We are back living at the Wyandot House and our attention is finally focused on building our Tandem House! It has been a long road to get to this point but we have been taking it one step at a time. Another big milestone is out of the way now-Scott completed and passed his final architecture exam to become a licensed architect! One thing we have realized as we take each step forward to reaching our goal is that we become more confident in our game plan and even more dedicated to seeing this project through to the end.

In this post, I wanted to take one more step back and finally tell you why we are choosing to build a tandem house as opposed to the common side-by-side duplex that is appearing up and down our neighborhood streets. As I explained in a past post, most developers are seeking residential lots of our size (6,250 SF) with a 1-single family (SF) home on it, knocking it down, and building a side-by-duplex like the one shown in the image below.

To the contrary, we have chosen to pursue the tandem house zoning configuration on our lot for a number of reasons.  (1) our neighborhood block has set a precedent for homes that lie in the alley rather than having direct street frontage. So we are intrigued by the prospect of building our home off the alleyway and activating the internal block to respond to the relationship we will have with interior neighbors. And, (2) this configuration is the most financially feasible scenario that allows us to stay in the front house while we oversee the construction of the back house.   Once the back house is built we can then move into it and either sell the front house (as is) or renovate and pop-the-top before selling it.  Below is a graphic that shows the unique situation behind our house where (4) single-family (SF) homes have recently been built.  The tandem house is our response to the existing condition.

Here are some perspective images of the (4) homes behind ours.

The second view is the future home of our Tandem House!