Outdoor work area + driveway roof with hoist

[jdurand]

Хороший, большой и красивый дом.
Счастливого Рождества!! Счастья и благополучия в дом!!

We asked for a modest house, but when you hire top people to do the work and they take it as an honor to be working for The American Engineers, they tend to go a bit on the fancy side. The floor plan mostly follows what we drew, although they refused to use American stair pitch...said it's too steep for their code so it took a week of redesigning to make a stairway fit. Of COURSE they hadn't mentioned the stair change until the walls were up (spaced to fit our American stairs) and they even had started putting in forms for what they were going to do. Nope, we eventually got a compromise approved that we can live with...just have to be careful to not fall down after having grown up with USA stair pitch.

There's also been a door moved, a window moved, things like that. But, overall it's our design (revision 42 or something).

The fireplace is a good example of "modest". In California we have a steel wood stove for extra heat, very efficient, low smoke, heats the whole house to WARM. We asked for either a steel stove or a Russian fireplace (with the chambers in it to extract heat). Well, they hired the top fireplace guy in S. Russia and we discussed some ideas, then he started building. And building. And when he was done he noticed he had more stones left so built some more. This DOES have interior chambers that I'm not allowed to discuss (trade secret), but here's the builder in front of his creation.

The fireplace is actually sunken into the wall to the outer layer of bricks, so it's around 40cm deep inside the wall plus what's in front of the wall.