On Thursday, we made another step towards actual construction as we submitted our latest plans to the city for Preliminary Project Review. The purpose of PPR is for the city to review your plans to ensure zoning compliance and identify if you need to go to the Committee of Adjustment.

Based on latest plans, it looks like we’re just within the required setbacks (i.e., how far the house must be setback from the adjacent property lines), so we’re confident that we won’t need to go before the Committee. In our particular case, we can build a maximum of three storeys and have a lot density of 0.8… and we’re just under that.

The main purpose for the setbacks is to ensure fire safety. This is accomplished by keeping a predefined distance between adjacent buildings, and (depending on the distance) building the adjoining walls fire-retardant materials. Which means no windows.

One goal of the house was to have as much natural light inside as possible… to accomplish this, we had to build a slightly narrower home, allowing us to place windows along the side walls. Similarly, we also played a lot with varying depths & levels of the rooms, which allowed us to place windows in some unusual places.