May 24, 2008

The Design Plan

Richard is the architect who designed the house. I already had a detailed floor plan in mind, and we haven’t deviated from the basic 30 ft by 40 ft design. I found there is much more to building a house than a floor plan, however! Click on each drawing to enlarge.

The Front:

This is the front of the house. The existing hill in front has been cut away to expose the basement windows in front. This will give the living area in the front of the basement a "first floor" feel. I'm leaving the original hill intact on the left, where the front door is. I'm putting in a retaining wall, then will cut away the hill from the retaining wall to the existing driveway on the right. There will still be a gradual slope from the house down to the sidewalk along the street in front, allowing for drainage away from the house. I would have liked to have had a front entrance out of the basement in front, but it was just too expensive.

The First Floor:

I put the living room and master bedroom on the south side of the house, as there is a busy street along the north side. The Faswall acts as a great sound barrier in addition to being an energy-saving building material, but I still wanted the quiet rooms on the quiet side. I have a bay window in the front and on the south side of the living room to bring in light. The kitchen and dining room are open with no barriers above the countertop, and the dining room opens into the living room.

The South Side:

The south side is unusual. The front of the roof looks normal, but then the roof is cut away at a steeper angle to accommodate the 9 thermal solar panels. The roof then flattens out for 5 feet, where a living roof will be planted. The bottom 5 feet are at a normal slope, where the PV panels will be installed (when I get enough money to buy them!). The awning windows in the bath and bedroom are up high, providing privacy since this side faces my neighbor's house. The basement windows are below ground in window wells.

The Rear (west side) of the house:

This clearly shows the unusual slope of the roof on the south side. It also shows the footings for the pergola above the master bedroom windows, and a living roof over the porch (which will be built later due to budget constraints). The window at the peak of the house may or may not stay; at first, we were going to put a stationary skylight on top of the stair tower and needed a window for whole house ventilation. Now we're looking at a couple of window skylights (much less expensive than a 20 ft by 5 foot single unit), one of which will open.

The North side of the house:

Here, you can clearly see the 20 ft by 5 ft skylight, which may change to 2 or 3 flat skylights (due to cost). It also shows the slope of the existing asphalt driveway, which runs along the north side of the property, and then cuts through the rear of the property. There is an egress window in the basement bedroom. Not a lot of windows on the north side, due to it facing a busy 6-lane street. The roof on the north side is a seamed metal one. I haven't picked a color yet.

The Basement:

The basement has a bedroom, a full bath, and a family room with a kitchenette. I plan to live in the basement living area while my mom lives upstairs. There is quite a large "mechanical" room in the upper left. Solar, radiant in-floor heating requires some BIG tanks for hot water. More on the heating system in a later blog. There is a laundry room in the basement, but there will also be a laundry connection in the first floor bath, where there is room for a single unit washer/dryer. That's so my mom (and me when I get to be her age) doesn't have to navigate the steps to the basement to do laundry.

The Stair Tower:

It's kind of hard to see from this picture, but the roof trusses in the rear are separate, with the stairwell walls loadbearing with their own footings. This was necessary to keep the stair tower open. The stair tower will act as a huge skylight as well as a whole house ventilation system. Note the raised ceiling over the kitchen. There will be indoor windows along the south side of the kitchen, the north side of the master bedroom, and the west side of the living room. In other words, there will be interior windows on every side of the stair tower to let the natural light flow from the skylight into the house.