptions. The ridge on a gable or hip roof can be 35' from the average grade, but flat and shed roofs must stay under the 30' limit. Exceptions are made for railings and chimneys up to 4' above a flat roof. Clerestories can be up to 4' above a flat roof, but the raised area must be less than 30% of the roof area.

We have been using +263.0 as the finish floor of the main house, so the base height limit is +290. We can do two floors with a 10' ceiling downstairs and a 14' ceiling and a flat roof upstairs. Three stories would be hard to sell in this neighborhood of mostly one-story homes.

Garage Frontage

We would like to move a 20' wide garage to the front setback, but a special Seattle rule applies, designed to de-emphasize garages along a streetfront. First, the garage is limited to 50% of the structure width (currently 68' 1"), so we're good there.

Second, the garage may not be closer to the street than 80% of the walls that are not the garage. Currently, the 20' 3" garage is set back from the 47' 10" house, except for the 13' 8" breezeway, which is 28.57%. We are currently non-compliant, which is a potential exception for us--hey, it works for side setbacks.

Seattle wants to discourage this sort of thing

Lot Coverage

The lot coverage is limited to 35% of the parcel size, with several exceptions, none of which apply. The "footprint" is supposed to include things like bay windows, even if they don't touch the ground, but not ordinary roof eaves. The existing house, including the front porch and the greenhouse, is 1895.082 SF. The current coverage is either 17.9% (10,589) or 17.5% (10,800).

The limit is either 3,706.15 SF (10,589) or 3,780 SF (10,800), which we are unlikely to approach.

Parcel Size

We know the parcel is 90 feet wide (from the legal description--it's the westernmost 90' of lot 24), and the lot size is either 10,589 or 10,800 square feet. Not sure where the first number came from, but the King County Parcel Viewer database says it's the latter. Because the lot is a simple trapezoid, we can calculate the average depth of the lot. 90' wide at the street, sides parallel, means that the average depth is 120' becase 90 x 120 = 10,800. Because we know the angle of the boundary with Carkeek Park, we can calculate the lengths of the two sides.

The property line to the west is 102.06' and to the east is 137.94'--these are my calculations, based on the angle of the south line, pending confirmation by the surveyor. Even if my angle of 68.27 degrees is found to be mistaken, the lot area is still 10,800. (If the lot is really 10,589 SF, the average depth is 117.65'.)

Up on the rooftop, quick quick quick

First time on the roof today. Scoped out the gutters--there is debris in every run, some worse than others. Along the breezeway, the previous owners ran the cable TV line in the gutter.

I did not expect the carpet of dead needles on the west side of the garage roof, and generally, everywhere else. The chimney is very, very old. Dickensian old. No covers on the flues. The smell of diesel fuel ("heating oil," to use the industry's euphemism) wafts from one uncovered flue; warm, expensively heated air from the other. Good news--the flashing around the chimney is fairly new.

Looking east from the garage. Line on the right is the advanced cable TV distribution network installed by the previous owner.

Looking west from the main house. Breezeway ridge is about an inch below the garage ridge.

View from second floor bedroom into Carkeek Park

Chimney and neighbor to the east

Dickensian chimney. Ow, guvnor, it needs a good sweepin's all.

It was hard to figure out this little detail from the ground

John Lasswell says we need a rain cover. Roger that. He says they're called "spark arrestors" in dry California. Near flue vents the oil furnace; far flue is the damper-less living room fireplace.

Just a few needles. How does one clean them off without removing the granules from the asphalt shingles?

The Master Bathtub Leaks

I had just about persuaded myself that home inspector John Lasswell was wrong when he said that the bathtub leaked. I have no doubt he found moisture under the plumbing end of the tub, but that's the outside wall where someone cut a silly, narrow door out to a homespun greenhouse. When that narrow door is open, you can see a cross-section of the wall--siding, furring, sheathing--that they didn't bother to close. I wanted to conclude that the infiltration John found was the wall, not the plumbing.

Well... I took a shower this morning and five minutes later went down to measure the basement. We've had no rain since Saturday (it's Wednesday) and there was a small stain of fresh water--maybe 1 square foot--on the otherwise dry basement floor. It ain't the greenhouse.

It might be the drain line from the tub, or there could be water getting behind the tile, because the caulking has failed, especially on the long wall. A pro could poke and prod and likely find a quick sealant-based remedy. Just have to make it through Christmas with 4 or 5 visitors, then this tub is history.