TheFranLover, good luck with your project! Did you have to go thru the Coastal Commission for your remodel? How long did it take and how painful? We're also thinking of remodeling a very old home (1950), not yet purchased. It's still in an exploratory phase to see how feasible and expensive it's going to be. The house hasn't been remodeled in 60 years, and not liveable. We're thinking of doing it in 2 phases. 1) Keep same footprint and remodel interior walls. Exterior walls are also badly damaged, so to remodel that, do we need a permit? Redo electrical, plumbing, gas lines. We want to do enough to be able to live in it, while applying for a permit to build it up or out. 2) Add another story up, but hear the coastal commision may take a long time to approve anything. All, please share your experiences and advice. Thanks!

Before my (late) DH and I embarked on a large renovation/addition, we did the math to compare what the addition would approximately cost (x), then added that cost to the approx. value of our home (y), and priced out homes in our area for sale at approx. x+y. For us it was worth doing the addition rather than buying a different house, even though ours ended up over $200/sqf, probably closer to $300/sqf. For comparison homes in this area are about $1.5+M for new builds; homes for teardown between $400=600k in very rough approximations. Some things to factor in: the cost of a rental when you move out during construction, including the cost of switching utilities to the rental then back (it's not so much the cost as it is the hassle. For example, keeping my same email address with Comcast required almost an act of divine intervention, not to mention about 20 phone calls.) Also count on scope creep. We were victims of our own enthusiasm and I can't tell you how many times we said, "While we're at it, we might as well do...." That's how we ended up going from the kids wanting a dog and me saying "no dog until I get a mudroom", to a 1000+ sqf addition with gutted kitchen and 4 gutted bathrooms, plus a new garage and a new roof. World's most expensive dog. (But Hendrix is worth it. :) ) Finally, there are compromises you will make that no one has to make with a new build from scratch, and there will be surprises. (Like when they cut an opening for my new office window and found a vent pipe no one knew was there. Or when they broke the sewer line while digging the new foundation.) I guess this is a long way of advising you to have a good contingency budget. For us it was totally worth it and I'm so glad we did the addition. And you have something in your favor I didn't know about at the time... this forum! I often wonder whether my layout and kitchen would be different if I knew about this forum and the kitchens forum when we did our work.

Angled walls create dead and slivers of unusable space. Most people want to be able to use every square foot they pay for. The curved wall does not relate to anything, it is an oddity, and it a lot easier to draw than it is to build; and a 90 degree corner costs less that a rounded corner (if you can find someone to build it properly). My other comments from the previous thread still apply.

"... planning to bring the drive up as high as possible now, though ... we don't want it so high that it starts to block that lower-level window on the left." Your problem with getting good feedback is going to be that you're starting this process without properly introducing people to the surrounding site. We have only a snippet of information ... more or less a theoretical house front. Not a complete front yard or a driveway or even a good picture that shows the land/house relationship. As it is, every solution offered is already limited by your own preconceived notions, which limit what you show us. We've been here before and didn't come to a conclusion that you got excited. The set-up now is little different. Whatever you do architecturally, outside of changing the main entrance to the basement floor, will make no difference insofar as solving the problem, which has not yet been clearly identified (the path from parking-to-front-door problem.) No one can investigate how changing the approach to the house might work toward solving your problem. Most other threads on the forum seem to reach a more or less successful conclusion because they involve a little planting or a simple problem. Here, the problem is much more complex, but the base information is threadbare. Like a newspaper that starts with the front page headlines, and then goes to article titles, and then on to elaboration of details, is how you should be presenting information. We should see the whole front yard at a distance, some sequential pictures that show the present approach, some wide span scenes (from slightly overlapping pictures) that show the area from at least 2, or maybe three different points of view, since there is topography involved. (Each point of view should be a complete scene ... not a disconnected picture.) A landscape architect could not assess and explore the issue with so little information to go on. I'm not trying to be a downer about your thread or issue, but trying to say if you want to be happy when you leave, you've got to produce enough information to work with.