Statesman Article

The recent groundbreaking at Mueller was the subject of an article in the Statesman today: Mueller breaks ground on first homes. Though they don't mention it, the first new homeowner they profile, Aaron Wine is a blogger as well; you can read his blog over at Design & The Car Dependent City.

Checking Out Our Lot

So, the roads are finally done in the "phase 1" area of Mueller. This weekend, Jill and I went by to snap a couple shots:

That's our corner. Here's our lot:

Not much to see, but as they say, "watch this space". More pictures, as always, here.

Trees

Got this note from our Standard Pacific rep, today:

I just received a "Tree Map" from our Project Manager and wanted to pass the information on to you. In addition to your standard landscaping package you are tentatively going to receive one Cedar Elms planted in front of your home between the sidewalk and the curb. These will be 65 gallon trees with a minimum size of 3# caliper. All of the streets in the neighborhood will be tree lined. It is going to be lovely.

Nice! Trees rule. I'm happy there will be a lot of them.

3D Designing

So, after a few weeks of going through noob tutorials on Blender, I finally got up the gumption to try doing a simple model of our future house. Or, specifically, our future kitchen. Witness its glory:



OK, sure. Not much yet. But wait'll I put another, say, 350 hours into it. It'll look awesome.

The main point in doing this, at the moment, is actually to try to make some educated decisions about the interior design of our kitchen. More on the design process soon. But what you see here, friends, is beige walls, white cabinets, and black granite countertops.

Squint really hard. You'll see it.

Acronyms

Last night, Jill and I attended our first "RMMA PIAC" committee meeting. That's a lot of letters; it stands for "Robert Mueller Municipal Airport Plan Implementation Advisory Commission". Basically, it's a bunch of stakeholders (neighbors, future residents, etc.) meeting with people from Catellus (the master developer) and Roma (the design company). It's a forum to ask questions and get updates, as a community, on the progress of things. The meeting was headed up by the enthusiastic & put-together Rick Krivoniak:



It was a really enlightening meeting for us. Aside from just meeting some of our future neighbors (hi guys!), we also got a real sense of "who's in charge" at Mueller. The verdict? They're not some big faceless company off in Boise, Idaho ... they're real Austinites, living and working here. They seem to be invested in this process and have the right motives at heart, at least as far as we can tell.

That went a long way towards putting our mind at ease about what Mueller will be like. Of course, there are still lots of important issues that need watchful eyes on them; but it feels doable. Plus, we learned all kinds of inside stuff that hasn't been publicized. Curious? Then you should come to the next meeting. :)

Visualizing It

At this point in the process, months away from seeing any real construction, our mental map of our new home is pretty sketchy. We've got the floor plans, but it's hard to really get a feel for the size & layout from those basic photocopies.

So, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and invest a little time to get a better map of our soon-to-be house. Using Inkscape (a free open-source alternative to Freehand & other similar vector graphics programs), I traced over a scan of the floor plan to come up with an editable, scalable, zoom-able floor plan of our new house. It's not exact down to the inch, but it's pretty darn close. Here's the bedroom:



The cool thing is, since Inkscape supports layers, now I can also add layers for other things, like furniture, rugs, etc. Using a tape measure and a conversion between inches and pixels, I added a few of the larger items in our house to the rooms, so we can really get a sense for how big these rooms are compared to our current place. Here's the bedroom again:



That makes it so much easier to visualize how this house is really going to turn out.

My next step: trying to do a 3D model of the house with Blender, so we can make decisions about decorating. Wish me luck - I've never done any 3D modeling before. :)

Open Letter about Dog Parks

Just wrote the following letter to Catellus, the development group running the show at Mueller. We've heard from other Mueller pioneers that this is an important thing to lots of folks; if you feel likewise, you should send them a letter as well.

Catellus Development Group
4550 Mueller Blvd.
Austin, TX 78723

To whom it may concern:

My name is Ian Varley. My wife Jill Meyers and I are moving in to a new Standard Pacific home in the Mueller Redevelopment next year. We just signed the contract this week, and couldn't be more excited.

We have a request for the planners at Catellus: so far, we haven't seen any provision in the plans for an off-leash dog area. We've got a dog, and while we'll have a small fenced yard, we'd really like a place where we can let him off-leash to run around and get some exercise. I know this will be even more important for the folks in row houses without yards of their own.

Additionally, we've discovered from living in West Austin for the past 2 years that the local off-leash dog park is one of the real hubs of community life in the neighborhood - the only neighbors I know well are those I've met through the dog park. We’ve heard that strong community connections are a part of the “big picture” goals for Mueller, so we thought you'd like to know that the benefits of a dog-park extend to that area as well.

Thanks for all you're doing to make Mueller a sustainable, friendly, urban neighborhood that feels like Austin.

Ian Varley & Jill Meyers