If you can design it. You can build it.

Building something - anything - has a great amount of satisfaction. Designing it is more than 1/2 the fun.

The cover photo is of myself (Russ Dubbels on the right) and my son-in-law (Mike Fouts) on the left, taken in June 2009 during the construction of our future retirement home in Ocean Shores, Wa.

I, and my wife, Peg, designed it. We obtained a structural permit and the building permits. We talked with contractors who assisted us with the concrete, roof truss erection and metal roof. We made mistakes (the truss erector didn't know what he was doing; our son-in-law did).

I admit this was a big project, but it was built upon a base of 40 years of designing and building smaller projects prior to this one. Each project brought a great amount of satisfaction. Certainly, this one has had the greatest satisfaction. And it had the biggest challenges.

My first project was a set of bookends built in junior high school. That was followed by the building of a longbow (now hangs on my office wall), a dustpan for my mother (Peg now uses it; and its over 40 years old!). I migrated to building a study desk in high school, furniture made of packing crates when we first got married, an outhouse (my first framing project) for the first house we built, a remodel of our first business venture (the Burnt Woods Store), the remodeling of our our current home and construction of a small boat.

Planning the final home in life takes a lifetime. My wife, Peg, and I started designing our dream retirement home when we first got married in 1970. We originally read a story in Sunset magazine about a down-sized home for retired couples in 1971. Over the years we dreamed big dreams, but in the end, dreamed a smaller dream we could afford as we got older. Our final dream home came into being over the winter of 2008-2009.

We have lived in numerous climate areas during our years and have considered the pro and con of each. I liked the mountains and Peg has alway like the coast. In the end, we decided to live near the ocean (hey, I can see the Olympics on a clear day). We choose the Washington coast rather than the Oregon coast. The weather is slightly cooler overall, but the coast is unspoiled compared to Oregon. The towns are quaint, are removed from the mainstream, offer a good jump-off point to explore other areas (my mountains) and the citizens are average joes (i.e. there are no snobs with high opinions about what you can do with your own land). Ocean Shores is an Alice & Jerry kind of town that reminds me of what Cannon Beach was like in the 1950-60's.

So we found our paradise. Now for the details of what we each wanted in a home after living together almost 40 years.

I wanted a home that:

• could house boat building projects to launch in the canal
• had ceilings that I could pick up a sheet of plywood in and not hit the lights
• had a garage with roll-up doors on both ends
• contained a design & shop loft where works in progress could be left without cleaning up
• had storage
• provided low cost of ownership

Peg wanted a home that:

• had a large kitchen & dining room
• rooms that had space
• had a covered deck with view of our canal frontage
• contained a studio apartment for guests
• was easy to clean and manage and had storage.

Our final home plan was a simple rectangle with a detached garage and large covered back deck to enjoy nature, was easy to manage and allowed us the space to entertain or to build large projects. It incorporated the things we wanted in common:

• canal view/access
• tall ceilings
• design loft/apartment;
• individual work areas
• storage (we specified storage trusses which were used in both the house and garage)

Design of a home or any other living structure requires a combination of aesthetics, design, functionality, form while conforming to building costs, building & structural codes, aesthetics. We were able to compromise on these attributes and still build a home that we both could afford and enjoy in later years.

The home built includes a number of other features: that we considered essential to our way of living and designed to accommodate future needs:

• ramp for easy access to the elevated level of the home (I was diagnosed with pernicious anemia and have permanent nerve damage that will in later years limit my mobility)
• raised stemwall (5 ft) on house to be above surrounding terrain for better view, and enormous room below for storage and hot water heater
• minimum number of interior doors; all doors to minimum 3-0 wide for moving furniture and wheelchair access
• heated bathroom ceramic tile floor
• low threshold shower stall entrance
• wood stove
• ceiling fans to circulate heat
• dining hall for holiday occasions (we can seat at least 25-30 guests with ease)
• protected covered rear porch to enjoy the outdoors with exterior gas fireplace to keep warm by
• RV hookup for three RV's in the front that will allow our friends and guests a place to park when they visit
• Garage loft/apartment where we can build projects and not have to cleanup each time. Also will provide an apartment for guests, an elderly relative or someone to take care of us in old age.

The only real tough part of this project has been the structural permit. I designed the home and printed off a complete set of working drawings and took them to the building department for approval and a building permt. The lady at the desk looked at them and asked "where is the structural design stamp." I didn't have one. Two winters prior, Ocean Shores had had severe wind storm and and as a result now required a structural analysis of the dwelling. So I took my plans to a local structural engineer. She redrew the plans (they were never completely redrawn correctly) and after the analysis required that our house have a Simpson strongwall at the rear of the house where the woodstove was located. The end result was a 6 foot long wall in the living room that had 3 Simpson Strong-wall panels ganged together and tied to the foundation through six 1" grade 8 all thread bolts imbedded into a concrete pad 10 ft x 4 ft x 2.5 ft deep with three horizontal rows of rebar connected to the 4 ft stem walls. This added about $6,000 to the cost of the building! In the event of a 9.0 earthquake of with a resultant tsunami or gale force 10 winds, this one wall WILL survive (who cares about the occupants!).

Our paradise is now enclosed, partially plumbed & wired, stocked with sheetrock and partially moved into.

So much for our project. After reading this discourse, you can see any project take planning. It takes time to design. It takes compromise in terms of desire, building cost, building space, building codes, etc. It takes time to build. The effort has been worth it.

You can design it; you can build it.